Banking

WARSAW / Bloomberg Polish Central Bank (PCB) Governor Marek Belka said rate setters are debating how to transition from their pause in monetary easing as they weigh the risk of deterioration in the global economy and potential capital inflows as a result of the euro area’s quantitative easing program. The 10-member council left the seven-day reference rate at a record-low ...

Ottawa / Bloomberg Canadian stocks rose, joining a rally in global markets as growing optimism on European stimulus overshadowed a surprise increase in Canada’s jobless rate. The Standard & Poor’s/TSX Composite Index rose 1.1 percent to 13,522 in Toronto, to the highest since December 1 while capping a second weekly increase. The resurgent S&P/TSX is one of the best-performing developed ...

LONDON / Bloomberg Britain’s banks have criticised the UK Treasury’s plan to pare back the scope of the bank levy to lenders’ domestic businesses only, warning international operations could still be subject to taxation after the changes. Under the government’s current proposal, funds raised at a UK holding company level and then passed down to an international subsidiary would continue ...

BAKU / Bloomberg The once-in-a-generation crash in oil prices sent the Azeri economy staggering into a crisis and the central bank is running out of options to stop the unraveling. Every seventh lender is now shut, the currency is testing new lows and by one measure Azerbaijan’s international reserves are as thin as Ukraine’s. The central bank has little to ...

Beijing / AFP China’s bank loans plunged in February from January, the central bank said, despite government efforts to encourage lending to keep the world’s second-largest economy from slowing. New loans extended by banks slid to 726.6 billion yuan ($112 billion), the People’s Bank of China said, a massive drop from January’s record 2.51 trillion yuan lending surge. The figure ...

BLOOMBERG Gazprom PJSC, the natural-gas export monopoly, has hired banks to organise a sale of Swiss-franc debt in what could be the first Eurobond deal out of Russia this year. Europe’s biggest gas supplier picked Deutsche Bank AG, Gazprombank JSC and UBS Group AG as joint lead managers and Renaissance Capital as a co-manager for investor update meetings in Geneva ...

FRANKFURT / Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG, which runs Europe’s biggest investment bank, said it expects the industry’s revenue to decline this year as clients consider pulling back from trading some fixed-income securities and refrain from doing deals. Securities firms will see debt trading revenue fall “slightly” from a year earlier as “an increase in macro revenues due to monetary policy ...

FRANKFURT / Bloomberg The next target for the European Central Bank’s (ECB) expanding asset-purchase programme will be the region’s 900 billion-euro ($980 billion) corporate-bond market. The ECB will buy investment-grade euro-denominated bonds issued by non-bank corporations established in the euro area. Corporate bonds are the latest assets to be added to a growing list of securities, from government debt to ...

Frankfurt / AFP European Central Bank (ECB) chief Mario Draghi said that while chronically weak loan growth in the euro area “has been recovering for quite some time, it is still too low.” In the wake of the eurozone’s financial and debt crisis, banks became wary of lending money to households and businesses for fear of a possible default, preferring ...

Bloomberg Foreign banks including HSBC Holdings Plc and Deutsche Bank AG are pushing back against the Federal Reserve’s proposals on implementing rules designed to end too-big-to-fail, saying they are burdensome and unfair to the US units of the world’s biggest lenders. Under the Fed’s proposals, US units of foreign banks affected would need an extra layer of debt available to ...