Banking

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 ...

BLOOMBERG Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), the country’s largest lender by assets, awarded David McKay C$10.9 million ($8.2 million) for fiscal 2015, his first full year as chief executive officer, 44 percent more than the previous year. McKay, 52, received a salary of C$1.3 million, share-based awards of C$5.8 million, C$1.45 million of stock options, C$2.33 million in incentive pay ...

BLOOMBERG Stocks traders put declines in Asia behind them as European markets rose with U.S. index futures and commodities. Government bonds fell, gold slid and the euro weakened. European shares advanced for the first time in three days on speculation the region’s central bank will ramp up monetary stimulus on Thursday. A gauge of raw materials rebounded from its biggest ...

London / Bloomberg Three UK banks, led by HSBC Holdings Plc, will have $77 billion of new loss-absorbing debt to meet requirements of the European Union and the Bank of England, Moody’s Investors Service said. Barclays Plc, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and HSBC will have to issue new debt to comply with the EU’s ‘minimum requirement for own ...

BLOOMBERG Citigroup Inc. joined US rivals in signalling another dismal start to the trading year, spurring a slide in Wall Street bank stocks. First-quarter revenue from fixed-income and equity trading will probably drop 15 percent, Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach said during an investor presentation. That would make 2016 the fourth straight year that the company’s revenues from those operations ...

Bloomberg Europe’s biggest banks will need billions of dollars to meet collateral requirements for derivatives starting this year under the latest version of a key rule that seeks to reduce risk. The standards, which will be phased in from September, may require EU buyers and sellers of swaps to set aside between 200 billion euros ($220.5 billion) and 420 billion ...

BLOOMBERG Ghana’s Agricultural Development Bank Ltd. extended its initial public offering (IPO) by a month to attract more retail investors and may sell as much as 100 million cedis ($26 million) more of stock than it initially planned. Demand for shares from individual investors surged during the final week of the original proposed sales period, Solomon Adu Atefoe, a spokesman ...

Frankfurt / AP European Central Bank head Mario Draghi has all but promised more monetary stimulus for the 19-country eurozone economy at Thursday’s meeting of the bank’s governing council. Now the question is, exactly how much will he deliver — and how much effect will it have? Expectations at a minimum are that the ECB’s governing council will cut the ...

BEIJING / Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc winning approval to start a credit-card business in China’s $1 trillion market offers Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver added flexibility in his push into the nation’s retail banking and wealth-management industries. The approval from Chinese authorities came as HSBC ended a card venture with Bank of Communications Co., the bank’s Asia-Pacific head Peter Wong ...