Sitting in my Hangzhou hotel room one evening last September, I caught a helpfully subtitled Chinese TV show about Song Dynasty inscriptions carved on a mountainside near Quanzhou — the city Chinese media invariably call “the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road.” With prayers for good winds and safe returns, the carvings bore witness to China’s far-flung commercial relations ...

Bloomberg Bank of Montreal’s US push hit a speed bump in the second quarter as higher loan losses eroded earnings from its Chicago-based BMO Harris Bank. The lender set aside C$259 million ($192 million) for soured loans, up 29 percent from a year earlier and the highest since at least 2011, tied largely to U.S. personal and commercial banking and ...

Bloomberg State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender by assets, picked Bank of America Corp. and Deutsche Bank AG to arrange a share sale that could raise about $2 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said. The lender also chose IIFL Holdings Ltd., Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd., JM Financial Ltd. and SBI Capital Markets Ltd. to work on ...