LONDON / Reuters Former Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond marked a return to investment banking in Britain with a Qatari-backed takeover of stockbroker Panmure Gordon, one of the oldest names in the City of London. Diamond, who left Barclays in 2012 during the Libor interest rate-rigging scandal, is making the move through his private equity firm Atlas Merchant Capital, …

  Bloomberg The S&P 500 Index could reach 2,600 as the global economy improves and corporate earnings climb, said Keith Banks, president of Bank of America Corp.’s (BofA) US Trust unit. “It’s natural to get nervous when you’ve seen the run that we’ve seen, but what I would bring things back to are underlying fundamentals,” Banks said in an interview …

  DOHA / Reuters Qatar’s central bank said that it raised its overnight lending rate by 25 basis points to 5.0 percent after the U.S. Federal Reserve tightened policy by a similar margin. The central bank also increased its overnight deposit rate by 25 bps to 1.25 percent. However, the central bank reduced banks’ reserve requirement — the amount of …