Bloomberg The Azeri central bank said the job of overhauling the financial industry is almost done after shuttering every seventh lender in the country in 15 days and pushing several others to merge. “The process of restructuring the banking sector has mostly been completed,” Namiq Aliyev, head of the central bank’s press service, said Thursday in an e-mailed response to …

Bloomberg When European regulators created a new type of bank debt, the idea was to transfer risk from taxpayers to investors. Now bondholders are learning what that really means. Yield-starved investors bought $102 billion of the contingent convertible bonds, securities created to help troubled banks hang onto cash in times of stress by skipping coupon payments without defaulting and converting …

Bloomberg Home prices rose in 81 percent of U.S. metropolitan areas in the fourth quarter, with the pace of gains accelerating even as sales slowed from earlier in the year, the National Association of Realtors said. The median price of an existing single-family home increased from a year earlier in 145 of the 179 markets measured, the group said in …