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 …