Bloomberg Citigroup Inc. plans to exit the mortgage-servicing business by the end of 2018 to focus on making new loans. The bank reached an agreement to sell the servicing rights on Fannie Mae- and Freddie Mac-backed loans with $97 billion of outstanding balances to New Residential Mortgage LLC, New York-based Citigroup said Monday in a statement. The bank also …

  Bloomberg Central bankers may do well to pay less attention to the bond market and their own forecasts than they do to newspaper articles. That’s the somewhat heretical finding of a new algorithm-based index being tested at Norway’s central bank in Oslo. Researchers fed 26 years of news (or 459,745 news articles) from local business daily Dagens Naringsliv into …

  Bloomberg The head of Bank of Montreal says Canada’s biggest financial institutions are actively grooming women to become chief executive officers, ending centuries of male rule at the country’s top lenders. “There are five large Canadian banks,” CEO Bill Downe said in an interview. “I think it’s inevitable.” Canada’s biggest banks have never had a female CEO, reflecting the …