Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc surged in London trading as first-half loan impairment charges fell by a third, signaling further progress in Chief Executive Officer Bill Winters’s plan to turn around the bank a year into his tenure. The shares were briefly halted after jumping as much as 11 percent, after provisions for bad loans declined to $1.1 billion in …

  Bloomberg The Bank of England’s corporate-bond purchase program, announced on Thursday, has been met by skepticism from some credit market analysts, who say precedents across the Channel don’t bode well for the program’s ability to stimulate issuance. While credit market observers reckon the BOE’s corporate-bond program will engineer a modest reduction in borrowing costs across the sterling bond market …

  Japanese growth is still sluggish. Consumers aren’t consuming much, and businesses aren’t investing. The government doesn’t have many options to remedy this, and the Bank of Japan, which has sent both long-term and short-term interest rates into negative territory, has basically no more room to maneuver. The dreaded Zero Lower Bound is starting to bite. The BOJ is buying …