London / AFP US President Barack Obama will be thrust into the eye of a boisterous British debate over European Union membership when he touches down in London on Thursday for a royal-filled visit. The US president’s four-day trip—perhaps his last to Britain before leaving office next year—comes ahead of a June 23 referendum when Britons will be asked ...

  Bloomberg Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the country’s largest mortgage lender, has tightened criteria for home loans to foreigners just as the central bank warned buying by Chinese posed an ‘indirect risk’. Commonwealth Bank, which accounts for one in every four mortgages in the country, will no longer approve applications that cite self-employed foreign income, it said in a note ...

  Bloomberg Commerzbank AG Chief Executive Officer Martin Blessing said a “slow” first quarter will make it more difficult to achieve last year’s profit, just a month after the bank projected an increase in full-year earnings. “The result for the first three months is likely to be lower than in the previous quarter,” Blessing, 52, told shareholders at the annual ...

  Bloomberg The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) used open-market operations to inject the most funds in two weeks, helping meet a seasonal spike in demand for cash that also saw the central bank provide two rounds of medium-term loans within a week. The PBOC auctioned 90 billion yuan ($14 billion) of seven-day reverse-repurchase agreements on Tuesday, the most since ...

  New York / AFP Goldman Sachs reported a sharp decline in first-quarter earnings, but gave a fairly bullish outlook for the mergers and acquisitions business now that financial markets have stabilised. Earnings for the quarter ending March 31 were $1.2 billion, down 56.3 percent from the year-ago period. Revenues sank 40.3 percent to $6.3 billion. Nearly all of the big ...

  Tokyo / Reuters Bank of Japan (BOJ) Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said inflation could be affected if the yen continued to rise excessively, leading to further easing measures to meet the central bank’s price target, the Wall Street Journal reported. Kuroda also told the paper that the BOJ was not targetting the exchange rate but that he would continue to ...

  Bloomberg China wants to get control of the most popular fast-food chain in the country. A consortium backed by sovereign fund China Investment Corp. has expressed interest in buying a majority stake in Yum! Brands Inc.’s China business, which runs more than 7,100 KFC and Pizza Hut eateries across the nation, people with knowledge of the matter said. The ...

  Bloomberg Malaysia Airlines Bhd. said Chief Executive Officer Christoph Mueller will leave the company before his term ends, posing a new challenge to turn around the carrier after two plane crashes in 2014 dented its sales and reputation. Mueller requested to step down before the end of his three-year contract for personal reasons, the carrier said in a statement. ...

  Reuters British plus-size fashion retailer N Brown Group Plc expects a hit of about 3 million pounds ($4.31 million) on full-year profit before tax in the new financial year, and said trading so far has been subdued. Shares of N Brown, known for its brands SimplyBe and JD Williams, fell as much as 13 percent to 273 pence, the ...

  Paris / REUTERS A growing backlog of undelivered Airbus passenger jets, stranded outside their factories due to supplier problems, is putting pressure on the planemaker’s cash generation for the start of the year, industry sources and analysts said. After a slow first quarter in deliveries, parking space at Toulouse airport in France, and at Hamburg in Germany, is increasingly ...