Bloomberg Asia’s largest retailer Fast Retailing Co sees profits growing slightly beyond analysts’ expectations this fiscal year, driven by a robust recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic in the Uniqlo owner’s key China and Japan markets. Operating profit will probably be 245 billion yen ($2.3 billion) for the year through August 2021, the Japanese company said in a statement. That compares …

Bloomberg Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government is adding more commercial flights from the UK, India and South Africa and boosting quarantine places so that more Australians stranded overseas by the pandemic can return home. Morrison said Qantas Airways Ltd will provide eight flights over coming weeks from London, New Delhi and Johannesburg. Australia’s capacity to let citizens and permanent residents …

Bloomberg Bank of America Corp. (BofA) inched closer to its diversity goals last year, and said it recognises more needs to be done. Racial and gender representation increased in most areas of the company, including among senior management, according to data by the bank. Still, the percentage of women in the top three tiers of the firm remained unchanged from …

Bloomberg The Bank of Thailand extended its 500 billion baht ($16 billion) “soft loan” program for small and medium-sized enterprises by six months to help with the effects of the lingering Covid-19 outbreak, the central bank said on its website. The central bank also relaxed rules to allow listed SMEs to join the low interest-rate lending program, which started April …

Bloomberg HDFC Bank Ltd., India’s largest private lender, posted second-quarter profit that beat analysts’ expectations on strong loan growth and fall in bad loans. Net income was 75.1 billion rupees ($1.02 billion) for the three months to September, up from 63.4 billion rupees a year earlier, the lender said in a filing. The profits were 17% higher than the 64.1 …

Bloomberg Westpac Banking Corp. is cutting more than 150 jobs as Australia’s second-largest lender consolidates its international operations, according to people familiar with the matter. The cuts will impact employees in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Jakarta where the Sydney-based bank is exiting its operations. Most staff are locally employed and the process will take one to two years, …

Bloomberg Wall Street’s top matchmaker for megadeals sees a wave of corporate takeovers coming with a worrying implication for the workforce: a jump in job losses. “Politicians are going to be faced with the uncomfortable reality that you’re going to have more big business doing better and that there’s going to be more losses of jobs along the way,” Goldman …

Bloomberg Ethiopia’s effort to stamp out counterfeiting by introducing new currency notes is pulling people who’ve never had a bank account into the financial system. Over the past four weeks, almost 1 million previously unbanked Ethiopians have handed in their two-decade-old banknotes, according to the central bank. In exchange, they were given a bank account from which they can draw …

Bloomberg Singapore’s central bank signaled it would keep monetary policy unchanged for longer to complement a massive fiscal stimulus supporting the economy’s recovery. The Monetary Authority of Singapore, which uses the exchange rate as its main tool rather than a benchmark interest rate, kept its policy settings unchanged, in line with economists’ forecasts. The slope of the currency band was …

Bloomberg European investors started the past week preparing for a Brexit showdown. They ended up getting blindsided by a fresh wave of virus restrictions, in a reminder of the pandemic’s power to thrash markets. The announcements of Paris curfews and London curbs on activity was what ultimately drove the Stoxx 600 to its first weekly loss in three and sent …