Bloomberg Austria is putting unvaccinated people under lockdown from Monday, the most drastic move by a Western European country to slow the latest wave of the coronavirus. European cases reached almost 2 million last week, the most in a single week in the region since the pandemic started. The Netherlands and Latvia have both imposed new measures, while Germany is ...

Bloomberg A row engulfing the British government has helped the opposition Labour party record one of its first poll leads over the ruling Conservative party for almost a year. Keir Starmer’s Labour party registered 37% support in the survey, a single point ahead of the Conservatives in the Opinium poll published by the Observer newspaper. It’s the first Labour lead ...

Bloomberg Traders are betting the Bank of England (BOE) will rapidly raise borrowing costs before reversing course almost as quickly. Again. With inflation looking increasingly sticky, the BOE is expected to raise its key interest rate by 115 basis points over the next 18 months, according to money market pricing. Policy makers are likely to then be forced to unwind ...

Bloomberg Commerzbank Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Manfred Knof is cutting management positions at Germany’s second-biggest listed bank by about 30% as part of his turnaround plans. The target is linked to an agreement with the company’s works council on how to implement deep job cuts which were first announced in February, the lender said in a statement. It didn’t say ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank (ECB) could stop buying bonds as early as next September if inflation looks to have sustainably returned to the official target, Governing Council member Robert Holzmann said. Introduced in 2015, the bank’s asset purchase program, or APP, was designed to get consumer-price growth back to 2%, according to Holzmann, who heads Austria’s central bank and ...

Bloomberg ABN Amro Bank NV reported third-quarter profit that beat estimates as the Dutch lender released money it had stashed for doubtful loans and said it’s in talks with its regulator about buying back stock. The bank, based in Amsterdam, saw net income jump 14% from a year earlier to 343 million euros ($397 million). That was higher than the ...

Bloomberg Mexico’s central bank upcoming monetary policy decisions will be data driven and depend on any additional price shocks, Governor Alejandro Diaz de Leon said, signalling that policy makers aren’t committed to an established path for interest rates. “We’re not pointing in any direction nor ruling out any direction,” Diaz de Leon said in a telephone interview. “We’re signalling that ...

Bloomberg Nigeria’s currency rebounded in the illegal market as the central bank boosted sales of dollars to commercial banks, according to traders. The currency strengthened to an average 540 to a dollar from about 570 a week ago in unauthorised markets in Lagos and other cities where foreign currency is freely traded, according to Abubakar Mohammed, chief executive officer for ...

Bloomberg Peru’s central bank tightened monetary policy for a fourth straight month after inflation accelerated to its fastest pace in more than 12 years. Policy makers, led by bank President Julio Velarde, raised their key interest rate by a half-point to 2%, as forecast by six of eight economists surveyed by Bloomberg. One analyst expected an increase of 75 basis ...

Bloomberg For years, Chinese leaders have been fighting an uphill battle to drive funding for small business. They are counting on Beijing’s first-ever stock exchange to get the job done. The Beijing Stock Exchange, which launches on Monday, is intended as a platform to house small and medium-sized companies that have long faced difficulty raising capital because they aren’t large ...