Bloomberg Taiwan’s timing on rolling out a new stock trading system could have been better. Traders in Taipei starting on Monday will be able to trade stocks continuously, rather than through a five-second matched call auction that has been in place since 2014. It’s the only major capital market which runs such auctions throughout regular trading, said the Taiwan Stock …

Bloomberg Bank of America Corp. (BofA) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. plan to make special payments to branch, call-center and operations employees who can’t work from home during the coronavirus pandemic. JPMorgan, the biggest US bank, will make payments of $1,000 — $500 next month, and the rest in May — to branch workers as well as operations and call-center …

Bloomberg UBS Group AG is making “several billion” Swiss francs available to small and mid-sized companies as it backs Switzerland’s measures to help businesses hit by the coronavirus pandemic. The bank will provide liquidity to smaller Swiss corporate clients “who find themselves in need through no fault of their own,” the lender said in a statement. Amortisation payments or leasing …

Bloomberg Flagstar Bancorp, one of the United State’s biggest lenders to mortgage providers, has stopped funding most new home loans without government backing. The move, announced to its customers, deprives the housing market of one of the country’s 10 largest so-called warehouse lenders. Other lenders that make non-traditional mortgages to households will no longer be able to borrow from Troy, …

Bloomberg Nigeria’s central bank will migrate to a single exchange rate for the naira by collapsing the multiple exchange rate policy that determined the value for the local currency, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. The West African nation will merge the official rate, the rate for importers and exporters and rate for foreign-exchange bureaus, among others, according …

Bloomberg Central banks in the Asia Pacific pledged to spend billions of dollars and implemented new policy steps to stem a bond market rout. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) and Bank of Korea (BOK) offered to buy bonds worth a total of $13.1 billion, while Japan’s authority said it would supply another $36.7 billion of funds. Australia’s central bank (RBA), …

Bloomberg Bank of Ghana has told the country’s lenders that they must seek approval before declaring and paying dividends on 2019 earnings as the regulator moves to guard against banks taking advantage of eased reserve rules due to the coronavirus to boost payouts to investors. After cutting its benchmark interest rate by 150 basis points on March 18 to combat …

Bloomberg Simon Wolfson, chief executive officer of clothing chain Next Plc, said that the coronavirus pandemic presents the global retail industry with its biggest threat in nearly half a century. The oil price shock of 1973 — when Wolfson was five years old — triggered a stock market crash, soaring inflation and high unemployment. The viral contagion could become just …

Bloomberg Hong Kong will extend Covid-19 testing to asymptomatic arrivals after a sharp rise in infections driven mainly by imported cases, Chief Executive Carrie Lam said. The government will take other measures, including postponing university entrance exams and ordering civil servants to return to working from home, Lam told the media. The resumption of schools, which have been closed since …

Bloomberg American Airlines Group Inc is shifting some of its biggest idled jets to ferry just cargo — the carrier’s first flights without passengers in nearly four decades. The Boeing Co 777-300s will fly medical supplies, military mail, e-commerce packages and high-demand office equipment as more people work from home, the airline said in a statement. The wide-body flights began …