Bloomberg President Joe Biden’s White House released its first set of records detailing visits by official guests, returning to a practice set by the Obama administration and dismissed by the Trump team, disclosing 400 visits during his first 12 days in office. While hundreds of visitors might have visited the White House complex on an ordinary pre-pandemic day, the sparse ...

Bloomberg The top leadership of South Africa’s ruling party excluded its suspended Secretary-General Ace Magashule from a meeting on Saturday, confirming the sidelining of one of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s biggest detractors. Magashule was ordered to vacate his post after he ignored an order by the African National Congress (ANC) to step aside while he faces trial on graft charges. He ...

Bloomberg Global central banks are starting to wind down the trillion-dollar money printing machines set in motion to rescue their economies in 2020. Getting ahead of them is becoming this year’s biggest currency trade. Early changes to bond-buying programs from Canada and Britain have been rewarding for foreign-exchange players. Meanwhile, Norway, which hasn’t needed to deploy more unconventional policy such ...

Bloomberg Housing Development Finance Corp (HDFC) plans to raise as much as $17 billion in bonds after India’s largest mortgage financier posted a better-than-expected rise in fourth-quarter profit. The Mumbai-based shadow lender’s fourth-quarter net income rises 43% to 31.8 billion rupees ($432 million) as it set aside fewer provisions for bad loans, it said in a statement. That beat an ...

Bloomberg Credit Agricole SA’s profits jumped in the first quarter, as the bank joined European peers in posting a strong trading performance and lower-than-anticipated charges to cover potential loan losses. Net income rises 64% from a year ago to 1.05 billion euros ($1.27 billion), after Credit Agricole provided 384 million euros against the possibility of souring loans, below the 564.5 ...

Bloomberg India approved a plan to privatise IDBI Bank Ltd. as the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi sells assets to narrow its budget gap. The government plans to sell all or part of its 45.5% stake in the lender, as well a state-owned Life Insurance Corp of India’s 49.2% ownership, according to a government statement. The sale envisages ceding ...

Bloomberg Citigroup Inc’s global chief economist, Catherine Mann, is leaving the bank after three years in the job. Mann, a prominent economist who joined the New York-based company in February 2018 from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, said by email that she has resigned from Citigroup, without elaborating. Gabriel Morales, a spokesman for Citigroup, confirmed her resignation. Mann ...

Bloomberg Foreign demand for a slice of Taiwan’s increasingly profitable companies is threatening to upend the central bank’s decades-old currency management policy. Central bank board member Chang Chien-yi told Bloomberg in a rare interview that the institution won’t be able to fight currency appreciation if the Taiwan dollar rises on economic fundamentals as the competitiveness of local industries improves. “The ...

Bloomberg Samantha Proyrungtong, co-owner of an artisan food shop in downtown Bangkok, keeps three phones and a laptop glued to Facebook and Softbank Group-backed Line Corp.’s social-media app throughout the workday. She needs them not to hear from friends and relatives but to get orders from customers since her shop, Vivin Grocery, relies on chat applications for a big part ...

Bloomberg Argo AI, the self-driving startup backed by Ford Motor Co and Volkswagen AG, has developed a sensor it believes will be key to commercialising autonomous transportation in cities, suburbs and on the highway. The Pittsburgh-based company, which plans to go public as soon as this year, unveiled a lidar sensor capable of “seeing” 400 meters (437 yards) down the ...