Sitting in my Hangzhou hotel room one evening last September, I caught a helpfully subtitled Chinese TV show about Song Dynasty inscriptions carved on a mountainside near Quanzhou — the city Chinese media invariably call “the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road.” With prayers for good winds and safe returns, the carvings bore witness to China’s far-flung commercial relations …

Bloomberg Bank of Montreal’s US push hit a speed bump in the second quarter as higher loan losses eroded earnings from its Chicago-based BMO Harris Bank. The lender set aside C$259 million ($192 million) for soured loans, up 29 percent from a year earlier and the highest since at least 2011, tied largely to U.S. personal and commercial banking and …

Bloomberg State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender by assets, picked Bank of America Corp. and Deutsche Bank AG to arrange a share sale that could raise about $2 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said. The lender also chose IIFL Holdings Ltd., Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd., JM Financial Ltd. and SBI Capital Markets Ltd. to work on …

Bloomberg Royal Bank of Canada’s (RCB) acquisition of City National Bank is paying dividends. The Los Angeles-based lender contributed C$77 million ($57 million) in profit for the fiscal second quarter, helping fuel a 12 percent jump in earnings for Royal Bank’s wealth-management division. This marks the fifth quarter of results since the Canadian lender bought Hollywood’s “bank to the stars” …

Bloomberg The Philippine central bank isn’t in a race to raise interest rates, incoming governor Nestor Espenilla said, despite economists’ predictions the country will be the first in Southeast Asia to do so. “It’s not a race to raise interest rates,” Espenilla, 58, deputy governor in charge of bank supervision, said in an interview. “Is it time to raise interest …

Bloomberg Maria Silvia Bastos resigned as the head of Brazil’s state development bank (BNDES) amid a corruption scandal engulfing both the institution and President Michel Temer. The BNDES in a statement cited personal reasons for Bastos’ decision, without elaborating. Brazil’s currency and the Ibovespa stock index trimmed gains. Paulo Rabello Castro, an economist in charge of the national statistics agency …

Bloomberg A Barclays Plc trader fired amid a global probe into foreign-exchange market manipulation lost his lawsuit against the bank after a judge ruled the lender was right to dismiss him for revealing confidential information to rivals and using sexually explicit, racist language in online chats. Barclays suspended Jack Murray in October 2013, shortly after regulators began probing banks suspected …

Bloomberg The Russian state-controlled behemoth reported net income of 167.8 billion rubles ($2.98 billion), beating estimates of 159 billion rubles by 10 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. Earnings were boosted by a stronger net interest margin as the Russian central bank moved slowly to bring down borrowing costs. It was the third record profit in the last five quarters. Sberbank Chief …

Bloomberg Manufacturers of airport security equipment have a message for travelers who fear they will have to give up laptops and tablet computers on international flights: They have a solution. At least four of the largest companies making screening devices say they are developing scanners so much better at detecting explosives than existing X-ray machines that passengers could leave laptops, …

Bloomberg Ryanair Holdings Plc will soon offer connections to destinations including New York and Havana, as the budget carrier widens its network of long-haul partners with a deal with Spain’s Air Europa. In the first stage of the cooperation starting Tuesday, Ryanair customers can book Air Europa tickets to 20 cities in the Americas via the Dublin-based carrier’s website, the …