October, 2019

• 26 October

  ICICI profit misses estimate on tax impact

  

  Bloomberg ICICI Bank Ltd, India’s second-largest private lender, posted a lower than expected profit due to a one-time income tax adjustment. Net income fell 28% to 6.55 billion rupees ($98 million) for the three months ended on September 30 from 9.1 billion rupees a year earlier, the lender said on Saturday. The profit compared with analysts expectation of 13.8 billion ...

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• 26 October

  Visa spending more to please banks after ‘deal’

  

  Bloomberg Visa Inc had to shell out more money to entice banks to issue their cards on the company’s network. The firm set aside $1.69 billion in incentives for banks during its fiscal fourth quarter, a 13% increase from a year ago, that topped the $1.51 billion average of analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The world’s largest payments network — ...

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• 26 October

  Payment firm Stripe moves into Mexico after CoDi

  Bloomberg Mobile payment startup Stripe began operations in Mexico, after the launch of a similar central bank-backed system aimed at boosting the amount of digital payments used in the nation’s cash-heavy economy. Stripe, used by companies including Uber Technologies, touts a key difference between it and CoDi, as Banxico-backed cobro digital is known: Its users can make and take payments ...

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• 26 October

  Citi promotes Jane Fraser, sets stage for first female CEO

  

  Bloomberg Jane Fraser ascended to the No. 2 job at Citigroup, putting her in position to succeed Chief Executive Officer Michael Corbat and become the first woman to lead a major US bank. The behemoth lender named Fraser as president and handed her responsibility for consumer banking, one of its thorniest turnaround efforts in recent years. Corbat moved to keep ...

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• 26 October

  Why we should impeach, remove president Trump

  

  No one has worked more aggressively to trigger impeachment than the president. You may remember that, during the campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump suggested that, should he win, he might become one of the most “boring” presidents in history. There was in this curious pledge — which, as we now know, has been broken along with many other campaign promises — ...

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• 26 October

  Brexit has British fleeing to Europe

  

  Five years ago, I emigrated to Germany from Russia, because it had abandoned any pretense of wanting to be a European country. Now, I’m watching in amazement as Britons are doing the same, in droves, for the same reason. It’s well known that tens of thousands of UK citizens have obtained second passports from Ireland as insurance against a post-Brexit ...

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• 26 October

  Normal yield curve doesn’t mean everything’s normal

  As we count down to this month’s meetings of the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve, both of which are expected to maintain their monetary easing stance, the US yield curve has been quietly undoing the inversion that had raised alarms in the corridors of the world’s two most systemically important central banks. Over the last few weeks, the ...

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• 26 October

  Facebook could do to banks what it did to newspapers

  On October 23, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, testified about his company’s cryptocurrency project at a hearing held by the House Financial Services Committee. In his testimony, Zuckerberg tried to reassure Congress that Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency would square the circle between financial inclusion and regulatory adherence, consumer privacy and proactive fraud detection. The one thing he didn’t manage to address ...

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• 26 October

  Economic growth shouldn’t be a death sentence for Earth

  

  Among some intellectuals and environmentalists, it’s an article of faith that economic growth must be brought to a stop. If we fail to act, we’ll use up the planet’s resources and growth will suffer a disastrous collapse. For example, British writer George Monbiot has been advancing this point of view for quite some time. In April, he declared: Perpetual growth ...

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• 26 October

  UBS superstar banker has a lot riding on him

  

  UBS Group AG’s assets under management reached a record $2.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2019, buoyed in part by money from rich clients. Unfortunately, the world’s largest wealth manager is finding it harder to squeeze more profit out of this business; its chief executive officer Sergio Ermotti may be running out of ideas. Net profit at the Swiss ...

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