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  Bloomberg President Emmanuel Macron would face conservative candidate Valerie Pecresse and defeat her in a runoff if elections were held now, according to a poll. Support for Macron was at a field-leading 24% in the Ipsos Sopra Steria poll, followed by Pecresse of the Republicans at 16.5%. If replicated in the first round of voting in April, that outcome ...

  Bloomberg Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party cranked up the prospects of a prolonged political crisis following the resignation of the region’s First Minister, warning it won’t return to the power-sharing Executive unless issues related to Brexit are resolved. “The DUP will not be involved in forming a government in Northern Ireland until those issues have been satisfactorily addressed,” the ...

  Bloomberg Europe’s biggest bank payout-plan failed to excite investors who’ve grown accustomed to fat payout ratios and dividends at Intesa Sanpaolo SpA. The Milan-based lender said it will disburse more than 22 billion euros ($25 billion) to shareholders through 2025. While that put it ahead of Italian rival UniCredit SpA in the contest to offer Europe’s bank investors the ...

  Bloomberg Bank of America Corp (BofA) boosted Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan’s compensation 31% to $32 million for 2021, a year in which the firm set a record for profitability. His package includes $1.5 million in salary and a $30.5 million in stock-based incentive awards, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender said in a filing. A year ago, Moynihan took ...

  Bloomberg As interest rates finally inch up, European banks are telling investors to expect something they haven’t seen in almost 15 years: returns in the teens. Several of the region’s top lenders recently raised their profitability targets as they expect higher income from lending. The upgrades range across the whole of Western Europe, from Nordea Bank in Helsinki to ...

  Bloomberg China called on banks to boost real estate lending in the first quarter and eased a key debt restriction for developers, a sign that authorities are becoming increasingly concerned about the industry’s liquidity crisis. In previously unreported window guidance issued last month, regulators told banks to step up lending to developers after at least two quarters of consecutive ...

Bloomberg Danske Bank A/S has cut 60 jobs as part of plans to reduce costs and operate with a smaller labour force. The cuts were made across the organization in January, Karsten Breum, head of human resources at the Copenhagen-based bank, said in an emailed statement. Denmark’s largest bank, which is due to publish 2021 earnings on Thursday, currently employs ...

  Bloomberg The Czech central bank raised borrowing costs to the highest level in the European Union, (EU) delivering what’s probably its last large increase and outlining a relatively dovish outlook for the rest of the year. The koruna weakened. Policy makers raised the benchmark rate to 4.5% from 3.75%, as predicted by a majority of economists in a Bloomberg ...

  Bloomberg Audi is considering investments in clean energy for sites in China where the luxury car-maker is struggling to source enough power from renewable sources to churn out hundreds of thousands of vehicles each year. Volkswagen AG’s key earnings contributor has pledged to make its production network carbon-neutral by 2025, and has already moved plants in Belgium and Hungary ...

  Bloomberg Sony Group Corp will continue producing PlayStation 4 consoles throughout 2022 as it navigates disruptions to the global supply chain that limited output of its pricier PlayStation 5. The Japanese conglomerate, whose flagship PS5 console has been in scarce supply since its debut in November 2020, told assembly partners that it would continue making its earlier-generation machine through ...