Singapore dollar set to weaken as central bank faces downturn

Bloomberg Singapore’s dollar is set to weaken because the central bank is likely to scrap its appreciation bias at a policy meeting next week, according to a growing group of forecasters. Mizuho Bank Ltd and Societe Generale SA are defying consensus by predicting the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) will adjust the slope of its nominal-effective-exchange-rate policy band to zero, ...

Read More »

Bank of China leads way for Libor successor

Bloomberg One of China’s biggest lenders is marketing a new dollar note linked to a Libor replacement, as borrowers across the globe move away from the scandal-ridden pricing benchmark. Bank of China Ltd’s Macau Branch is expected to price a floating-rate note tied to the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the matter. ...

Read More »

Fabio Panetta awaits role as ECB’s next Italian after Draghi

Bloomberg Fabio Panetta, Italy’s candidate for a board seat at the European Central Bank (ECB), got his first big career break one early morning in 1985. Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the then-Bank of Italy chief and a future president of the republic, was already at his desk at dawn when he rang the switchboard at his research department for help with ...

Read More »

Free trade is expanding, just not with the US

New US tariffs on as much as $7.5 billion of exports from the European Union (EU) have brought another reminder of how trade wars and protectionism dominate the news. Yet in the last two years, countries accounting for more than one-third of global output have signed more than a dozen trade treaties. When historians look back, they may depict this ...

Read More »

Investors are caught in a tug of war

More than anything else, last week’s market gyrations illustrated the tug of war that has dominated US stocks in recent months and confined them in a range despite significant developments in the underlying dynamics. The intensifying tension between the two macro forces could lead to greater volatility and pose increasing challenges for investors. The first part of the week was ...

Read More »

Virtue’s worth trying, but vice may pay more

Fund managers are grappling with how to incorporate environmental, social and governance considerations into their portfolios. A movement that started in equities has spread across asset classes. For credit investors, the trick to investing with a conscience without hurting returns may lie with which corporate bonds they load up on as much as with those they choose to shun. Chris ...

Read More »

Cash is no longer a king trading strategy in Japan

Cash is king, unless you are in Japan. One successful trading strategy there has recently lost its luster, thanks to the Bank of Japan’s never-ending obsession with negative interest rates. When a global recession looms, investors tend to hug stocks that pay handsome dividends. Cash rewards also have appeal at corporate headquarters. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the S&P ...

Read More »

Recession fears seeping into the stock market

Last week brought lots of bad news about the American economy. The stock market treated each new data point suggesting that activity was slowing down as bad news. And that, in itself, is bad news. Here’s why: Grim tidings for the economy aren’t necessarily so bad for investors, because they tend to lead to lower interest rates. That, in turn, ...

Read More »

In war against plastic, America is a big threat

How much do you care about the scourge of plastic waste, and how much more might you pay for a bottled drink in order to reduce it? We may be about to find out. The cost of brand new polyethylene terephthalate, or virgin PET (the stuff used to make plastic containers and fibers for clothing), fell below the cost of ...

Read More »

DBS is losing Asia fintech deals to foreign banks

Southeast Asia’s largest lender happens to be its most tech-savvy. Why then is Singapore’s DBS Group Holdings Ltd. missing out on some of the region’s hottest deals in digital banking? In recent years, technology has played a large role in the bank’s profitable pivot away from trade financing to corporate cash management. One of its application programming interfaces that hooks ...

Read More »
Send this to a friend