Deutsche Bank ratings cut on struggle to overhaul

  Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG had its credit rating cut by Moody’s Investors Service, which said the German lender faces mounting challenges in carrying out its turnaround. The bank’s senior unsecured debt rating was lowered to Baa2 from Baa1, Moody’s said in a statement this week. That left the grade two levels above junk. The firm’s long-term deposit rating fell ...

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‘Stay tuned’ for better returns, says Morgan Stanley

  Bloomberg Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer James Gorman sounded a positive note about the Wall Street bank’s business, telling investors to “stay tuned” for better performance as markets recover. Speaking to Bloomberg Television in Beijing, where the firm is hosting its China summit, Gorman said a 6 percent return on equity in the first quarter was in “a very ...

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Deutsche names Thomas Piquemal to lead Global M&A

  Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG hired Thomas Piquemal as head of global mergers and acquisitions and chairman of corporate and investment banking in France. Piquemal, 47, most recently senior executive vice president for finance at French electricity utility Electricite de France SA, will be based in Paris and report to corporate and investment banking chief Jeff Urwin, Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank ...

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ECB warns of financial turbulence as rising populism adds to risks

  Bloomberg The European Central Bank (ECB) warned that risks of financial-market turmoil have increased amid slower growth in emerging economies, weak bank profitability and the rise of populist movements across the 19-nation euro region. “A sharper-than-expected fall in Chinese growth could well lead to a synchronized downturn across other emerging market economies, particularly commodity exporting economies,” the ECB wrote ...

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UK banks to appeal Swift to enhance cyber securities

  BLOOMBERG UK banks are privately lobbying the Bank of England to pressure Swift into adopting new security measures that would make it more difficult for cyber criminals to target the global payments network, according to a person with direct knowledge of the discussions. The banks want the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) to install software that would ...

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Singapore kicks out Swiss bank linked to Malaysia’s 1MDB

  Singapore / AFP Singapore’s central bank on Tuesday said it was kicking out Switzerland’s BSI Bank, which has been linked to a global money-laundering scandal that has embroiled neighbouring Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak. In the toughest legal action so far in the crisis rocking Malaysian state fund 1MDB, Switzerland also disclosed it had launched criminal proceedings against the ...

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China inks deal for industrial park at Oman’s Duqm port

  Reuters A group of Chinese investors have signed an agreement to build an industrial park at Oman’s southern port of Duqm in a project that could attract billions of dollars of investment, government and company officials said on Monday. The Omani government is working to develop the area around Duqm, on a stretch of barren coast 550 km (345 ...

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Soured British commercial property loans cut by half as values jump

  Bloomberg Rising property values enabled lenders in the U.K. to reduce defaulted commercial-property loans on their books by almost half to about 12.1 billion pounds ($17.5 billion) last year, a survey showed. The amount remaining in default fell from 23.2 billion pounds at the end of 2014, according to a survey of lenders by Leicester, England’s De Montfort University ...

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No takers yet for New Jersey’s most expensive home

  BLOOMBERG In this age of tiny houses and the less-is-more aesthetic of millennials, can a house be too large for its market—even when that market sports a median home price around the $5 million mark? That has to be a question that occurs when viewing this massive 30,000-square-foot home listed for $48,880,000 in tony Alpine, NJ. New Jersey’s most ...

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Breathing life into Bedouin poetry

  Abu Dhabi / AFP The Middle East’s poetry equivalent of “Pop Idol” is helping to keep alive an age-old tradition using bedouin dialect, which is barely understood outside the Arabian Gulf. Apart from the glory, a Kuwaiti student took home five million dirhams ($1.36 million), the top prize in a television show followed by millions of poetry lovers across ...

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