Category: Business

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has slapped BNK Banking Corporation with a $247,500 fine for failing to meet its data reporting requirements to the APRA.  In a statement, the prudential regulator said BNK was 32 days late in filing statistical reports for the month ending Feb. 23 under the Economic and Financial Statistics program. This failure to report data by required deadlines was in breach of the requirements of the Financial Sector (Collection of Data) Act 2001 (FSCODA). Therese McCarthy…

SHANGHAI – China’s major state banks have lowered their US dollar deposit rates for the second time in a month, seven banking sources with direct knowledge of the matter said, as the authorities step up efforts to arrest a slide in the Renminbi currency. Interest rates offered by the “Big Five” state-owned lenders on most dollar deposits are now capped at 2.8 per cent, down from 4.3 per cent previously, said the people. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), which…

James S. Crown On Sunday, James S. Crown died in an unusual single-car accident, reportedly on a motorsport racetrack at a “member-owned country club” in Aspen, Colorado. The Pitkin County Coroner’s Office said in a statement that “The official cause of death is pending autopsy, although multiple blunt force trauma is evident.” The Sheriff’s Office indicated that the earliest new information would be made available to the public is next week. In August of last year, Wall Street On Parade made a…

Sweden’s data protection watchdog has issued a couple of fines in relation to exports of European users’ data via Google Analytics which it found breach the bloc’s privacy rulebook owing to risks posed by US government surveillance. It has also warned other companies against use of Google’s tool. The fines — just over $1.1 million for Swedish telco Tele2 and less than $30k for local online retailer CDON — are notable as they are the first such fines following a…

LONDON – Kyiv has placed British consumer goods giant Unilever on Ukraine’s “International Sponsors of War” list, claiming Monday it continues to profit from operations in Russia, triggering demonstrations in London. “The National Agency on Corruption Prevention has added British company Unilever onto its list of ‘International Sponsors of War’,” a statement said. This was owing to its “presence in the Russian Federation and its significant taxes to the Russian state budget, thereby supporting the aggressor’s economy and contributing to…

China’s defense minister said on Monday he hoped to expand naval cooperation with Russia, in the highest-level public talks between military officials from the two countries since a failed mutiny in Russia last month. Li Shangfu spoke in Beijing with Nikolai Yevmenov, head of the Russian navy, and said he hoped both countries could “strengthen communication at all levels,” according to a readout from the Chinese defense ministry. He also said the two should “regularly organize joint exercises, joint cruises, and joint military…

Canada’s banking regulator is cautioning that lenders and borrowers are overly reliant on lengthening mortgage amortizations to help the latter cope with higher interest rates and surging costs. In an exclusive interview with The Globe and Mail on Friday, Peter Routledge, the head of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), said that borrowers with mortgages in which payments are not high enough to cover the interest portion of the loan could experience a “shock” in significantly higher…

Petro-Canada gas stations across Canada are impacted by technical problems preventing customers from paying with credit card or rewards points as its parent company, Suncor Energy, discloses they suffered a cyberattack. Suncor Energy is the 48th-largest public company in the world, and one of Canada’s largest synthetic crude producers, having an annual revenue of $31 billion. The company says it has taken measures to mitigate the attack and informed the authorities of the situation. At the same time, it expects…

BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are reportedly aiding the Ukrainian government in setting up a reconstruction bank that could see rebuilding projects being heavily invested in by private entities. The Financial Times noted that it would cost Ukraine roughly $411 billion to rebuild their country amid the onslaught of attacks by Russia, but the cost is continuing to increase.

Potential investors will get an inside preview of how things will look during a London conference that is set to take place this week.

NEW YORK – Former Goldman Sachs banker Brijesh Goel’s trial on insider trading charges drew to a close on Tuesday, with his attorney saying he was framed by his friend and a prosecutor saying Goel had lied to a New York jury. Goel, a former Goldman Sachs vice-president, faces securities fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges for allegedly tipping his friend Akshay Niranjan to deals the bank was considering funding in 2017 and 2018. Prosecutors say Goel gleaned the…

NEW YORK – Gannett, the largest US newspaper chain and publisher of USA Today, on Tuesday sued Google for trying to corner the market for online advertising by monopolising ad technology. In a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, Gannett, which has more than 200 daily newspapers, said Google’s control over tools for buying and selling online ads forces publishers to sell more cheap ad space to the Alphabet unit. Gannett said this leaves Google with “exorbitant monopoly profits”, and…

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon said it will be able to spend US$6 billion (S$8 billion) more than originally expected on arms for Ukraine thanks to what it called accounting errors. The Defense Department overstated the value of weapons sent from its stockpiles by US$2.6 billion in fiscal 2022 and US$3.6 billion in fiscal 2023, for a total of US$6.2 billion, deputy spokesman Sabrina Singh told reporters on Tuesday at the Pentagon.  “It’s just going to go back into the pot…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden has agreed to plead guilty to two charges of willfully failing to pay income taxes. He will enter into an agreement that could enable him to avoid a conviction on a gun-related charge, according to a court filing on Tuesday. The federal charges against Hunter Biden resulted from an investigation by David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in the Democratic president’s home state of Delaware, who was appointed by Republican then-President Donald…

A new report has revealed details surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to JPMorgan Chase, one of the largest banking institutions in the world, and specifically highlighted the financier’s ties to former JPMorgan executive Jes Staley. Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal sex-trafficking charges, and died that same year in jail before he was tried in court over sex trafficking charges. The 20-plus internal report was reportedly prepared after news broke of Epstein’s arrest in 2019. According to reports based on…

My latest Deeper Dive dug into China’s failing commercial real-estate market, as well as other global commercial real-estate markets that are collapsing, laying out the corporate zombie apocalypse that is building particularly in office real estate, but also still deepening in retail real estate. It’s happening all over the world: Unprofitable companies that survived only because of cheap credit (zombies) — and even some profitable ones — are toppling as credit costs rise. The headlines supporting my summary analysis this weekend can…

Emails from the Biden laptop shed light on Burisma’s opening of a Maltese bank account for Hunter Biden in the spring of 2016. This newly discovered development coincides with the allegations made by an FBI source, suggesting that Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma Holdings, allegedly paid a $5 million bribe each to then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. In 2014, Ukraine initiated criminal cases against Zlochevsky and Burisma, the company where Hunter Biden held a board…