AUSTRALIAN lending finance has posted its biggest annual fall in 16 years as slumping consumer sentiment wards off business borrowing. Total lending finance - which includes personal, housing, commercial and lease borrowing - slumped by a seasonally adjusted 13.3 per cent in the year to May, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said today.
This was the [...]
The European Central Bank kept interest rates at a six-year high today to fight inflation even as the euro-region economy cools.
ECB policy makers meeting in Frankfurt left the benchmark lending rate at 4 percent, as predicted by all 59 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. The bank will wait until at least February to lower [...]
Chile’s central bank will probably raise the benchmark lending rate for the sixth time in the past 12 months as policy makers seek to slow the fastest inflation since 1994.
Central bank President Jose de Gregorio will increase the overnight rate by a quarter percentage point to 6.50 percent, according to 12 of 24 forecasts in [...]
Brazilian stocks fell early on Wednesday for the fourth straight session, tracking losses in overseas markets and hit by inflation concerns at home, while the local currency weakened slightly.
The data reinforced expectations that Brazil’s central bank will raise its benchmark lending rate again in July to rein in consumer prices, sending interest-rate futures higher on [...]
The number of mortgages approved for people buying a home fell to a record low for the second consecutive month, figures from the Bank of England reveal.
Around 58,000 loans were approved in April according to the bank and in no way reflected the predictions of some economists who had expected an increase on the 64,000 [...]
That’s the approach we in the General Assembly have taken to the home mortgage crisis, believing that big-government intervention can make a bad situation worse.
In the late 1970s, because of something known as “redlining,” in which some banks discriminated against certain neighborhoods, Congress passed legislation that led to the easing of restrictions of lending for [...]
India’s inflation accelerated at the fastest pace in more than 3 1/2 years, maintaining pressure on the government to do more to tame prices which threatens economic growth. Bonds fell.
Wholesale prices jumped 8.1 percent in the week ended May 17 from a year earlier, Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told reporters in New Delhi today. Economists [...]
Iceland’s central bank unexpectedly left its benchmark interest unchanged, six days after it obtained emergency funding from its Nordic counterparts to bolster the currency and quell inflation.
Sedlabanki kept the weekly lending rate at a record 15.5 percent, according to a statement on the Reykjavik-based bank’s Web site today. Three of 10 economists surveyed by Bloomberg [...]
 Mexico’s peso will rally through June on speculation the Federal Reserve will keep the benchmark U.S. lending rate at 2 percent this year, helping maintain the yield advantage of Mexican assets, Citigroup Inc. said.
The peso will rise to 10.3 against the dollar by June, Joel Virgen, an economist at Citigroup’s Banamex unit in Mexico City, [...]
Colombia’s peso bonds rose the most in three weeks after central bankers signaled they’re concerned about an economic slowdown, fueling speculation they may hold off from raising interest rates in coming months.
The central bank left the benchmark overnight rate at a six-year high of 9.75 percent today and said in a statement after the meeting [...]
