3 Min Read
SYDNEY, April 15 (Reuters) - The Australian and New Zealand dollars touched three-week tops on Thursday as their U.S. counterpart extended its broad retreat and upbeat data suggested the Australian economy had grown strongly last quarter.
The Aussie stood at $0.7718, after jumping 1% overnight when a break of major resistance at $0.7677 triggered a wave of stop-loss buying. The next target is a high from March at $0.7849.
The kiwi dollar climbed to $0.7145, having gained 1.2% overnight and finally cleared resistance at $0.7070. Its next targets are $0.7187 and $0.7268.
Both currencies also made sizable gains on the yen and euro.
The Aussie got an added fillip from data showing 70,700 jobs were added in March, twice the market forecast, while unemployment dropped to a one-year low at 5.6%.
By Reuters Staff
1 Min Read
April 16 (Reuters) - Insurer Hartford Financial Services Group said on Friday it had agreed to a settlement with the Boy Scouts of America and would pay $650 million for sexual abuse claims associated with policies issued mostly in the 1970s.
Under the agreement, the Boy Scouts and its local councils will release Hartford from any obligation under policies it issued, Hartford said.
The Boy Scouts filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last February, amid a flood of lawsuits over allegations of child sexual abuse stretching back decades.
Apart from Hartford, insurer Chubb Ltd is also facing potentially massive liabilities stemming from the Boy Scouts of America bankruptcy.
By Reuters Staff
1 Min Read
April 17 (Reuters) - Channel tunnel operator Eurostar has struck a deal with its lenders to refinance hundreds of millions of pounds of debts, the Telegraph newspaper reported on Saturday, paving the way for talks to restart about financial support from British taxpayers.
A group of banks, including state-backed NatWest, have agreed to refinance 400 million pounds ($553 million) of loans that were due to be repaid this summer, according to the paper. ($1 = 0.7230 pounds) (Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
(Adds value and number of Russian bonds in indexes)
LONDON/NEW YORK, April 15 (Reuters) - U.S. sanctions announced on Thursday on newly-issued Russian government debt could see the bonds excluded from JPMorgan’s influential indexes, including the emerging market local-currency GBI-EM investment index, the bank said.
“Economic sanctions which impact the replicability of the JPMorgan fixed income indices will result in an Index Watch (observation period) followed by potential rebalance actions such as exclusion of the sanctioned bonds/issuers from the benchmark,” JPMorgan said.
Russia’s share in JPMorgan’s GBI-EM index, the main global benchmark for emerging market local currency bonds, now sits at 7.1% compared with 8.9% a year ago and the maximum possible 10% in 2014 before Russia was hit with Western sanctions for annexing part of Ukraine.
5 Min Read
LONDON (Reuters) - The promised digital euro started to take shape this week and signals from Frankfurt may offer some relief to nervy commercial banks worried about being sidelined by the latest disrupter.
FILE PHOTO: A picture illustration of euro banknotes, April 25, 2014. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo
With the “hands off” pandemic accelerating the demise of physical cash, and private-sector crypto and stablecoins threatening to invade the space, the pledge last year of a digital euro within five years came before the European Central Bank knew what exactly it would be or how it would function.
As nearly every central bank working on digital legal tender suggesting a different model or system, the debate over design has ranged widely over the past 6 months - from digital tokens to a direct central bank accounts or something in between.