As many as 40 staffers, in the key equities and investment banking division in India, could be asked to go as part of the London-headquartered lender's global layoffs, said people aware of the development. HSBC India declined to comment.
While Barclaycard, the card arm of the Barclays group, has informed some of the credit card holders that the cash limit has been reduced to zero 'to help manage the credit situation'. The new entrant to the cards business in India has sent text messages to card holders informing them about the change. A customer care executive said that the limit has been lowered for all card holders.
CPI inflation slowed to 9.39% in April compared with 10.39% in March.
Top no-frills carrier IndiGo on Tuesday approached capital markets regulator Sebi with Initial Public Offer.
The broader markets gained with mid-caps and small-caps rising 0.7-0.9 per cent on the BSE.
Analysts say loan growth, Casa ratio and exposure to sectors under pressure did not indicate any stress at United Bank.
After the RBI surprised the Centre with a record Rs 99,122 crore in surplus transfer for FY21, analysts said this will help the government tide over the revenue losses from lockdowns and extend more support to the pandemic hit industries and to the poor people. In fiscal 2020, the RBI had paid only Rs 57,128 crore in dividend to the government and the finance minister had budgeted only Rs 45,000 crore from the central bank. The higher payout followed the Bimal Jalan panel report that had set a new economic framework capital buffer for the central bank along with the contingency risk buffer at 5.5 per cent.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is likely to keep monetary policy steady in June despite sluggish economic activity as inflation remains elevated, a Reuters poll showed on Wednesday.
Of the 1,145 offers made this year, consulting firms made up 34 per cent, followed by banking, financial services and insurance, pharma/healthcare, IT/ITeS and FMCG/retail.
In the broader market, BSE midcap and BSE smallcap indices underperformed the larger counterparts and ended flat with a negative bias.
Reliance Industries Ltd, the nation's most valuable company, on Thursday said it has raised $4 billion (around Rs 30,000 crore) in debt through the largest ever foreign currency bond issuance by an Indian entity. The oil-to-telecom conglomerate plans to use the proceeds of the three tranche issues to retire existing borrowings. The issue was "nearly 3 times oversubscribed with a peak order book aggregating around $11.5 billion," the company said in a statement. This is the largest ever foreign currency bond transaction in India, eclipsing ONGC Videsh Ltd's $2.2 billion US dollar bonds issue of 2014.
Fitch Ratings on Wednesday cut India's growth forecast to 10 per cent for the current fiscal, from 12.8 per cent estimated earlier, due to slowing recovery post second wave of COVID-19, and said rapid vaccination could support a sustainable revival in business and consumer confidence. In a report, the global rating agency said the challenges for banking sector posed by the coronavirus pandemic have increased due to a virulent second wave in the first quarter of the financial year ending March 2022 (FY22). "Fitch Ratings revised down India's real GDP for FY22 by 280bp to 10 per cent, underlining our belief that renewed restrictions have slowed recovery efforts and left banks with a moderately worse outlook for business and revenue generation in FY22," it said. Fitch believes that rapid vaccination could support a sustainable revival in business and consumer confidence; however, without it, economic recovery would remain vulnerable to further waves and lockdowns.
Royal Bank of Scotland and JP Morgan were also fined over attempts to rig currency benchmarks in a year-long probe that has put the largely unregulated $5 trillion-a-day market on a tighter leash, with dozens of dealers suspended or fired.
India's economy is unlikely to see double-digit growth and may grow between 8 per cent and 9 per cent this fiscal year (2021-22, or FY22), against the estimated 11.5 per cent, according to leading economists and rating agencies. The downward revision of growth projections to as low as 10 per cent is mostly on account of stringency in restrictions by states, relatively slow vaccination pace, and the possibility of a third wave of the pandemic. However, they say the impact will not be as severe as the first wave, and expect the first quarter to see positive growth.
'You may see some movement indicating a simpler tax regime with less exemptions but with fewer tax rates making life simpler for taxpayers.'
As the central bank continues to increase forex reserves by running down the forward book which totalled $42 billion as of end-July, signalling its strong resolve to build a bigger reserve cushion to aid its expansionary, unorthodox monetary policy, the reserves are set to top the $655-billion-mark by March, according to a report. The forex kitty declined by $2.10 billion to $619.36 billion for the week to August 13 due to a fall in the core currency assets and gold, showed the latest RBI data. The reserves had risen to a lifetime high of $621.46 billion in the previous reporting week ending August 6.
Given the developments, analysts expect fiscal and monetary support from the government and RBI to revive sentiment. However, recovery, they say, from these levels will be slow and painful.
IndiGo had debt of Rs 3,912 crore at end of the June quarter.
All Sensex components ended in the red. IndusInd Bank was the top loser, followed by Tata Steel, HDFC, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, Infosys and ITC. According to traders, volatility heightened in global markets as US Federal Reserve's interest rate cut stoked concerns over an impending economic recession.
'There is a long-term bull market that commodities will witness. This can take 2-3 years to start. There have been some large moves in foreign exchange. We have seen the pound depreciate by 25 per cent against dollar. We have seen the yen appreciate against the dollar. When the markets start stabilising, these trends will reverse. This will give good trading opportunity. But it is not clear whether any one should do anything yet,' says Robert Morrice, MD, Barclays Wealth.
Investment bankers handling the IPO had said marquee global investors made big-ticket applications.
British Prime Minister Theresa May will be in India tomorrow, but Cyrus Mistry will no longer head the Indo-UK CEO forum.
The government on Wednesday asked the Reserve Bank to maintain retail inflation at 4 per cent with a margin of 2 per cent on either side for another five-year period ending March 2026. To control the price rise, the government in 2016 gave a mandate to the RBI to keep the retail inflation at 4 per cent with a margin of 2 per cent on either side for a five-year period ending March 31, 2021.
S&P Global Ratings on Thursday cut India's growth forecast for the current fiscal to 9.5 per cent, from 11 per cent earlier, and warned of risk to the outlook from further waves of COVID pandemic. The agency lowered the growth outlook saying that a severe second COVID-19 outbreak in April and May led to lockdowns imposed by states and sharp contraction in economic activity. "We forecast growth of 9.5 per cent this fiscal year from our March forecast of 11 per cent," S&P said.
Financial services major Citigroup's top executive Tom King is leaving the company after 20 years of service and is likely to join Barclays Plc, a media report said.
An immediate RBI rate cut will lower lending rates for banks' MSME/retail/mortgage loans before the 'busy' industrial season ends in March.
Pegging the cost of the covid-19 lockdown at USD 120 billion (approximately Rs 9 lakh crores) or 4 per cent of the GDP, analysts on Wednesday sharply cut their growth estimates and stressed on the need to announce an economic package. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which is scheduled to announce its first bi-monthly policy review on April 3, is set to deliver a deep rate cuts and it should also be assumed that the fiscal deficit targets will be breached, analysts said.
Fitch Ratings has cut India's economic growth forecast to 8.7 per cent for the current fiscal but raised GDP growth projection for FY23 to 10 per cent, saying the second COVID-19 wave delayed rather than derail the economic recovery. In its APAC Sovereign Credit Overview, Fitch Ratings said India's 'BBB-/Negative' sovereign rating "balances a still-strong medium-term growth outlook and external resilience from solid foreign- reserve buffers, against high public debt, a weak financial sector and some lagging structural factors". The 'Negative' outlook, it said, reflects uncertainty over the debt trajectory following the sharp deterioration in India's public finances due to the pandemic shock.
Oil prices have already fallen over 70 per cent since the downturn began in mid-2014.
Barclays had been found guilty of submitting false information that had the effect of manipulating the calculation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which is the interest rate at which banks are ready to lend to other banks.
Many analysts over the past week have said the RBI has legroom to cut rates to the tune of 65 bps by June and some like Barclays and BofA have also spoken about the likelihood of an inter-meeting cut.
Bank of America (BofA) Securities expects India to be the third-largest economy in the world by 2031. The economic rise could become a reality by 2028, but the Covid pandemic delayed the pace, BofA Securities economists Indranil Sen Gupta and Aastha Gudwani wrote in a report.
HSBC's purchasing managers' index was released on Tuesday.
Today, they can't meet even the piffling capital norm set by Mint Road - Rs 5 crore for partnerships and Rs 10 crore for public and private firms in this line of business. Bulk of the trades are put through e-platform offerings of Reuters, Bloomberg, JPMorgan, Barclays or Deutsche Bank. And they have the web-based FXall, FXconnect, Atriax, Hotspotfx and LavaFX for company.
Bhavtosh Vajpayee, managing director and head of the Indian equities business at Barclays, the London-headquartered multinational banking and financial services company, tells Business Standard it is still too early to predict an economic recovery.
Insufficient rainfall will have a negative impact on the economy.
The 30-share Sensex ended down 112 points at 20,112 and the 50-share Nifty closed 43 points lower at 6,114.
TCS is expected to report a 5 per cent QoQ (USD) growth in revenues, highest in our coverage, while Wipro's IT Services revenue growth could be closer to 1.1 per cent QoQ (USD terms)."
Leading brokerages Nomura and Barclays on said current account deficit, which unexpectedly improved to 4.8 per cent in 2012-13, but still at a historic high, could moderate further this fiscal on slowing gold imports and cheaper commodities.
'While most companies were bullish before the second wave of double-digit sales growth in FY22, that may not be the case now.'
© 2026 Rediff.com - Investor Information - Advertise with us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy - Sitemap - Feedback - About us - Terms of use - Grievances