Zimbabwe Restarts Minting of Gold Coins as Bullion Prices Soar to Record
Zimbabwe's central bank is again issuing gold coins it scrapped 10 months ago, a step it took to ramp up the bullion stockpile used to back up the local currency, the ZiG.
Minting of the so-called 'Mosi-Oa-Tunya' 22-carat coins, named after the iconic Victoria Falls, was scrapped in July, central bank Governor John Mushayavanhu told Bloomberg in an interview at the time.
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Bloomberg
43 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Adapt or else? How the sell-side is adjusting to new risks
Among examples, Allright says, are market risk and credit risk capital requirements under the Basel framework. The proposal by the Basel Committee to strengthen banks' resilience to risks was written in 2019, but its introduction has been pushed back repeatedly since then. Banks are unsure when, or even if, they should invest in complying with the rule. There is also a trade-off to be considered – which other compliance project must be deprioritized to provide financial headroom for any new rules? 'Uncertainty of when, or if, a regulation is required adds a risk to a bank, who have to make a decision on how to invest engineering resources to meet regulations,' says Allright. Technology risks Technology itself is adding risks to banking operations. As Bloomberg's Global Head of Sell-Side Product Phil McCabe explained earlier in this report, the advent of electronic trading and automation has compressed investors' fees, hastening the diversification of their portfolios into new markets as they search of better returns. This has brought liquidity to once niche asset classes such as crypto, private equity and structured products Moving into new markets requires investment to develop new complex pricing models and deploy techniques to clean and smooth data. These costs can increase further when there is a requirement to provide portfolio level analytics in a timely manner. Search for innovative solutions Focusing on data and its increasing significance in banking operations: consistent datasets, particularly when used for pricing financial securities, provide banks with reliable informational bases for assessing and addressing emerging risks. Additionally, APIs facilitate connectivity to software and modeling tools, enabling banks to effectively utilise the expanding data pools accumulated by the sell-side on a daily basis. However, as the sophistication of data uses grows, many banks are unlikely to have necessary capabilities in-house to smooth curves and clean data sources as well as accumulate all data sets in a timely fashion, and so they increasingly need to turn to data- and technology-specialist vendors. Mitigation technology Sell-side organizations must consider how to achieve technological transformation to address new risk profiles. Building capacity is one option, but it is costly and requires ongoing updates. This strategy may be impractical if the organization's tech stack is fragmented, and systems are poorly connected. As the speed of technological change and the cost of implementation rise, it has become prudent for banks to outsource these operations. A key to meeting the challenges of the new regulatory landscape is access to consistent data sets and pricing models, says Allright. 'What you [as a bank] don't want to have is a risk solution at the top of the house that's different from a solution that the traders are utilizing, because it's likely they will be looking at different numbers,' he says. In organisations with siloed tech stacks, end users such as traders and compliance professionals, may not be working from single source of truth dataset, or a golden source of their enterprise intelligence. This becomes challenging when different departments may have to report to different regulators with different data sets. Having access to consistent data and pricing models ensures banks can satisfy modern reporting rules because regulators require data transparency and accurate pricing models that can justify the claims and assumptions built into disclosures. An additional reason to seek external support is the ability to connect to data and models in structures such as clouds and APIs, which allows for secure integration of external and internal data and provides organizations with a comprehensive view of their risk exposures. It is of great importance to banks to bring huge volumes of quality data into their systems ready for analysis and querying, says Allright. To that end, Bloomberg has developed tools and technology that allows -banks to access software and infrastructure through the cloud and APIs without the need to for large capital outlays. For instance, Bloomberg's Web Services technology delivers lightweight, industry-standard APIs. These APIs provide banks with flexible access to Bloomberg's software and infrastructure without requiring significant capital investment. 'A lot of investment in the past has gone into hardware on site, but these are machines that are not as flexible and scalable as we move into a new cloud-based computing world,' Allright says. 'We see clients trying to access our set of APIs rather than buy in a fixed product that sits on their desktop because they want to utilize the data and manage the data in different ways increasing deploying their own artificial intelligence – they want to commingle it with their data and create their own IP.'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Mexico Remittances Plunge as Trump Cracks Down on Migrants
(Bloomberg) -- Remittances sent to Mexico fell 12% in April from a year prior, registering the largest annual drop in more than a decade as US lawmakers mull taxing the transfers and Donald Trump's administration toughens its rhetoric against migrants. Billionaire Steve Cohen Wants NY to Expand Taxpayer-Backed Ferry Where the Wild Children's Museums Are The Economic Benefits of Paying Workers to Move Now With Colorful Blocks, Tirana's Pyramid Represents a Changing Albania At London's New Design Museum, Visitors Get Hands-On Access Central bank data released Monday showed that remittances received by Mexico fell to $4.76 billion in April, well below the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey and down from $5.42 billion in the same month in 2024. In March, remittances reached $5.14 billion. The annual decline is the largest since September 2012 and is likely attributable to a deteriorating US labor market and increasing fears of deportation among immigrants in the workforce, said Gabriela Siller, director of economic analysis at Grupo Financiero Base. 'This was due to the fact that migrants in the United States are afraid to go out to work and send remittances because they could be deported,' she said. A prolonged plunge could impact consumption and growth in Latin America's second-largest economy, which depends heavily on transfers from the US, Siller added. Mexico received nearly $65 billion in remittances in 2024, representing about 3.5% of gross domestic product, Finance Minister Edgar Amador said during a press conference last month. In the first quarter, 97% of its remittances came from the US, according to central bank data. Mexico's economy narrowly avoided entering a recession during the first three months of 2025, and the central bank reduced its growth estimate for the year to 0.1%, from 0.6% previously, in a quarterly inflation report released last week. US lawmakers are currently considering a 3.5% levy on remittances sent out of the country by non-citizens, an idea Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum's government has rejected as double taxation. Changes to the US labor market and wages for low-skilled workers pose key risks to remittances going forward, Alberto Ramos, chief Latin America economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said in a note to clients. 'The tightening of US immigration policies, and measures to reduce the flow of illicit drugs and money laundering may also impact the flow of remittances to Mexico,' he said. YouTube Is Swallowing TV Whole, and It's Coming for the Sitcom Millions of Americans Are Obsessed With This Japanese Barbecue Sauce Mark Zuckerberg Loves MAGA Now. Will MAGA Ever Love Him Back? Trump Considers Deporting Migrants to Rwanda After the UK Decides Not To Will Small Business Owners Knock Down Trump's Mighty Tariffs? ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Investors don't think the safest bonds of all are a sure thing anymore
With deficit concerns swirling, the market for the safest government bonds has been volatile. Bloomberg reported on Monday that top fixed income firms are staging a "buyers' strike." Investors are hesitant to buy bonds with long maturities amid doubts about the US fiscal position. A corner of the ultra-safe US Treasury market is losing its shine amid concerns about America's long-term fiscal health. It's an increasingly worrisome situation given the importance of Treasurys as a component of long-term portfolios for millions of Americans, as well as their role as an investment safe haven during times of turbulence. The market for US bonds with the longest maturities has seen a pronounced slowdown in the last few weeks. Bloomberg wrote on Monday that top fixed income firms, including Pimco and Jeffrey Gundlach's DoubleLine Capital, have been staging a "buyers' strike" of 30-year debt in favor of shorter-dated bonds. This embedded content is not available in your region. It continues a trend of investors balking at the idea of essentially lending the US government money for decades. A weak auction of 20-year bonds last month saw tepid demand, resulting in the highest yield on the bond since 2020. Pimco was already whittling its exposure to longer-dated bonds, it wrote at the end of 2024. "We have been reducing allocations to longer-dated bonds, which we find relatively less attractive. Over time, and at scale, that's the kind of investor behavior that can fulfill the bond vigilante role of disciplining governments by demanding more compensation," the bond firm wrote at the time, adding it was seeing better risk-reward in bonds with shorter maturities. Indeed, the bond vigilantes that Pimco hinted at have been credited with sending yields higher this year amid trade war and deficit angst. And more recently, KKR warned that investors shouldn't count on government debt to be the "shock absorbers" that they've relied on to shield them from volatility in the past. In fact, the market for the debt has been so volatile that it's possible the US Treasury could reduce or even cancel future sales of 30-year bonds to stabilize yields, JPMorgan Asset Management's fixed income head, Bob Michele, said in a TV interview last week. Michele added that the 10-year and 30-year bonds are trading more like risk assets. "I'm concerned it's going to get worse before it gets better," Michele said of the bond market volatility. The next auction of 30-year bonds is scheduled for June 12. The 30-year yield is back below 5% this week after climbing above that threshold to the highest level since 2008 in May. However, the concerns that drove yields up haven't abated. America's fiscal position is still an issue, and the GOP budget bill that passed through the House of Representatives in May could add trillions to the national deficit. Meanwhile, the US is now without a top-tier credit rating after Moody's downgraded its government debt in May. "We have witnessed what can happen with interest rates if investors are concerned about the fiscal health of an economy," Verdence Capital Advisors CIO, Megan Horneman, said in a recent note. "It is important to remember that long-term rates are tied to net interest costs and many loans, especially mortgages." She added that the coming 30-year auction would be highly important. But it's not just the US that's seeing investors demand more compensation to hold long-term debt. Governments around the world are seeing yields spiral higher while investors protest heavy government spending and a rapid pace of borrowing. Read the original article on Business Insider
