Wednesday Papers: Risk rally ebbs on US economy worries - other news

Financial Times

* The FTSE All-World equity index was up 1.6 per cent; FTSE 100 closed up 2.9 per cent at 4965; Wall Street closed up 0.5 per cent; the FTSE Asia-Pacific index climbed 1.4 per cent while the Nikkei 225 rose 0.8 per cent; Shanghai and Hong Kong added 1.9 per cent and 1.2 per cent respectively.

* The US justice department has informed several HSBC customers that they are the subjects of an investigation into potential tax evasion, sources said.

* Analysts are predicting that many European banks will see a drop of 50 per cent year on year in sales, trading and advisory revenues from April to June.

* Denmark’s banks are frantically lobbying European regulators to avert proposed funding rules in the Basel III template for global bank regulation that threaten the structure of the Danish mortgage market.

* Agricultural Bank of China is set to raise up to $22.1bn in the world’s biggest initial public offering.

* German industrial orders rose 2.8 per cent in April compared with the previous month and were almost 30 per cent higher than a year before.

* Bulgaria ‘is no longer interested’ in a project to build an oil pipeline from the Black Sea to the Aegean following the environmental damage caused by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to Boyko Borissov, prime minister.

* Eurozone market interest rates headed higher on Tuesday as European Central Bank operations drained excess liquidity from the financial system.

* Chinese investors bought up a net Y541bn ($6.2bn) in Japanese government bonds in the first four months of the year, amid ongoing global concerns about Europe’s debt woes.

* European commercial banks have begun using their holdings of gold to raise cash with the Bank for International Settlements; the BIS took 346 tonnes of gold in exchange for foreign currency in “swap operations” in the financial year to March 31.

* Barcelona, the Spanish football giants, are seeking a €150m loan to help pay player and staff wages.