The Traderszone Network

The bank’s trading business, like those of its main rivals, got a boost in the quarter after the Swiss central bank scrapped a cap on the franc, the European Central Bank announced its quantitative easing program and the U.S. Federal Reserve took steps toward tightening monetary policy. Morgan Stanley capped a mostly strong quarter for the big U.S. banks with its 60 percent rise in net profit, followed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc, whose profit jumped 41 percent.

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It was the 12th straight quarter that the Armonk, New York-based company reported a drop in quarterly revenue, including the effects of currency. IBM’s revenue has been shrinking for three years now as the company sheds low-profit businesses such as cash registers, low-end servers and semiconductors and focuses on emerging areas such as security software and cloud services, but the new businesses have so far failed to make up for revenue lost to divestitures. IBM did say that it has generated $7.7 billion in total cloud revenue over the past 12 months, up sharply from the year before.

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The talks with Wells Fargo underscore GE’s urgency in looking to dismantle its GE Capital business and free itself from the financial regulatory pressures that come with it. GE earlier this month unveiled plans to exit the bulk of GE Capital over the next few years to focus more on industrial manufacturing. Chief Financial Officer Jeff Bornstein told analysts on the company’s quarterly conference call last week that GE was seeing “incredible” interest in the GE Capital assets.

Asian stocks were firm on Tuesday after China’s latest step to prop up its faltering economy lifted global equities, while the euro was pressured on growing worries a cash-strapped Greece may default on its debt. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was up 0.3 percent, with the dollar’s gains against some Asian currencies offsetting a rise in stock prices in local currency terms. China’s central bank on Sunday cut the amount of cash banks must hold as reserves in its latest attempt to spur lending and combat a slowing economy.

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China will switch to a “registration system” for initial public offerings (IPO), ending the current approval process, the official China Securities Journal reported on Tuesday, a day after parliament began reviewing draft changes to the Securities Law. A registration system – used in mature markets such as the United States, where the market decides who gets to list, when, and for how much – will obviate the China Securities Regulatory Commission’s (CSRC) role as the approval agency, industry sources say, and leave companies to register with stock exchanges to float shares.

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The chief executive of BlackRock Inc (BLK.N), the world’s largest money manager, said on Tuesday that China will need to continue to reform its capital markets to avert what he called boom and bust scenarios. “It is our strong belief that China needs more robust capital markets,” CEO Larry Fink said at a Credit Suisse conference in Singapore. “And by having a more robust capital market, it will mean we’ll have less boom bust. “China needs to expand its capital markets.

The United States and Japan have made significant progress in trade talks over recent days, adding momentum to multilateral efforts toward a free-trade pact, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said early on Tuesday. The two sides narrowed their gaps substantially in the bilateral discussions, Froman told reporters after two days of talks with Economy Minister Akira Amari, following senior working-level discussions last week. The bilateral deal between the two nations is vital to the success of a 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact.

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