Finance

NEW YORK (Capital Markets in Africa) -# The Trump administration has announced new steps to speed up testing for the coronavirus, after widespread warnings about a bottleneck in diagnosing cases that’s failing to provide a clear snapshot of the pandemic’s U.S. footprint. The Food and Drug Administration announced it had approved the first rounds of high-volume testing, as well as allowing New York state to authorize labs to expand testing on their own. The Trump…

NAIROBI (Capital Markets in Africa) – KCB Group Ltd., Kenya’s second-biggest bank by market value, is betting on recovering bad loans and issuing more credit to boost profit by at least 12% this year, Chief Executive Officer Joshua Oigara said. The lender’s 2019 earnings were dampened by a tripling in loan loss provisions, weighed down chiefly from souring mobile phone-based loans. Total non-performing loans jumped by 90%, the lender said on Thursday, while reporting full-year…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – A combination of President Donald Trump’s unprecedented travel restrictions between the U.S. and Europe and underwhelming stimulus measures sparked a fresh exodus from risk assets in global financial markets Thursday. The rush to gauge the impact on the global economy and corporate earnings, a sense of disappointment at the lack of detail in the U.S. stimulus package and an impression that Washington has fallen behind the curve in its…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – A judicial inquiry in South Africa recommended sweeping changes to laws governing Africa’s biggest fund manager after it found senior management, including former Chief Executive Officer Dan Matjila, flouted internal procedures. The investigation, led by retired Judge Lex Mpati, concluded there had been “substantial impropriety” at the state-owned Public Investment Corp., which manages 2.13 trillion rand ($130 billion) of state-employee pension funds. It found that the board had acted as a…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Market in Africa) – Moody’s Investors Service downgraded South Africa’s Sasol Ltd.to junk, citing high debt and cost overruns at its Lake Charles chemical project in Louisiana. The ratings company cut its assessment on Sasol’s long-term rating to Ba1, from Baa3, with a stable outlook, it said in a statement on Thursday. “The decision to downgrade the ratings to Ba1 reflects Moody’s view that Sasol’s financial leverage will remain elevated over the next two…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – Investors are chasing South African dollar bonds as the flight to safety sparked by the spread of the coronavirus eclipses the country’s idiosyncratic risks, including a key budget this week and the possibility of a credit downgrade to junk soon after. While the rand and local-currency bonds lost ground on Monday amid a global risk selloff, yields on South Africa’s hard-currency bonds held near multi-month lows, tracking the plunge in U.S. Treasury rates as investors…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – The Trump administration is poised to argue before the Supreme Court that victims of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi should be compensated by Sudan, which at that time harboured the attack’s plotters, Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda members. In a session scheduled for Monday, President Donald Trump’s solicitor general will add the weight of the federal government to the civil suit brought by the families of…