Euro Bank Stock Free Fall; Student Loan Hardball

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HSBC buyback: HSBC said it plans to buy back $2.5 billion of its stock despite a 40% drop in net income in the second quarter. The recently announced sale of its Brazilian until will help pay for the buyback. Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times

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European bank equity rout continues: European bank stocks extended their poor 2016 performance into August, losing nearly 5% yesterday on top of Monday's almost 3% drop. The Euro Stoxx Banks Index is down nearly 35% this year.

"A loss of confidence in the ability of European banks to increase earnings against a backdrop of negative interest rates and a tepid economy has ravaged share prices … and dented a European equity market that investors had held high hopes for in 2016," the Financial Times reports.

Separately, the Wall Street Journal says that Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank have been removed from the Stoxx Europe 50, one of the euro zone's benchmark equity indexes, because their market capitalization no longer meets its criteria.

Both banks have lost almost half their value this year, compared with about a 9% decline for the full index. Companies are removed from the index if their market cap falls below 75th place on a list of the region's largest listed companies for two months in a row.

Wall Street Journal

What's the best way to pay? If you said a chip card, you're wasting your time — literally. Chip card transactions take twice as long as swipes and mobile payments, an average 13 seconds versus six for the latter two. "Mobile payments like Apple Pay are the real answer," says the writer.

Finer details: Federal regulators are asking big banks to provide more information about their trading businesses, including revenue breakouts from individual products like bonds, stocks, commodities and more exotic instruments, rather than lumping them together like they do now.

So far communications between the SEC and the banks have been informal and preliminary, but the agency could soon send comment letters to the biggest trading firms in the coming months.

Student loan crisis grows: The number of borrowers in long-term default of their student loans continues to grow even as the U.S. government is getting more aggressive in its collection tactics.

Borrowers who haven't made a payment in at least a year constitute about 16% of the roughly 43 million Americans with student debt and $125 billion of the $1.3 trillion loans outstanding.

Despite rumors that Washington is considering debt forgiveness as an election ploy, it's instead playing hardball: The government garnished $515 million in borrowers' wages in the nine months through March, according to government figures.

New York Times

Who's afraid of the big, bad bank? Large commercial banks are trying new ways to convince consumers they're not as evil as politicians paint them.

Citigroup, for example, the sole banking sponsor of the Summer Olympics and Paralympics, is tying its sponsorship to its role in fueling the global economy. It plans to run an ad highlighting its roles in rebuilding Europe after World War II and the construction of the Panama Canal.

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