VENTURE CAPITAL POST

Every day hundreds of garment traders alight at the newly-built Humen station to ply their wares in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, arriving on high speed trains that whoosh through the terminal every ten minutes.

HSBC (HSBA.L) pledged a new era of higher dividends on Tuesday, laying out plans to slash nearly one in five jobs and shrink its investment bank by a third to combat sluggish growth across its sprawling empire.

China's factories struggled to expand in May despite recent interest rate cuts and other policy stimulus, a Reuters poll showed, suggesting the government may have to do more to halt a protracted slowdown in the economy.

China's factories suffered their fastest drop in activity in a year in April as new orders shrank, a private business survey showed on Monday, hardening the case for fresh stimulus measures to halt a slowdown in the world's second-largest economy.

HSBC Holdings (HSBA.L), Europe's biggest bank, said it has started a review of whether to move its headquarters out of Britain following regulatory and structural changes in the industry.

Standard Chartered remains committed to Islamic banking and expects growth in its core markets, a spokesman for the lender said on Sunday, after the head of its Islamic arm departed.

Crude prices rose as much as 6 percent on Thursday after Saudi Arabia and its allies launched air strikes on Yemen, pushing shares lower in Europe, the Middle East and Asia and lifting oil producers' currencies.

Brent crude reversed early losses to trade back towards $57 a barrel on Tuesday, as a weaker dollar overshadowed signs of slowing growth in China and Saudi Arabian oil production close to an all-time high.

HSBC Global Asset Management, an arm of HSBC Holdings (HSBA.L), is buying bonds of commodity exporting countries because their valuations have dropped so far with the plunge of oil prices, an executive said.

A subsidiary of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's Grupo Financiero Inbursa (GFINBURO.MX) bank has entered two loan agreements for nearly $700 million, pledging America Movil stock as collateral, according to a filing published on Thursday.

The largest U.S. banks and their foreign rivals are facing a tough two-step check-up of their financial health by the Federal Reserve, forcing the firms to get a far better grip on how they measure risk.

European shares clung to seven-year highs on Monday, lifted by merger activity in the telecoms sector, while Asian stocks edged up after China cut interest rates at the weekend.

Greek funding and quantitative easing in Europe, an expected rate cut in Australia and the buoyant U.S. labor market are set to be the focus of an economic week dominated by a host of central bank meetings.

Hours after China's central bank cut interest rates to battle slowing growth and rising deflationary risk, an official survey showed on Sunday that activity in China's factory sector contracted for a second straight month in February.

HSBC (HSBA.L), in the spotlight after details emerged about how its Swiss unit allegedly helped clients dodge taxes, isn't the troublemaker it is currently depicted as, the head of a rival private bank was quoted saying on Saturday.