SWISS BANK CHIEF BREAKS SILENCE - There was no regulatory breach at the Swiss National Bank last year, according to its president Phillipp Hildebrand.
He rejected calls to resign yesterday afternoon over a scandal involving currency transactions by his wife Kaysha, who bought US dollars just prior to a move by the SNB last summer to devalue the Swiss franc. She then sold them at a profit - a very embarrassing revelation for her husband who is under fire over the issue.
Haig Simonian of the Financial Times said Mr Hildebrand did a good job yesterday in explaining what had happened - expressing regret and providing adequate information.
He said it also emerged that the SNB chief and his wife, a former currency trader, had conversations about currency movements.
The FT journalist said it was not surprising that "extraordinary gyrations" on currency markets last year would have been a conversation topic, but it was odd that a woman married to the head of a central bank of a country centrally involved did not think twice before the transaction.
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NEWS IN BRIEF - The euro has been back under pressure and overnight fell to a 16-month low of $1.2760 against the US dollar. It is currently trading at $1.2790 and 82.5p sterling.
PwC has been hit by the largest fine ever imposed on an accounting firm in the UK.
It was given a fine of £1.4m after it failed to notice that JPMorgan Chase - the US investment bank to which PwC was acting as auditor - was intermingling $23 billion of client funds with its own cash.
That potentially and illegally put client money at risk, although in the event no loss occurred. For its part JPMorgan, was fined £33m for the regulatory breach.
