jonathan: good -- guy: good morning. another surprise rate cut from china. governor rajan delivering the cuts following the latest modi budget. francine: standard chartered posts a 30% drop in full-year profits. jonathan:guy: reports suggest that rbs and barclays are looking to accelerate their exit from investment banking with thousands of job cuts expected. good morning. welcome. you are watching "the pulse." i'm guy johnson. francine: and i'm francine

lacqua. banks are in focus today. standard chartered posted a 30% drop in full-year profit. guy: anna edwards, what did the bank have to say? >> very interesting what the bank is saying right now. the bank has no plans to raise capital, saying they start with very strong capital and that could be one of the reasons we are seeing a little enthusiasm for the stock. there have been questions raised by investors as to whether one of the things the new management team might need to do is raise capital. the stock is up as you can see by 5.3%. what else they told us was that the pretax profit for the full-year came in below estimates. $4.24 billion in pretax profit. the estimate had been $5.58 billion. some of the phrases they are using to describe 2014, a tough year a perfect storm. two years of declining profits

under peter sands on the back of this asia-focused business really having to cope with slowdown in asian economies. they are taking some action on cost. the bonus pool is down by 9%. the board of directors are not taking variable compensation. they planned to take out $1.8 billion of cost over the next three years. clearly, the current ceo saying they are on track to meet their cost-saving target. they plan to cut staff by 2000 in 2015. a lot of the noises are about taking cost out of the business. francine: what is expected from the new ceo, bill winters? >> he joins a little bit later on this year. spring into summer. peter sands was there for eight years, but the last two years, he had overseen a business recording a decline in profitability. a turnaround expected from this man.

the chairman of standard chartered saying this bank is extremely fortunate to have bill winters. he is a former colleague of jamie dimon at j.p. morgan. it is not just that peter sands is out, we've had a various -- a pretty big change in various high-level positions. this might mean that bill winters is able to reshape the strategy at the company. crucially, some investors are pointing to his credibility with regulators. apparently, he comes with some political mouth which is pretty important in the current regulatory environment. standard chartered rubbed the wrong way against u.s. regulators in its dealings with iran. that story might not be entirely in the past. interesting to me is what bill winters has been doing since 2009. he's been writing government-sponsored reports on the u.k. financial system and

working with the bank of england on that. he has a lot of experience in dealing with regulators. perhaps he can play a little politics. that seems increasingly important. francine: thank you so much, anna edwards. guy: let's stay with the banks. u.s. prosecutors have asked barclays to provide more information related to an electronic trading platform that allows traders to take a "last look at in order before executing it there go let's bring in -- before executing it." explain why they are concerned about it. guest: it is a thing called last look. it is not just barclays that have got this. it is essentially a legacy thing. it used to take a while to take an order and execute it. it allows the bank to say, markets went haywire we can't honor that trade. this is still in place.

the suggestion is that regulators in the u.s. are looking at this last look, which is an opportunity for banks to back out of a trade to see whether there is anything untoward about it, whether banks are using it to rip off their clients. that is the allegation. francine: we had this affects probe which you broke at bloomberg. how does that fit in? what exactly -- is this just an investigation to see if there is any wrongdoing? are the banks being accused of anything? guest: there's no allegation as yet. if banks are in a position to have this last look feature and they are using it, it doesn't sound like there's anything intrinsically wrong with that. but the regulators in the u.s. the new york financial services regulator has said that there is smoke here, not necessarily fire. they are concerned. i guess it is an unusual feature

of banking. you can agree a deal with your client and if markets move against you, you can back out. guy: it does sound like a house buying experience. how would you abuse it? guest: i think one of the allegations would be that you could potentially enter into trades you had no intention of executing. and then you deliberately back out of those trades. by that stage, you've got some knowledge may be of what the flow is in the market. the other could be that maybe contractually it is not permitted within the current laws. at a time when we are redressing all the myriad ways in which the foreign exchange market may be unfair, this is one of those ways. those questions are still to be answered. francine: at the moment, they asked barclays for more

information, but there's no need to believe this would be widened out to more banks, right? guest: this is part of a much broader investigation. last year, we had some fines issued by the u.k. regulators. they were focused on a specific allegation of the rigging and manipulation of financial benchmarks. since the banks and regulators started looking into that, they found other aspects of the foreign exchange market are potentially troubling. the department of justice, they seem to have taken a much broader read. things like sales desks and whether they are taking information from within the bank and passing on information to their favorite clients in exchange for business, or whether sales desks are adding on something called hard markup where the trader does the light is certain price, and he goes to the company and says, i executed it at 20 basis points more. things like that, which are

features of this market because it is over-the-counter and is not regulated in the same way as equities. francine: thank you so much. liam, one of the reporters that broke the fx libor scandals. guy: and not done yet by the sounds of things. we've got breaking news coming from ukraine. we had an explosion at a mine in the donetsk region. let's go live to ryan chilcote in eastern ukraine. around 100 kilometers east of donetsk. what is the latest on this? ryan: 32 dead, more missing, at least five injured. it just speaks to the danger of working in these mines. a lot of these mines have regular explosions. this very same mine had an accident in 2007 in which 63 people were killed.

they've become even more dangerous since the conflict began between the separatists and the ukrainian government. electricity has been disrupted. you are not getting proper ventilation in the lines. some of the lines have been partially flooded. to make matters worse, this is called lining country. -- coal mining country. they are down there in the lines, bringing coal to the service. because the railroad lines have been blown up, they can't sell the coal, so they are not getting paid their salary. i'm at a different mine right now and they haven't been paid since december. they only get $90 a month at that. they only got 40% of their paycheck. francine: ryan, thank you so much. ryan chilcote bringing us updates throughout the day. coming up, rajan cuts rates.

india's central bank lowers interest rate. guy: that brings us to today's twitter question. if the world had one central bank setting policy for a global economy what policy would it be adopting right now? plenty of central banks cutting rates, but the fed could be about to raise rates. where does that leave us? ♪