Weekly Global News Wrap Up: World's shadow banks expand; US Senate banking bill clears procedural hurdle

And France rejects UK bid to include banks in EU trade deal.

From Reuters: Growth in global bond, real estate and money market funds continued to swell the world’s “shadow banking” sector, a watchdog that coordinates financial regulation for the G20 big economies said on Monday. The Financial Stability Board said its “narrow” measure of shadow banking activities that could pose a threat to stability, rose 7.6 percent to $45.2 trillion in 2016, the latest year for which figures have been collated.

From AP via CNBC: A Senate effort to relax certain banking regulations has cleared an early procedural hurdle with enough support from Democrats to show the bill has a good chance of passage. The vote of 67-32 allows the Senate to begin debating a bill that would scale back certain provisions of the 2010 law known as Dodd-Frank.

From Bloomberg: U.K. Chancellor Philip Hammond is heading for a showdown with his French counterpart over whether financial services can be part of a free-trade deal with the European Union after Brexit. Hammond told lawmakers on Monday that a fair and appealing agreement would have to include services, and is expected to make the same argument in a keynote speech on Brexit on Wednesday. It’s in nobody’s interest to break up London’s financial services sector, which “simply can’t be relocated or replicated,” Hammond told Parliament’s Brexit scrutiny committee. But French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire, who is trying to attract banks to Paris after Brexit and will meet Hammond on Tuesday in London, rejected the chancellor’s position.