Bloomberg Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann said the bar should be high for government funds being used in a rescue of Italian lender Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA. Government funds are intended as a “last resort,” Weidmann said in an interview with German newspaper Bild, with the banker adding that planned measures by the Italian government should only ...

  Reuters European shares were steady with the focus on lenders after Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse settled mortgage securities fraud suits in the United States, and Italy’s Monte dei Paschi agreed to a bailout. The STOXX Europe 600 was flat at its close and unchanged for the week, but the index still on track for its best month since ...

  TEHRAN / AP At money changers across Tehran, shouting voices accompany each change of the signboards out front showing the value of the Iranian rial, which slips ever lower against the US dollar. This week saw Iran’s currency fall to 41,600 rials to $1, its lowest point ever. While making Iranian exports more attractive to the world market in ...

  Bloomberg China promoted Yin Yong to deputy governor of the central bank from assistant governor and named Liu Guoqiang as an assistant governor of the monetary authority. People’s Bank of China Deputy Governor Guo Qingping and assistant governor Yang Ziqiang will step down, according to a statement on the State Council’s website without giving further details. Yin worked for ...

  Vienna / DPA Music comes to Alma Deutscher when she dreams. “I sometimes get a melody in the middle of the night. Then I wake up and I sneak out of bed and I write it down in my notebook,” the British girl says. Like many 11-year-olds, Alma also has a vivid imagination when she is awake, but unlike ...

  Puerto Barra / AFP Forced from their ancestral forests by the arrival of big agriculture in eastern Paraguay, the Ache people gave up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that had sustained them for centuries. Now they have taken up farming themselves — and they want their old land back. The Ache’s homeland was remade in the 1970s by the mass arrival ...

  Reuters Banking shares boosted Saudi Arabia’s stock index on Tuesday to its highest level this year, while other Gulf markets moved little in quiet trade with some foreign investors absent for New Year holidays. The Saudi index closed up 1.3 percent at 7,257 points in its highest trading volume for two weeks, rising above technical resistance at this year’s ...

  London / AFP A plunge in the share price of Toshiba over a possible write-down and the bailout of one of Italy’s top banks were the biggest ripples in otherwise placid trading on Tuesday. “Markets are calm, as thin holiday volumes are in play,” said market analyst Ipek Ozkardeskaya at London Capital Group. However a 12 percent meltdown in ...

  Bloomberg After pulling off the biggest oil-market deal in a decade, OPEC faces a new balancing act in 2017: boosting prices without igniting shale. The first shale boom spurred a global supply glut that started prices sliding in mid-2014, and was amplified that November by a pump-at-will OPEC strategy aimed at market dominance. During the ensuing rout, prices in ...

  SINGAPORE / Reuters Egyptian General Petroleum Corp (EGPC) is seeking up to 178,000 tonnes of gasoil for delivery in January, a tender document showed on Tuesday. The state-owned company is seeking two cargoes of 30,000 to 33,000 tonnes each of 0.1 percent sulphur gasoil for delivery into Alexandria or El Dekheila ports over Jan 11 to 13 and Jan ...