Fed up by the bureaucracy in their own country, a group of 30 fishermen from north-eastern China have now filed a lawsuit against ConocoPhillips in a U.S.-based federal court, reported the Associated Press on Monday, in the hopes of claiming compensation for two oil spills last year.
The European Union seems to be a step closer to resolving its 30-month long crisis after its leaders agreed on plans to stabilise the region’s troubled banks. However, markets are increasingly impatient for a major market boost and central banks might be forced to act with the imminent global market slowdown.
Bank chiefs found responsible for the collapse of their financial institutions should not be “allowed back into the industry again,” said the chairman of the U.K. Financial Services Authority (FSA) on Sunday, in the wake of new rate-fixing allegations that have engulfed Barclays and other banks.
Here are some highlights of the deals, and unbroken deadlocks, after the first day of the EU summit in Brussels: The 20th round of emergency crisis talks led by eurozone finance ministers and regulators.
After 13 hours of talks, EU leaders yesterday agreed to step up their rescue plans, promising more help for weaker euro economies such as Spain and Italy while expediting the financial integration of the euro bloc.
The U.S.’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis has led to widespread hope that America has the capacity to stay the course and provide a backstop for the rest of the world in the midst of the euro crisis. But a closer analysis of America’s recent economic growth suggests that the economy may be even more vulnerable to foreign crises than before.
Both Italy and Spain are refusing to back a 120 billion euro ($149 billion) European Union growth package, wrote numerous reports emanating from the EU Summit in Brussels on Thursday, with the two countries threatening to block “everything” unless they received immediate eurozone aid to bring down their borrowing costs.
The Bank of China opened its first bank branch in Taipei yesterday to much media fanfare as decades of tension cool. China’s third largest bank has a global banking network, but it is the first time that any mainland Chinese bank has received approval from Taiwan’s financial regulators for commercial banking licenses.
With the aim of forging closer ties with Taiwan, Bank of China yesterday became the first Chinese lender to set up a branch in Taiwan, with the opening ceremony attended by Taiwanese officials and top banking executives.
A new WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement would benefit all by increasing developing countries’ capacity to trade, strengthening the WTO’s development mandate, and boosting global economic growth. Indeed, such an agreement could be a down payment on WTO members’ commitment to linking trade and development.
Since 2003, Turkey has long fretted whether a sovereign Kurdistan could lead to social unrest within its own borders – especially given Turkey’s native Kurd population. Yet with Ankara’s recent announcement of a series of bilateral deals with the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, everyone’s first question now is why would Turkey want to align itself with an Iraqi Kurdish leadership that is clearly making a play to create a sovereign Kurdish state?
Eurobonds will be back on the agenda as European leaders gather for a crisis summit later this week, but Germany, who has always been critical of the proposal, has once again taken the hard-line stance with Chancellor Angela Merkel declaring that Europe would not share total debt liability “as long as I live”.
