Chinese Premier Li Keqiang pledged on Monday to build trust with India and declared that ties between the Asian giants were key to world peace as he visited New Delhi only weeks after a recent flare-up in border tensions.
Speaking alongside his counterpart Manmohan Singh, Li said the purpose of his three-day visit to India was “to increase mutual trust and co-operation and face the future”.
This week offers the first major gauge of the health of the global economy in 2013, with huge implications for policymakers and investors for the second half of the year. Disappointing manufacturing and services data in April, particularly in the eurozone, U.S. and China, suggest a slowing economic recovery after a weak end to 2012.
Monday, May 20
French president Francois Hollande on Thursday called for a eurozone-wide “economic government”, with its own budget and full-time president as well as a harmonised tax system, as a step to deepen integration in the increasingly divided currency bloc.
With the appointed president, the proposed eurozone government would meet monthly to shed light on key economic developments in the unified bloc, said Hollande, who marked his first year in office as the most unpopular president in modern French history.
Timely central bank intervention helped prevent widespread global economic chaos but their unprecedented and dramatic action could result in potentially heavy losses when they begin to withdraw the extraordinary sums of money they pumped into financial systems around the world, the IMF warned on Thursday.
Nearly six years after dropping behind Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim as the world’s richest man, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has regained the top spot on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, thanks to a surge in Microsoft share price, which took his estimated fortune to $72.7 billion.
The Vatican Bank, known formally as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), will begin making public disclosures of its financial accounts by the end of the year, said its new president on Wednesday, lifting the shroud from the world’s most secretive financial institution, which was recently embroiled in a money-laundering scandal.
More and more companies are stashing their cash offshore and they are doing it at an alarming rate.
More than 30 percent of the world’s 200 richest people, who hold a collective net worth of $28 trillion, control part of their personal fortune through an offshore holding company or other domestic entity where the assets are held in directly, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The European Commission on Tuesday raided the offices of a number of oil companies to investigate claims that oil giants may have “colluded in reporting distorted prices to a price reporting agency to manipulate the published prices for a number of oil and biofuel products”.
China’s environment ministry has given its approval for the construction of what will become the country’s tallest hydroelectric dam despite admitting that the project will have an impact on plants and rare fish, reported Reuters on Wednesday.
Global natural disasters have caused nearly $2.5 trillion in economic losses since the turn of the century, said a United Nations report on Wednesday, warning that the cost to the global economy will only continue to escalate unless businesses incorporated disaster risk management into their investment strategies.
