
The Euro zone economy will shrink 1.9% in 2009 and grow by only 0.4% n 2010, the European Commission has forecast. The Commission said in a statement that the whole European Union was facing a deep and protracted recession.

The global economic crisis has cost Arab countries 2,500 billion US dollars in the last four months alone, according to Kuwait's foreign minister.

The head of Argentina's powerful General Labour Confederation, Hugo Moyano said this week that when collective wage bargaining opens unions will seek salary hikes higher than the official inflation rate of 7.2% announced by the state-run INDEC statistics office.

The struggling US banking giant Citigroup has announced plans to split the firm in two, as it reported a quarterly loss of 8.29 billion US dollars. It said it would realign into two new firms, Citicorp and Citi Holdings.

Spain faces its deepest recession in half a century admitted Finance Minister Pedro Solbes anticipating the economy will contract 1.6% this year. In July, the minister had predicted a 1% expansion.
A severe economic slowdown in China is one of the biggest risks faced by the world this year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has warned. The WEF report said a hard landing for China's economy could create domestic social tensions and put stress on the global financial system.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon said he is willing to cooperate with incoming US president Barack Obama to address aspects of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, which links the economies of the United States, Mexico and Canada and has boosted trade several times.

Brazilian farm exports totalled a record 71.9 billion US dollars in 2008, up 23% over 2007, according to the latest reports from the Ministry of Agriculture. Farm exports also reported a surplus of 60 billion US dollars last year while agro-business represented 36.3% of all of the country's shipments.

China's exports and imports have suffered their biggest decline in a decade. Exports in December were down 2.8% from the same time last year, a bigger decline than November's 2.2% drop, while imports were down 21.3% (17.9% in November), the China Daily said.

Italian banks were saved from the US subprime mortgage originated crisis that has become global because they barely speak or understand English confessed the Italian Minister of Economy Giulio Tremonti during an interview published this week in the French newspaper Les Echos and picked up by global news agencies