Some of the world's biggest banks have revealed they are victims of an alleged fraud which has lost 50 billion US dollars. Bernard Madoff, who was arrested on Thursday, has been charged with fraud in what is being described as one of the biggest-ever such cases.
Electronics giant Siemens AG has agreed on Monday to pay 1.4 billion US dollars to US and German authorities after the company allegedly engaged in bribery, the SEC said in a release.
The discovery and exploitation of new oil and gas wells in the extreme south of Chile has generated a boom for the Magallanes Region which is creating a significant demand for technicians and specialized labour.
A firm that counted itself a client of a broker accused of a 50 billion US dollars Wall Street con has criticised US regulators for what it says are systemic failures. Bramdean Alternatives said the charges against Bernard Madoff raised fundamental questions about the American financial regulatory system.
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa has ordered halting payment on foreign bonds he calls illegal and illegitimate. If this is the case it would be Ecuador's second default in a decade.
The outgoing George Bush administration said it may be willing to give emergency aid to the ailing US car industry, keeping open the prospects for a bailout the day after Congress failed to approve a deal.
World Trade Organization (WTO) chief Pascal Lamy has abandoned attempts to restart the world trade talks. Lamy told ambassadors in Geneva that he has decided there was not sufficient consensus among major economies to call new ministerial talks on a trade deal.
The former chairman of the Nasdaq stock market has been arrested and charged with securities fraud, in what may be one of the biggest fraud cases yet. Bernard Madoff ran a hedge fund which ran up 50 billion US dollars of fraudulent losses and which he called one big lie, prosecutors allege.
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged Latinamerica to continue fighting poverty and avoid the temptation of closing off trade. Rice said on Wednesday countries should not repeat the mistakes of the Great Depression when nations deepened that crisis by turning inward.
Germany's Munich based Ifo (Institute for Economic Research) expects the German economy to contract 2.2% in 2009 and continue falling into the following year, according to a forecast published on Thursday.