Russian bourses halted stock and bond trading on Wednesday amid the worst falls since the country's 1998 financial collapse and the Finance Ministry pledged a total of $60 billion of funds to help local banks. Investors have dumped Russian assets after global financial turmoil combined with falling oil prices and Moscow's war with Georgia to

Central banks struggled to restore confidence on financial markets for a third day running on Wednesday after the United States agreed to rescue insurance giant AIG, the latest casualty in a crisis sweeping Wall Street. Asian central banks ploughed extra liquidity into short-term funding markets, although central banks in Europe took their foot off the

Construction starts on new U.S. homes plunged to a 17-1/2-year low during August as builders scaled back sharply to try to cope with the worst slump in U.S. housing since the Great Depression. The Commerce Department reported on Wednesday that starts on new homes dropped 6.2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 895,000,

Greece said it would shut down ailing state carrier Olympic Airlines and relaunch it under a new structure, ending years of failed efforts to find a buyer, under a plan that received the blessing of the European Commission. Greece's conservative government had pledged to either find a buyer or re-establish the loss-making airline as a

Media reports that British banks HBOS and Lloyds TSB are in advanced merger talks underscore the speed with which regulators seem prepared to ditch long-held orthodoxies to counter the credit crunch. HBOS, Britain's biggest home loan lender, and Lloyds, which has previously been blocked from buying a smaller mortgage bank, can only have got so

Capital Intelligence, the international credit rating agency, has upgraded the Czech Republic's long-term foreign currency rating to ‘A’ from ‘BBB+’ and its short-term foreign currency rating to ‘A1’ from ‘A2’. At the same time, the long-term local currency rating was raised to ‘A+’ from ‘A’ and the short-term local currency rating of ‘A1’ affirmed. The

The number of Britons claiming unemployment benefit rose for a seventh consecutive month in August and by its biggest amount since December 1992, official data showed on Wednesday. The Office for National Statistics also said the number of people in work in the three months to July fell for the first time since the beginning