“We hate you guys…” – this is what Mr. Luo Ping, director general at China’s Banking Regulatory Commission, speaking in New York on Wednesday, said about USA bailout plans. It is clear thatt once USA government will start printing those crispy greenbacks, and the printing machine can print unlimited supply of those dollars, things will go really bad for every country who relied on dollars as a way to keep their...

US President Barack Obama on Saturday called on senators to complete passage of the $827bn stimulus package that was struck behind close doors late on Friday. US Senate Democrats agreed to cut their hopes for a larger economic stimulus package and support a compromise that would give Mr Obama an important but narrow victory. In his weekly radio and YouTube address to the nation, Mr Obama said he was pleased that the bipartisan compromise,...

Italian-born French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has cut ties with her homeland by selling her family home for almost £8 million. It follows bitter comments she made in October saying she was no longer happy to be an Italian citizen. Yesterday was confirmed that the Castello di Castagneto Po, near Turin, had gone to an Arab sheik, following a London auction of its antiques and other fittings which raised another £10 million. Carla’s...

Zero is a perfidious number. Nobody likes it. Nobody wants to be “a zero.” Nobody wants to get a zero on a test…or zero returns on his investments. It is a line that leads nowhere…with no substance in the middle of it. You can add a zero…or multiply by zeros; it gets you nowhere. And is a zero? Is it something? Or nothing? No one knows. Some remarkable news in the history of zeros appeared this week. Mr. Gideon Gono,...

The U.K. commercial property market is in the middle of its worst slump on record and won’t recover for at least another two years, a report by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors showed. Values for offices, stores and industrial properties may fall 25 percent by the end of 2010 as the economic recession causes rental growth to slow and property vacancies to increase, the London-based firm said. That would bring the decline...