Business and Finance news

The Bank of England should expand its bond-purchase program to as much as 200 billion pounds ($316 billion) next month to secure Britain’s recovery from recession, the British Chambers of Commerce said.
“With quantitative easing, there’s still scope for some more,” David Frost, director general of the BCC, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. […]

Russia’s economy may contract by a “very serious” 7.5 percent this year as dependence on energy exports left the country more vulnerable to the global financial crisis than expected, President Dmitry Medvedev said.
“I must admit that we sunk below our lowest expectations,” Medvedev said in an interview to be broadcast today at 9 […]

Ashoka Mody, an assistant director of the International Monetary Fund’s European department, was in critical condition today after he was shot in the garage of his Bethesda, Maryland home last night, police said.
Mody, an economist originally from India, has worked at the IMF for eight years and is mission chief to Germany and […]

The Japanese government may undermine banks by forcing them to defer debt repayments while easing accounting standards on the loans, the country’s former top financial regulator said.
Shizuka Kamei, Japan’s newly appointed financial services minister, plans to submit legislation next month that would allow ailing small firms to postpone loan repayments for up to […]

Japan’s broadest indicator of economic health rose for a fifth month in August as global stimulus spending helped the country emerge from its worst postwar recession.
The coincident index, a composite of 11 indicators including factory production and retail sales, climbed to 91.4 in August, the highest since November, from a revised 89.8 a […]

European Central Bank President Jean- Claude Trichet led the region’s finance chiefs in pushing China to let the yuan strengthen amid mounting concern the euro is shouldering too much of the burden of a sliding dollar.
Some currencies “have in the medium run to appreciate,” Trichet said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in […]

The head of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said on Sunday that she wanted to end the “too big to fail” doctrine and shrink the shadow banking system that operates outside the reach of regulators.
FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, speaking to the Institute of International Finance meeting here, said a U.S. proposal to create […]

Hong Kong Monetary Authority Chief Executive Norman Chan said he will maintain the city’s fixed exchange rate, after the central bank intervened under his watch for the first time to stop the Hong Kong dollar gaining.
Chan, who began work as the head of the HKMA today, said his first task was “to keep […]

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the U.S. will have to both tighten credit and raise taxes as the economy pulls out of the worst recession since the 1930s.
“The presumption that we’re going to be able to resolve this without significant increases in taxes is unrealistic,” Greenspan, 83, said in an interview […]