The Israeli military and Palestinian militants are ignoring a UN security council resolution calling for an end to two weeks of fighting in the Gaza Strip which have killed more than 700 people

The US economy will become 'dramatically worse', wrecking the dreams of a generation of Americans, if Congress does not act quickly to drive through huge fiscal stimulus plans, Barack Obama said, as fresh data showed deepening recession

Bernard Madoff ordered his UK company to transfer about $150m to his US firm just weeks before he allegedly confessed to running a $50bn fraud scheme, two former employees of Madoff Securities International said

Support is building on Wall Street for Don Kohn, vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, to succeed Timothy Geithner as president of the New York Fed, according to people familiar with the matter

Citigroup is to suffer a $1.4bn loss on its loans to LyondellBasell, the chemical group that placed dozens of its subsidiaries under bankruptcy protection this week after failing to restructure $26bn in debt

Shares in Satyam Computer Services, the group at the centre of India's worst scandal in more than a decade, plunged as much as 71 per cent on worries the country's fourth largest outsourcing group might be heading towards insolvency

Greg Fleming, the head of investment banking at Merrill Lynch, is leaving scarcely a week after it was acquired by Bank of America

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive officer, has increased the pressure on Yahoo to hand over control of its search business to his software company

Warning the 'world economy appears to be undergoing an unusually sharp and synchronised downturn', the Bank said it needed to cut interest rates by a further 0.5 percentage points

The German state on Thursday injected a further €10bn into Commerzbank and took a 25 per cent stake to shore up the country's second-largest lender and allow it to complete the takeover of Dresdner Bank, its ailing rival

A private equity group moves to buy crystal and china company's major assets as it signs a letter of intent following a meeting with Deloitte, the administrators

The decision by the world's second largest PC maker may be an early-warning sign of further closures by US multinationals seeking to cut costs in face of the global slowdown