Hot finance topics

Asian stocks surged Tuesday after a pledge by European leaders to protect the region’s banks against a continent-wide debt crisis and Beijing’s move to buy the shares of major Chinese lenders.
Oil prices hovered above $85 a barrel in Asia, while the dollar strengthened against the euro and the yen.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng shot up 3 […]

The leaders of Germany and France, the eurozone’s two biggest economies, are meeting to discuss new measures to counter the bloc’s debt crisis.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are holding the talks at Berlin’s chancellery to forge an agreement on the next steps in tackling the debt crisis ahead of a summit […]

The Bank of England is deciding whether to pump billions more pounds into the ailing British economy.
Bank watchers are split on whether the nine policymakers will announce more stimulus on Thursday, or wait another month.
There is growing pressure on the Bank to resume quantitative easing whereby it essentially creates new money by buying financial assets […]

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is expected to testify Monday against a campaign consultant charged with scamming him out of more than $1 million, according to two people familiar with a trial that’s giving jurors a behind-the-scenes look at the billionaire politician’s last re-election bid.
The mayor would be prosecutors’ star witness against John Haggerty, who is accused […]

TORONTO

President Barack Obama is on the road selling his jobs plan _ and his re-election hopes _ to plugged-in networkers in Silicon Valley and around the country.
He was to appear Monday at a town hall-style event hosted by the career-focused social networking site LinkedIn to pitch his nearly $450 billion jobs proposal as he travels […]

A Spanish union official says Madrid teachers are staying off the job in massive numbers on the second day of a strike over staff cuts.
Colleagues in the northwest region of Galicia also went on strike.
Virginia Fernandez of the UGT union says official numbers for Madrid are not in but it seems Wednesday’s strike is about […]

ST. LOUIS

A plan to distribute $13 million to consumers cheated by Wentzville-based US Fidelis could be tossed aside if a lawsuit against the bankrupt company’s largest creditor is successful, according to a memo filed with the bankruptcy court Friday by the creditor, Chicago-based Mepco Finance Corp.
The memo accompanies a motion to dismiss a suit filed Sept. […]

Oak trees and sparkling waterfalls have replaced the shards and smoke and bodies. Ten years after the attacks that changed American life, the World Trade Center site is a memorial, and the need to mourn is being eclipsed by the need to honor the memories of the nearly 3,000 people killed.
Children of those lost, some […]