Finance

Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company, is preparing to raise as much as R$55bn from minority shareholders in what would be the world’s biggest share sale

Lloyd’s of London is to test whether Apple iPads could replace the traditional paper slips containing all the information on bespoke policies sold at the 300-year-old insurance market

The recovery in house building appears to have halted as an industry survey, which measures the number of people reserving new homes to buy, dropped to its lowest level on record

England is facing an acute shortage of school places, with more than one in 10 pupils in schools suffering ‘high’ overcrowding, Financial Times research has revealed

In 2002, Ben Bernanke deemed deflation such a threat that he referred to Milton Friedman’s notion of handing out cash to stop falling prices

Traders are piling into risky bets after a better than expected US labour market report reinforced hopes that the US economy can avoid sliding back into recession.

The Metropolitan Police are under renewed pressure to reopen their inquiry into telephone hacking at News of the World after Alan Johnson said he would review documents he saw on the case while home secretary

BP said it had spent almost $2bn in the last month responding to its Gulf of Mexico oil spill, even as it plugged the leak, taking its total bill for the catastrophe to $8bn

The Chinese government has backed Sinochem, the state-owned chemicals giant, to pursue a counterbid that could trump BHP Billiton’s $39bn hostile offer for PotashCorp

China and the US stage near-simultaneous naval exercises this week in the oceans around the Yellow Sea in one of the most open displays of the rising competition between the two rival forces in north Asia

Guaranteed bonuses accounted for about 5% of the bonuses paid out for 2009 at 37 leading financial companies surveyed by the Institute of International Finance

Hewlett-Packard won the bidding battle for data storage technology company 3Par after Dell said on Thursday it would not raise its offer and was ending talks

Warning given over British banks moving their headquarters abroad if UK government-appointed Commission on Banking were to decide that big groups should be broken up

Leading UK and continental European companies eschewing banks from Spain, Italy and even Germany because they do not believe the Europe-wide assessments gave a true picture of their financial health

A former Labour minister is one of at least 10 MPs who suspect they were targeted by reporters looking to hack into their telephone messages

The singer and campaigner for aid to the continent is seeking to raise money from institutional investors for a private equity venture on the continent

Russia announced a 12-month extension of its grain export ban, raising fears about a return to the food shortages and riots of 2007-08 which spread through developing countries dependent on imports

Foreign companies are losing market share in China across a broad range of industries because of discriminatory treatment by the government and regulators, according to the European Chamber of Commerce in China

UK house prices fell in August for the second month in a row, marking the first back-to-back house price declines since February 2009, according to a closely watched index

European bourses are on the back foot as traders take a more critical view of the previous session, which saw US and China factory data power a move into risk