Breaking Finance news

With bullion trading near an all-time high of $1,264 an ounce, miners are seeking to extract value from their bullion operations by listing them

Move aligns the banks favourably with Beijing’s policy priorities and positions them to profit from what is expected to be a rapidly growing line of business in the future

Transocean failed to meet ‘recertification’ maintenance deadlines for the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer, the key instrument that failed in the Macondo well explosion, a company employee testified

Alleged Soviet sympathies brought leading screenwriter and broadcaster Wolf Mankowitz to the attention of MI5, according to intelligence files

Google unveils a feature that will enable its Gmail users to call landlines and mobile phones from their e-mail inbox, broadening the search group’s growing array of communication products and creates a potent rival to Skype

Miner’s CEO dismisses speculation of a possible Chinese-led counterbid – ‘I’ve only seen one bid. It’s the bid we made. It’s the bid on the table’

Nick Clegg has launched a fierce attack on the Institute for Fiscal Studies, accusing the budget watchdog of making ‘impossible assumptions’ in finding that the coalition’s first Budget in June would hit the poor hardest

Fast-food chains in the US are rolling out more expensive premium products after two years of relentless focus on lower priced meals in the hope of recouping profit margins surrendered during the recession of 2008 and 2009

Regulator calls for different capital requirements for banks’ trading books to remove arbitrage opportunities

A precipitous drop in sales of new homes and signs of weakening business investment on Wednesday reinforced rising anxiety about the US economy’s wavering recovery

Settlement being discussed in which former president and the centre-right UMP party would pay compensation for allegedly misusing money by creating phoney jobs

A senior Banco Santander executive was charged with insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission in relation to the hostile $39bn bid by BHP Billiton, the mining company, for PotashCorp, the fertiliser producer

Andrew Wylie, the powerful literary agent, has backed away from a confrontation with Random House over digital royalties, after signing a truce with the Bertelsmann-owned book group

Large activist pension funds are to launch a campaign to shake up underperforming US companies, using new rules due to be agreed on Wednesday that allow shareholders to directly nominate board directors

Fears that the US and other major economies are slowing sharply sent investors piling into the safety of government debt, pushing UK, German and US bond yields down to record lows

The Pension Protection Fund, the body that stands behind the retirement promises of insolvent employers, is to reveal its strategy to generate enough cash to pay all future benefits

John Bercow, the Commons Speaker, is being urged to stop ministers from rushing through legislation that will slash redundancy terms for civil servants and clear the way for a cull of up to 100,000 jobs

The domestic arm of China’s main sovereign wealth fund completed its first bond sale, raising Rmb40bn ($5.9bn) from the interbank market as it prepares to help recapitalise some of the world’s largest banks

A rapid rebound in advertising in North America and on television that surprised even Sir Martin Sorrell pushed WPP, the world’s largest marketing services group, to raise its earnings guidance for the year

Facebook is now worth as much as $33.7bn based on secondary market transactions, giving the privately held company an implied valuation greater than the market capitalisations of publicly traded internet stalwarts such as Ebay and Yahoo