| » After months of discussion European leaders agreed on July 21st to give Greece a second bail-out. The country will receive another €109 billion ($158 billion) in loans from the euro zone and the IMF. In addition private bondholders holding around €135 billion in Greek debt will be asked voluntarily to accept new securities with a lower value. Ratings agencies are expected to declare Greece in selective default once the bond swaps occur. The agreement should ease Greece's borrowing costs, but does less to address its long-term debt pile.
See article » Despite the deal in Brussels markets remained jittery about the euro zone's (and America's) debt problems. Italian and Spanish bond yields went up; Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany's finance minister, said that Germany won't hand over "blank cheques"; and Moody's downgraded Cyprus's sovereign rating by two notches.
Then there were three  » Deutsche Bank resolved the quandary of its management succession plans by appointing Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen as co-chief executives to take over from Josef Ackermann when he leaves the job next year. Mr Jain, who is currently based in London, will be the first person not fluent in German in charge at Germany's biggest bank. But with Mr Ackermann expected to chair the supervisory board, analysts are pondering how much autonomy Mr Jain and Mr Fitschen will really have. » UBS reported a sharp decline in quarterly profit, issued a warning that it would probably miss its earnings target for the year and embarked on another round of job cuts. The Swiss bank attributed its latest misfortune in part to "new capital and regulatory requirements", but some say its weak performance is a result of the big salary increases it paid to retain senior staff during the financial crisis. Profit at Credit Suisse also slumped, by half, and it too announced lay-offs. » An appeals court rejected the Securities and Exchange Commission's proxy-access rules, which were designed to make it easier for large shareholders to propose candidates for corporate boards. The judges ruled that the regulator had carried out insufficient cost-benefit analysis. Other bits of the Dodd-Frank financial reforms could now come under legal attack.
A very exclusive club » It emerged that George Soros is to close his hedge fund to outside investors and will refund up to $1 billion to those who have put in money. The prominent financier blames new regulations that require investment advisers to register with the SEC. The rules exempt funds that are run on behalf of a family, so Mr Soros's firm will manage only his own $25 billion pot of investments from now on. » India's central bank raised its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point, to 8%. As with other hot emerging markets, India is trying to contain inflation. Brazil recently upped its basic rate to 12.5%.  » The volume of foreign direct investment around the world continued to recover after the financial crisis, growing by 5% in 2010 to reach $1.24 trillion (though this was still 37% below its peak in 2007). One notable exception was Britain, where FDI fell by 35% compared with 2009. New figures showed that Britain's economy slowed in the second quarter, growing by just 0.2%. » Bob Dudley, BP's chief executive, reassured shareholders that the energy company was getting back on track after last year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Mr Dudley did not dismiss splitting BP in two, as some investors have urged, though he stressed that this would be BP's "year of consolidation". BP made a headline profit of $5.3 billion in the second quarter, compared with a $17 billion loss in the same period a year ago. » Meanwhile, ConocoPhillips, which is splitting in two, reported an 18% drop in quarterly net profit. Earlier this month Conoco announced that it would sell its refining and marketing business next year so it can concentrate on exploration and production. » Express Scripts and Medco Health Solutions announced their intention to merge in a $29.1 billion deal. Both are in the business of managing prescription-drug plans provided by employers and negotiating prices on their behalf with drugs companies. In 2006 Express Scripts proposed to buy Caremark in a similar mega-deal, but its bid failed partly on antitrust grounds. » Japan's Panasonic decided to sell part of the washing-machine and refrigerator operations of Sanyo, which it acquired in 2009, to China's Haier, the world's largest branded maker of large home appliances. It is a rare instance of a Japanese firm selling a big division, and one of the only cases in which Japanese operations have been sold to a Chinese company, a sensitive matter in Japan. | 
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