As Iraqi militants advanced on Baghdad with M-16s and stolen tanks in June, most investors and traders in the jittery oil markets believed oil prices would spike even higher.

U.S. regulators are asking banks for more detail on their autos financing exposure, as rapid growth in the lending has prompted officials to seek to better assess the risks, according to a person familiar with the matter.

As traditional Wall Street moneymakers like stock and bond trading suffer, banks are growing increasingly willing to invest in less glamorous operations: their credit card businesses.

Policymakers scrambling to keep the world economy from settling into the "new mediocre" of sluggish growth can no longer rely on global trade to do the heavy lifting.

Inside an abandoned movie theater on a noisy avenue in a working-class section of Havana, some 70 Cuban children as young as nine pursue their dream of joining the circus.

Female central bankers from Ukraine and its bitter rival Russia took the stage together in Washington on Saturday and described differing fallout from the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

A sculpture of a goddess riding a chariot and a limestone bust of a woman's head upon which the sculptor Modigliani used to light candles are the centerpieces of an eye-popping 500 million pounds ($800 million) of art put on show at Sotheby's on Friday.

The hunt for dividend yield is pushing U.S. fund managers into an unproven new offshoot of the alternative energy industry. Yield companies - commonly called "yieldcos" - are spinoffs of alternative energy companies that own assets such as wind or solar farms and pay investors dividends out of the cash flow generated by long-term contracts to sell power to utility companies.

Federal Reserve officials on Saturday took stock of a slowdown in the global economy and said it could delay an increase in U.S. interest rates if serious enough.

The International Monetary Fund's member countries on Saturday said bold action was needed to bolster the global economic recovery and they urged governments not to squelch growth by tightening budgets too drastically, although Germany poured cold water on the idea of a new global "crisis."