Whisper it, but the next challenge for financial markets and policymakers may not be deflation, but the remarkable surge in oil prices from the six-year low touched in January.

Wall Street was higher at the open on Monday and the Nasdaq inched closer to its record intraday high ahead of Apple's (AAPL.O) results after the close.

“Downing Street has discreetly let it be known in the City that it would oppose any takeover of BP,” the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

Cap Gemini plans to buy United States-based IGATE Corp for $4 billion cash to make North America its biggest market and is raising its sales outlook for 2015 after a solid first-quarter, the French IT services company said on Monday.

One by one, Japan is turning off the lights at the giant oil-fired power plants that propelled it to the ranks of the world's top industrialized nations. With nuclear power in the doldrums after the Fukushima disaster, it's solar energy that is becoming the alternative.

Fitch Ratings downgraded Japan's credit rating by one notch after the government failed to take steps in this fiscal year's budget to offset a delay in a sales tax increase, the agency said on Monday.

World shares hit a new high on Monday, led by China, though the global rally faded in Europe as investors looked ahead to central bank meetings in the United States and worried over Greece.

China will likely cut the number of its central government-owned conglomerates to 40 through massive mergers, as Beijing pushes forward a sweeping plan to overhaul the country's underperforming state sector, state media reported on Monday.

The dollar steadied in the lower half of an increasingly intransigent range on Monday, after sliding late last week following another round of disappointing U.S. economic data.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is convening a group of financial industry veterans for the first time next month to consider stock market reforms, but one group will be conspicuously absent: retail brokerages.