Arunma Oteh, Nigeria’s new securities regulator, tells a story that highlights the collective delusion behind the country’s ruinous stock market bubble.
A friend of hers who is a markets expert said that he realised that something was amiss when his driver started making confident stock picks. The chauffeur was among Nigerians with minimal financial knowledge [...]

says its economy grew notably less in the fourth quarter than initial estimates.
The world’s second biggest economy’s gross domestic product expanded at an annual pace of 3.8 percent in the October-December quarter, revised down from 4.6 percent in a preliminary report last month.
The annualized figure corresponds to quarterly growth of 0.9 percent. GDP [...]

ROME – Police arrested organized crime suspects in Sicily, New York and Miami on Wednesday in raids aimed at dismantling a
-based Mafia family, Italian authorities said.
was still being carried out Wednesday afternoon.
So far, national police in Rome say 21 warrants, including for a Miami resident, were issued by Palermo-based anti-Mafia magistrates. Italian [...]

LISBON, Portugal –
announced new austerity measures Monday to avoid a debt crisis like the one engulfing Greece, cutting welfare benefits and government hiring as well as selling assets and raising taxes on the well-off.
The announcement comes two days ahead of a bond issue in which Portugal will try to raise euro750 million ($1.02 [...]

A team of Icelandic negotiators left London on Friday after failing to reach a last-minute deal with Dutch and British officials to repay billions of euros of compensation for a collapsed online bank, a day before a destabilising referendum in Iceland on the issue.
Negotiations over easing repayment terms for the €3.9bn that the British and [...]

If there’s anything worse than a drunk driver, it might be a drunk
with passengers in his care. Sadly, this phenomenon has become common in Bolivia, and so after a few particularly deadly accident-filled months,
has issued a zero-tolerance policy for offenders, including lifetime license revocation on the first DUI offense, vehicle confiscation, fines and [...]

Police, private security experts and internet service providers said on Wednesday they had shut down the Mariposa botnet, one of the largest networks of hacked personal computers discovered.
It had siphoned off financial and other information from inside half of the largest 1,000 US companies.
Computers using about 12.7m internet addresses in 190 countries were compromised, [...]

Snowstorms that shut in shoppers last month also chilled sales at women’s clothing stores compared with a year earlier, but most retail sectors saw gains in February, data released Wednesday show.
The latest numbers from MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse show footwear, men’s clothing, consumer electronics and luxury sales all rose, as did online sales.
The figures, [...]

President Barack Obama on Wednesday gave Congress the green light to pass sweeping healthcare reform legislation with a simple majority, saying lawmakers owe the American people a result after more than a year of often heated debate about overhauling the $2,500bn US health system.
Endorsing the Senate’s usage of a legislative tactic known as “reconciliation” will [...]

Snowstorms that shut in shoppers last month also chilled sales at women’s clothing stores compared with a year earlier, but most retail sectors saw gains in February, data released Wednesday show.
The latest numbers from MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse show footwear, men’s clothing, consumer electronics and luxury sales all rose, as did online sales.
The figures, [...]