Lloyds Banking Group got strong demand for a 9 billion pound ($14.9 billion) bond exchange, an indication of possible appetite for the UK bank's record share issue due to price on Tuesday.

A British charity is pioneering the idea of reducing the country's bulging debt by encouraging people to buy gift vouchers that will be sent to the Treasury.

The world no. 2 brewer beat forecasts on Thursday with a 6 percent rise in first-half profit and said its second half should be boosted by a fall in input costs and favorable currency movements.

Britain's Labor government, trailing in opinion polls ahead of an election next year, committed to halving a burgeoning budget deficit and said it would curb bankers' pay in draft laws unveiled on Wednesday.

"Unfriend" has been named the word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, chosen from a list of finalists with a tech-savvy bent.

Lehman Brothers has filed a lawsuit against Barclays Capital alleging the British bank took control of excess assets in collusion with Lehman executives when it bought its US brokerage business a year ago.

Investments in global projects in 2010 will fall to $28 billion from $30-$32 billion this year, Royal Dutch Shell CEO Peter Voser said.

Bailed-out British lender Lloyds Banking Group is to cut a further 5,000 jobs by the end of 2010 as it continues to overhaul its operations and integrate HBOS.

The Bank of England said on Thursday it would expand its quantitative easing program by 25 billion pounds to help kick-start Britain's recession-hit economy.

The Bank of England's injection of 175 billion pounds ($289 billion) into the economy hasn't yet pulled Britain out of recession, and the central bank now faces a difficult decision on whether to raise the stakes.

Britain's service sector showed its strongest activity since the start of the credit crunch in October, helped by growth in new orders to a two-year high, a purchasing managers survey showed on Wednesday.

The Lloyd's of London insurance market cautioned that a strong investment performance from surging share and bond markets would not be sustained and said its full-year expectations were unchanged.

Despite recent warnings that the rally may be over, stock markets face a "meltup" as institutional investors will now feel obliged to buy to deliver returns, Philippe Gijsels, senior equity strategist at Fortis, told CNBC Monday.

The decade that brought us the Enron scandal, the Madoff scandal, the subprime scandal, the Stanford scandal and the great bailout scandal has just two months to run and we have another scandal, the Rajaratnam scandal.

Stuck for what to get your loved ones for Christmas? Well if you stop by London's glitzy Harrods store, you could get some gold bullion to put in the stocking.