In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar, BusinessWeek reported.

Iceland’s prime minister has hit out against the International Monetary Fund and the British and Dutch governments for holding up recovery efforts a year after the country’s banking sector collapsed, the Financial Times reported. Johanna Sigurdardottir, the prime minister, said that it was “not acceptable” that the IMF had delayed a review for months. This review is needed before Iceland can access more of its $5.1bn (£3.2bn) international rescue package.

The administrator for Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc's European unit on Monday unveiled a new plan to dole out the collapsed investment bank's assets directly to creditors, Reuters reported. The administrators, said they would put forward a "contractual solution" that would allow them to distribute "a very significant portion" of the $8.9 billion in securities assets currently under their control, according to a statement published on the administrators' website.

Many struggling British retailers are facing a worse Christmas than last year, when 15 major chains failed, according to insolvency specialist Begbies Traynor, Reuters reported. The company said rising unemployment and fragile consumer confidence would result in many companies entering formal insolvency proceedings within a year.

The IMF forecasts that Spain will be within the group of European economies that recorded a higher rate of bad loans above the European average along with France and Italy, because these countries have a high rate of loans on total assets, according to the Barcelona Reporter. As far as estimates of losses for banks and financial institutions are concerned, their financial losses for the period 2007/10 could be around 412 million euros to 2.3 billion euros, but warned that risks to global financial stability "remains high".

Following the late-September announcement of massive layoffs at Russia’s OAO AvtoVaz - 27,600 jobs getting the axe - and Germany’s car-scrapping subsidy recently coming to an end, fears have been ascendant that another wave of job cuts is headed to central Europe’s auto sector, The Wall Street Journal’s New Europe blog reported. Earlier this year car makers in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and elsewhere in the region let go thousands of temporary contract workers, reduced work weeks to four days and some eliminated shifts.

Argentina needs to be in an International Monetary Fund program to conduct talks on restructuring its debt with the Paris Club of sovereign creditors, French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde said on Sunday. Argentina owes some $6.7 billion in defaulted debt to the club. It wants to resolve the issue as part of an effort to get relations with the international community back on track after the country's 2001-2002 economic crisis. The country can either repay the debt in full, or seek a restructuring, which usually requires a country to be in an IMF program.

The World Bank group is set to launch a $5.5bn initiative to raise funds to buy distressed assets from banks in emerging and developing markets in a bid to clean up their balance sheets and free up credit flows, the Financial Times reported. The move came as the International Monetary Fund warned on Wednesday that rising losses on loans were likely to strain bank balance sheets in emerging Europe “for years to come”, saying non-performing loan ratios could peak as high as double their current level.

One of the first fallouts, and certainly the largest, from the financial crisis in the Czech Republic came Sept. 22, 2008, when glassmaking group Bohemia Crystalex and Porcela Plus entered bankruptcy proceedings. One year later, Crystalex, one part of the group, has a new owner and - if full scale production resumes - could become the first example of an unlikely survivor of the crisis, The Prague Post reported. Crystalex's resurrection depends mostly on the company's ability to reacquire orders with customers who may now be skeptical about reinvesting in a cracked corporation.

Denmark's economy pushed deeper into recession in the second quarter, with data showing a much larger-than-expected decline in gross domestic product, The Wall Street Journal reported. Danish GDP fell 2.6% on a seasonally adjusted quarterly basis and was a record 7.2% lower from a year earlier, Statistics Denmark said Wednesday. Economists had forecast a decline of 1.4% and 5.2%, respectively. The figures mark the fourth straight quarter in which output has fallen in Denmark.