Pfizer, the No. 1 drugmaker, said on Monday that it would acquire U.S. rival Wyeth for about $68 billion (49.6 billion pounds) in a move to diversify its revenue base. The world’s largest drugmaker, which raised $22.5 billion in debt from a consortium of banks to finance the deal,...

Struggling German chipmaker Qimonda has filed for insolvency at a court in Munich, a court spokeswoman said Friday. The Infineon subsidiary had received a 325-million-euro ($422-million) cash injection from the German state of Saxony, the federal government and a Portuguese development bank in December in a bid to keep...

EU finance ministers vowed to lower their growing national deficits after recession-hit economies improve, but the politicians did not call for implementing binding deadlines to fight the debts. “A crisis that arose out of (too much) debt cannot be fought by creating more debt over the long term,” Austrian...

Barack Obama has taken the oath of office and been sworn in as America’s 44th president – and the country’s first African-American leader. More than one million people gathered in the National Mall in a wintry Washington DC, to see Mr Obama take the oath shortly after 1200 (1700...

Analysts were unprepared for a higher-than-predicted leap in German investor optimism in January, despite continued signs of downsizing in German industry. German investor confidence jumped unexpectedly in January, a key indicator released on Tuesday showed. It signals hope that signs of an economic recovery could emerge as the year...