INFLATION

Year-on-year inflation in Ivory Coast was running at 4.6 percent in August, the National Statistics Institute said on its website on Tuesday, the first time it has published price data since the end of fighting earlier this year.

China's purchases of beaten-down bank shares may be one of several baby steps along an easing path that eventually leads to interest rate cuts.

Americans Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims shared the Nobel prize in economics on Monday for work that helps governments and central banks weigh up responses to crises -- though it offers no immediate answer to current global problems.

A new study reveals income for U.S. workers fell even rapidly after the summer of 2009 than during the recession that preceded it.

Gold will reach $2,000 in the next three to six months, according to the chief investment officer of one of this year's most successful hedge funds.

Impala Platinum , the world's second-largest producer of the precious metal, said on Monday it has reached a two-year wage deal with South Africa's National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), averting a possible a strike at the miner.

Saudi Arabia's inflation levels are not worrying and will continue to decline, the country's central bank governor Muhammad Al-Jasser said on Saturday.

The risk of U.S. inflation is minor compared with an ongoing morass in the jobs market, two top Federal Reserve officials said after the government reported a steady 9.1 percent jobless rate.

The most urgent threat to the U.S. economy is joblessness, not inflation, but there is little more the Federal Reserve can do to help, a top Fed official, known for his hawkish views on inflation, said on Friday.

Gold prices booked two gains in a row Thursday and silver surged after the European Central Bank and Britain's central bank acted to protect the continent's staggering banks.

Mauritius' year-on-year rate of inflation slowed for a second straight month, with some analysts saying this gave the central bank room to give the economy a boost.

The Bank of England has launched a second round of quantitative easing to defend Britain's faltering economy against the euro zone debt crisis, pledging to buy 75 billion pounds ($114.8 billion) of assets with new money in a dramatic move to stave off recession.

The European Central Bank held interest rates at 1.5 percent on Thursday as a jump in inflation last month offset pressure to respond to the euro zone's worsening debt crisis by easing borrowing costs.

The Bank of England voted on Thursday to buy 75 billion pounds ($115 billion) more in assets to shield Britain's economy from the euro zone debt crisis and keep the faltering recovery going.

The euro zone's services sector shrank for the first time in two years in September as new orders dried up, stoking fears that the region's economy could be heading back into recession.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) on Wednesday applauded Uganda's four percentage point interest rate hike aimed at taming rampant inflation and said the cycle of monetary tightening was expected to trim economic growth in 2011.

Zimbabwe's economy will grow at a slower pace in 2012 than this year as politics puts a drag on full recovery and inflation should stay in single figures, partly due to prudent fiscal policy, Finance Minister Tendai Biti said on Wednesday.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said his government has scored initial success in taming inflation, and told banks to lend more to small firms and tolerate high levels of bad debt from them, official media reported on Wednesday.

Industrial commodity prices ended several days of losses on Wednesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve said it would take measures to prevent the economy from sliding into recession, although copper and crude oil held near multi-month lows.

Sudan's central bank said on Tuesday export traders needed to repay foreign currency gains within three months instead of six, the latest measure to fight a scarcity of dollars driving up inflation.

The Federal Reserve is prepared to take further steps to help an economy that is close to faltering, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said on Tuesday in his bleakest assessment yet of the fragile U.S. recovery.