By Donny Kwok and Lavinia Mo HONG KONG (Reuters) - Armed with empty suitcases and same-day return tickets, an army of mainland Chinese is descending on suburban outlet shopping malls and international fashion chains in Hong Kong, turning cheap into the new chic as luxury falls out of favor. Wealthy Chinese used to stop …

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Economy Minister Philipp Roesler said the European Commission made a "grave mistake" by agreeing to impose punitive import duties on solar panels from China and urged the Commission to work to prevent the eruption of a trade conflict. "It's a grave mistake," Roesler told Welt am Sonntag newspaper …

By William Schomberg LONDON (Reuters) - Bank of England Governor Mervyn King has urged successor Mark Carney not to bring to Britain his trademark policy of spelling out how long interest rates will remain low. King also said the bank could not be run as "a one-man show," a sign of concern at high expectations that the …

By Ann Saphir and Jonathan Spicer (Reuters) - The beginning of the end of the Federal Reserve's massive bond-buying program might come sooner than many investors think if recent gains in the U.S. labor market do not prove fleeting. Much will depend on how economic data, which has given mixed signals for growth prospects, …

By James Pomfret and Matthew Miller ZHUHAI, China/HONG KONG (Reuters) - In an underground mall just a stone's throw from China's teeming border with Macau, a row of 30 small shops with identical golden plaques does a brisk, though shadowy trade with mainland Chinese visitors, many of them bound for the gambling hub. "Good …

KUWAIT (Reuters) - State-run Kuwait Petroleum Company (KPC) appointed a new chief executive and suspended other top officials after the country paid $2.2 billion in damages to Dow Chemical Co over a scrapped plastics joint venture. Nizar Mohammad al-Asani replaced Farouk Zanki as CEO at the oil firm and the cabinet approved …

LONDON (Reuters) - The single biggest risk to Britain's nascent economic recovery is continued eurozone weakness, the Bank of England's outgoing governor Mervyn King said in a television interview on Sunday. He called for a "credible medium term plan" to get the economy back on track and said automatic economic stabilizers …

By Stanley White TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan risks missing, yet again, an opportunity to use foreign investment to help fuel sustained economic growth that has eluded it for the last two decades. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged to make Japan "the world's easiest country for companies to do business in" as part of his economic …

By Sonya Dowsett MADRID (Reuters) - Many duped savers at Spanish lender Bankia are shunning a state-supervised compensation scheme in favor of expensive lawsuits, prolonging a mis-selling scandal and complicating efforts to restore faith in the banking system. The disputes over mis-selling at Bankia and other nationalized …

By Allison Martell (Reuters) - Hope is fading for a global deal to regulate the airline industry's greenhouse gas emissions ahead of a fall deadline, even though failure could push the industry back to the brink of a trade war over the European Union's emissions trading system. Last November the EU suspended its controversial …

By Christine Stebbins CHICAGO (Reuters) - Financial trading in world markets has grown so lightning-fast that effective regulation is growing tougher by the second, increasing the threat of crashes sparked by hoaxes, electronic glitches or yet-unknown causes. The latest alarm was triggered by a fake tweet saying that the …

By William James LONDON (Reuters) - An independent Scotland would have a vastly oversized financial sector that would leave it vulnerable to a Cyprus-style banking crisis, Britain's finance ministry says. Before a referendum due in September 2014 on whether Scotland should split from the United Kingdom, the British government …

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece's bank rescue fund will aim to sell Hellenic Postbank and Proton by mid-July with big banks continuing to absorb small lenders as part of plans to revive the battered sector, the country's foreign lenders said in an inspection review. Greece is recapitalizing its four big banks and winding down …