Activists of global anti-poverty charity Oxfam wearing masks depicting world leaders stage a protest outside the venue of the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) in Le Bourget, near Paris, France, December 10, 2015.
Oil slipped to a 7-year low overnight. It came after figures showed OPEC pumped the most oil in three years last month. The cartel's monthly oil-market report, published on Thursday, showed that it pumped about 32 million barrels of oil per day in November, surpassing the record it hit just a few months prior.
Morgan Stanley has agreed to pay $225 million (£148.7 million) to settle claims that it sold toxic mortgage-backed securities to credit unions that later failed, the National Credit Union Administration said on Thursday. The deal boosts to nearly $2.43 billion (£1.6 billion) the amount the NCUA has recovered from banks through lawsuits it began filing in 2011, the U.S. regulator said.
Trading in the shares of Chinese conglomerate and Club Med owner Fosun International was suspended on Friday, amid reports that its billionaire chairman had become unreachable and could be under investigation. Guo Guangchang, 48 and dubbed "China's Warren Buffett", had been out of contact since Thursday, respected business magazine Caixin reported on its website.
Standard Chartered raised about $5.1 billion (£3.3 billion) after 96.8% of the bank's shareholders exercised their rights in a share sale on Friday, signaling confidence in new CEO Bill Winters's strategy to turn around the Asia-focused lender. Bloomberg reports that the shares will be listed in Hong Kong and the first trading day is expected to be December 16.
Lloyds has won a court battle that means it can avoid paying about £1 billion ($1.5 billion) in interest to bondholders, including thousands of smaller investors who helped to fund its bailout during the financial crisis. The Times reports that the Appeal Court ruled that Lloyds was within its rights to force investors, including thousands of its own customers, to offer their bonds for repurchase after regulators decided that the debt would no longer count as part of its core capital.
Asian stock markets are on track for a weekly loss, with a mixed picture today. Japan's Nikkei is up 0.97% at time of writing (6.35 a.m. GMT/1.35 a.m. ET), the Hong Kong Hang Seng is down 0.95%, and the Shanghai Composite is down 0.51%.
Boeing booked 11 new jetliner orders worth about $1.1 billion (£730 million) at list prices on Thursday, leaving it with about 180 more sales to land this month to meet its 2015 target. The world's largest plane maker also affirmed that orders will roughly equal the 755-760 jetliners it had expected to deliver to customers this year.
Ford wants to develop ride hailing services that could compete with existing players such as Uber or Lyft, the company's head of research said Thursday. "Our vision is to be a mobility service provider, beyond building a vehicle that would be in somebody else's fleet," said Ken Washington, Ford's vice president of research. "We see this as a business we want to be in."
Embattled German carmaker Volkswagen said Thursday that the global pollution-cheating scandal it has been engulfed in since September was the result not of a one-off error, but a series of mistakes dating back to 2005. The scandal broke in September when VW was forced to admit that it had installed emission-cheating software into 11 million diesel engines worldwide.
Adobe made a profit that topped market expectations for the ninth straight quarter on strong subscriber growth for its Creative Cloud package of software tools, which includes Photoshop. Adobe's shares jumped 4.7% to $93.10 (£61.50) in extended trading on Thursday and are set to hit a record high on Friday.