The Venezuelan government denied Friday it planned to devalue its currency, despite a shortage of dollars and euros that has fueled demand on the black market.

"A devaluation is not on the table," said Rafael Ramirez, the newly appointed vice president in charge of economic policy who has also long served as oil minister.

Shares of Internet search and advertising titan Google soared more than 13 percent to pass the $1,000 mark for the first time Friday after a strong earnings report.

The earnings demonstrated that Google was smoothly building its presence in the mobile area while advertising earnings rose all around, with particular help from Google's YouTube website.

Technical problems have hobbled the website design to sign up millions of uninsured Americans for health care, but they have largely been overshadowed by a 16-day government shutdown.

The government's healthcare.gov website launched on October 1 was supposed to spearhead President Barack Obama's sweeping health care reform, known as Obamacare.

Spain's banks reported Friday record high bad loans in August, revealing persistent balance-sheet weakness despite a eurozone-funded bailout.

Bad loans rose from the previous month by 2.0 billion euros ($2.7 billion), or 1.13 percent, to an unprecedented 180.7 billion euros ($247 billion).

Chinese computer and phone maker Lenovo is considering a counter bid to buy all of Canadian smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The newspaper, citing unnamed sources close to the matter, said that Lenovo had signed a confidentiality agreement to access BlackBerry's accounts.

International tourism grew by five percent in the first eight months of 2013, a better-than-expected growth driven mostly by strong results in Europe and Asia, the World Tourism Organisation said Thursday.

International tourist arrivals reached 747 million worldwide between January and August, some 38 million more than in the same period last year, the UNWTO said in a statement.

Leafy well-heeled Luxembourg, the wealthiest European Union nation per capita, is desperately seeking a new economic model as it prepares to shed banking secrecy.

The world's 13th biggest financial center and the second international investment hub after the United States, Luxembourg harvested almost half of its fiscal revenue from the financial sector before the crisis hit in 2008.

The U.S. debt standoff has shaken confidence in Washington's fiscal management and in the dollar as a reliable global currency, but, say analysts in Asia, there is no credible alternative to the greenback.

China and Japan, the biggest holders of U.S. Treasuries, slammed the political gridlock on Capitol Hill and warned that a narrowly averted debt default would have destabilized the global economy -- threatening their vast $2.4 trillion investment in U.S. debt.

Spain's public debt, rising unchecked for the past five years of economic crisis, will peak at just over 101 percent of output in 2015, the government said Thursday.

The country's ratio of debt to gross domestic product (GDP) will hit 101.13 percent in 2015 before easing to 101.09 percent in 2016, according to government documents sent to the European Commission which were published Thursday.

Bank of America posted a third-quarter profit Wednesday that topped estimates, saying provisions for credit losses were sharply lower than a year ago.

Net income was $2.5 billion in the July-September period, up from $340 million in the 2012 third quarter.