India's Reliance Industries, led by tycoon Mukesh Ambani, could spend $2 billion to boost its aerospace and telecoms businesses, reports said on Saturday.

Quoting unnamed executives, the Economic Times said Reliance had lined up close to $1 billion to spend on its new aerospace operations over the next few years and would likely hire around 1,500 people for the division.

Mining giant BHP Billiton warned Saturday that it needed to reduce its cost base and slash non-essential spending as China cooled faster than expected, "significantly" impacting profitability.

BHP chief Marius Kloppers said weakening commodity demand due to Europe's financial turbulence and a slowdown in China was hitting the Anglo-Australian miner's bottom line and said there appeared to be little relief in sight.

Iran is expanding its insurance on its fleet of 47 oil tankers through a multi-billion-dollar line of credit as it seeks to get around EU sanctions crimping its crude exports, reports said on Saturday.

"Iran is ready to give total insurance for the transport of its oil... and the commitments by Iranian insurers are no different from those by Western insurers and therefore all risks and dangers are insured," Iran's OPEC representative, Mohammad Ali Khatibi, was quoted as saying by the state-run newspaper IRAN.

Spain's jobless rate neared 25 percent in June, officials said Friday, darkening the recession outlook despite relief on financial markets at a vow of support by the European Central Bank.

The unemployment rate rose in the second quarter to 24.63 percent and a huge 53 percent among the young, despite the start of the tourist season, figures from the national statistic office showed.

Air France is offering a massive bonus of up to six months' salary to pilots who agree to move to its new low-cost Transavia unit, a spokesman said Thursday.

A company source said that the sums being offered to pilots were as much as 60,000 euros ($74,000).

Moody's on Thursday downgraded the credit rating for the Italian region of Sicily to within one notch of junk status as the finances of regional governments in Italy and Spain rattle investors.

Moody's said it was cutting the rating for the autonomous region to Baa3 from Baa2 with a warning of a possible further downgrade due to "heightened budgetary pressures" that would increase due to the recession this year.

The United States is bracing for growth figures that will set the tone for the last 100 days of the race to the White House and help decide if the Fed pulls the trigger on more economic stimulus.

Early Friday in Washington, the Commerce Department will release its first estimate of how much the world's largest economy grew in the second quarter of this year, from April to June.

Eurozone bank loans to the private sector contracted last month, new data showed Thursday, even as growth in Eurozone money supply, a key indicator of demand in the economy, picked up unexpectedly.

The European Central Bank, in its regular monthly money supply data, calculated that growth in Eurozone bank loans contracted by 0.2 percent in June after shrinking by 0.1 percent in May.

Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus said Thursday that microfinance could help disaster-struck Japan rebuild, even though the concept he pioneered is usually associated with poor and developing nations.

Yunus, seen as one of the world's leading anti-poverty activists, said extending small loans could help people in regions devastated by last year's quake-tsunami disaster, despite Japan being one of Asia's richest countries.

Santander, the biggest Eurozone bank by capitalization, said Thursday that its 2012 second quarter profit plunged by an annualized 92.8 percent owing to provisions ordered by Spanish regulators.

The bank's net profit for the three months from April through June fell to 100 million euros ($121 million) a statement said.