The Chinese and European central banks said Thursday they reached agreement to set up a "currency swap" mechanism for the purchase and repurchase of their respective currencies, the yuan and euro.

The "bilateral currency swap arrangement" will be valid for three years, the European Central Bank said in a statement on its website.

The Huffington Post, with its mix of online news, gossip and opinion, launched a German edition Thursday, vowing to be among the top five German information portals within five years.

Based in Munich, where it opened a newsroom with 15 journalists with media partner Tomorrow Focus, part of the Burda publishing group, the site will also target the Austrian and Swiss markets.

Dubai's property sector is making a strong comeback five years after prices in the emirate nosedived, but a surge in demand and bouncing prices have triggered calls to remember the crisis.

Scale models of grandiose developments rolled out at the three-day Cityscape property show, which ends on Thursday, showed the renewed confidence in a market that shed around half of its value.

President Barack Obama confronts Republican leaders Thursday, just one week before a toxic political stalemate could take an even more extreme turn and degenerate into a historic debt default crisis.

House Republican chieftains, including Speaker John Boehner, will join Obama at the White House, with neither side yet apparently ready to concede ground in a standoff over a government shutdown and raising America's borrowing authority.

Czech inflation slowed to an annual pace of 1.0 percent in September marking a three-year-low, official data showed on Wednesday, and fuelling expectations the central bank could act to weaken the koruna.

Slower growth in the cost of food and falling fuel prices meant that consumer inflation fell from an 1.3-percent annual pace in August, the Czech Statistical Office said.

President Barack Obama will nominate Janet Yellen Wednesday as the first female head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, at a time when raging political turbulence imperils a fragile American economy.

Obama will put Yellen forward for a four-year term, succeeding outgoing U.S. central bank chief Ben Bernanke, whose tenure and policies will forever be associated with tackling the global financial crisis and navigating a recovery.

In its latest economic outlook report the IMF was cautious about the perspectives for emerging markets without sliding into pessimism over the impact of U.S. monetary policy on growth.

"Medium-term prospects for emerging market economies are weaker," the IMF said Tuesday in its semi-annual World Economic Outlook report.

The Bank of England was Thursday set to maintain its record-low interest rate and level of cash stimulus pumping around an improving British economy, analyst said.

Markets widely expect the central bank's Monetary Policy Committee to keep its key lending rate at 0.50 percent and maintain its bond-buying quantitative easing (QE) scheme at £375 billion ($604 billion, 444 billion euros) at its October meeting.

Pakistan has asked Iran for $2 billion in financing to build its side of a controversial gas pipeline that has drawn threats of U.S. sanctions, Islamabad's petroleum minister said Tuesday.

The Iranian side of the $7.5-billion project is almost complete, but Pakistan has run into repeated problems paying for the 780 kilometer (485 mile) section to be built on its side of the border.

The Palestinian economy could expand by over a third if Israel were to lift its restrictions on about 60 percent of the West Bank that it controls, the World Bank said in a report published Tuesday.

"More than half the land in the West Bank, much of it agricultural and resource rich, is inaccessible to Palestinians," said the World Bank.