The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank will hold their 2015 annual meetings in the Peruvian capital Lima, the two Washington-based institutions announced Friday.

It will be the first time the meetings have been staged in Latin America since 1967, when they were held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The U.S. economy continues to demonstrate underlying strength and contains the seeds of future growth for the auto industry, Chrysler's top executive Sergio Marchionne said Friday.

But he blamed German officials for impeding a rationalization of the industry in Europe that could bring it back to health.

Global tobacco giant Philip Morris on Friday lost its attempt to overturn a ban in Norway on the display of cigarettes in stores.

Following in the footsteps of several other countries such as Ireland and Iceland, Norway in 2010 banned the display of cigarettes in stores in an attempt to cut impulse buys of tobacco products.

The massive financial rescue of Greece, with the country still struggling to meet its lenders' conditions, is placing strains on relations between the IMF and its European partners in the bailouts.

Officially, the three providers of funds to Greece -- the "troika" of the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the European Central Bank -- are unified as they press Athens to stick to the growth-crunching austerity program that came with their emergency loans.

Japan's finance minister on Friday ratcheted up warnings of currency market intervention to tame the strong yen, after the dollar tumbled in the wake of the Federal Reserve's bond-buying plan.

Jun Azumi made the comments to reporters in Tokyo after the dollar hit a seven-month trough of 77.13 yen at one point in New York trade on Thursday.

Standard & Poor's upgraded South Korea's sovereign credit rating from A to A-plus Friday, citing stability on the Korean peninsula and the resilience of Asia's fourth-largest economy.

It was the ratings agency's first upgrade for South Korea in seven years and followed similar moves in the past few weeks by Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble on Friday sought to allay fears that Europe's top economy would have to pick up the tab if other countries could not pay their share of the eurozone's rescue fund.

Speaking to Deutschlandfunk public radio, Schaeuble said that if a member country could not stump up its proportion of the cash for the massive 500-billion-euro firewall known as the ESM, then Germany -- already Europe's effective paymaster -- would not be left to pay the difference.

European aerospace giants EADS and BAE Systems are driving to re-draw the global battlefield for the booming aircraft market, with a tie-up boosting EADS in the U.S. and creating a defence and civil aircraft behemoth.

EADS controls airliner maker Airbus and has interests in defence and space industries.

A mansion overlooking London's Hyde Park that belonged to late Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri is on sale for a British record £300 million ($484 million, 372 million euros), a report said Thursday.

If it meets its asking price the seven-storey, 45-bedroom home would more than double the previous British house price record of £140 million, the Financial Times said.

Spain has made a 4.5-billion-euro ($5.7- billion) non-cash injection into Bankia, a money-losing, state-rescued lender at the heart of the nation's financial crisis.

Madrid moved urgently to shore up Bankia's depleted coffers, delivering the capital as an advance payment on a eurozone banking rescue loan of up to 100 billion euros that was agreed in June.