China is set to become the world's biggest manufacturer next year The US remained the world’s biggest manufacturing nation by output last year, but is poised to relinquish this slot in 2011 to China – thus ending a 110-year run as the number one country in factory production. The figures are revealed in a league table being published on Monday by IHS Global Insight, a US-based economics consultancy. Last... 

Portuguese Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira speaks during a parliamentary debate on the govenment’s controversial stability and growth program. As Greece barreled closer to the edge of a debt default this week, fears that the crisis would infect other countries rattled the world’s financial markets. “It’s not a question of the danger of contagion,” Angel Gurria, the...