Anxiety over the global economy weighed heavily on world stockmarkets, which have not had a good start to the year: the S&P 500 is down by more than 7% since January 1st. Market volatility in China is the source of much of the concern; the People’s Bank of China has heavily intervened to prop up the yuan in the offshore market. Officials gave assurances that the financial system was stable, after a circuit-breaker mechanism that automatically halts trading when stockmarkets plunge was abandoned just a week after it was introduced. See article.

China’s exports fell by 1.4% in December from the same month in 2014 and imports dropped by 7.6%. The figures were less bad than had been expected, though at $4 trillion, total trade for all of 2015 was 8% lower than in 2014.

Under pressure

Oil prices touched 12-year lows of $30 a barrel, which also soured market sentiment. With oil-industry margins under strain, BP shed another 4,000 workers. Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil company, which is mired in a corruption scandal, cut its five-year investment programme by 25%. One analyst forecast that oil would drop to $10 a barrel. Nigeria’s oil minister called on OPEC to hold an emergency summit. But the energy minister for the United Arab Emirates said there was no need for a meeting, as OPEC’s strategy is working. See article.

Having relied on oil exports for a big proportion of its revenue, Russia’s government was reportedly reworking its budget to reduce spending by a further 10% and ordering state departments to carry out “stress tests” in which they assume a further fall in oil prices.

GoPro, a maker of wearable action-cameras and a wannabe media company, reported disappointing quarterly results following disastrous sales of its Hero4 Session camera, the price of which has been slashed by half. As its share price nosedived, GoPro said it was cutting 7% of its workforce.

Golden years

Five months after it launched a hostile bid, Shire secured a deal to buy Baxalta, for $32 billion, the latest big acquisition in the drugs industry. Last year the value of takeovers in the health-care industry amounted to $673 billion.

Shipments of personal computers fell to 276m last year, the first time the figure has dropped below 300m since 2008, according to IDC. PCs are losing out to mobile devices, but the strong dollar and a slowing Chinese market were two other factors that hurt sales in 2015. The bright spot was Apple, which this week also said that 10m people have signed up to the music-streaming service it launched six months ago. It took Spotify six years to attain that number of subscribers. Airbus took 1,036 in net orders for aircraft last year, beating Boeing’s tally of 768. But following several years of robust growth, orders were down significantly compared with 2014 for both companies. Although it trailed in sales, Boeing delivered more jets to customers: 762 to Airbus’s 635. See article. In its latest broadside against “sweetheart” tax deals, the European Commission ordered Belgium to recoup €700m ($760m) in illegal tax breaks given to at least 35 companies. One of them is Anheuser-Busch InBev, a global brewer which has its headquarters in Belgium and is in the process of taking over SABMiller. Last October the commission ruled against the tax arrangements accorded to Starbucks in the Netherlands and Fiat in Luxembourg. America’s Treasury said that it will require title-insurance companies to identify the individuals behind all-cash purchases of luxury homes in New York and Miami made by shell companies. This is in response to reports that the upper reaches of the property market are awash with illicit foreign money.

Greece recorded annual inflation of 0.4% in December (using the EU’s calculations), ending 33 months of deflation.

Steven Cohen reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over a charge of failing to supervise an employee at his hedge fund who was convicted of insider trading. Mr Cohen is barred from investing clients’ money for two years, ending a lengthy government investigation. He neither admits nor denies wrongdoing.

Sound and vision

Proving that it is no dinosaur when it comes to snapping up American film companies, Dalian Wanda, a Chinese conglomerate, agreed to buy Legendary Entertainment, which produced “Jurassic World” and other recent box-office hits, for $3.5 billion. Later this year Legendary will release “The Great Wall”, which was shot entirely in China with a budget of $135m.