Crude oil prices are up again today despite a pledge by Saudi Arabia to boost production.

Traders focused instead on disruptions to Nigerian supply and heightened Middle East tensions — namely Iran’s threat of a “devastating” response to any attack on its nuclear sites by Israel.

On Friday, Pentagon officials said a large-scale Israeli military exercise in the eastern Mediterranean early this month may have been a dress rehearsal by Israeli forces for an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Tucking into vol-au-vents stuffed with mozzarella, delegations from 162 countries gathered in Rome this week to attempt to map a way out of the current global food crisis.

I’m reading a strange little book this week. It is called The Fall of Northern Rock and is written by an ex-employee of the now nationalised bank called Brian Walters. I’m not quite sure why Walters was the one commissioned to write the book, for the simple reason that he doesn’t seem to have any more inside knowledge into the affair than the rest of us.

The pessimists warning of a short-lived, or chronically weak, single currency at the European Central Bank’s inception in June 1998 have so far been “spectacularly wrong”, as Edward Hadas notes on Breakingviews.

When gold was going for $300 an ounce and oil for $25 a barrel, it was easy to know where to put your money.

Around this time last year, the nation’s investment experts all started to point out how cheap the big FTSE 100 stocks looked and to suggest that we all switched out of smaller companies and into blue chips.

It’s all doom and gloom in the British residential property market. By contrast, farmland values are rocketing at a record pace.

At the launch party for the Spectator’s business magazine, a banker introduced himself to me. He’d been wanting to meet me for ages, he said.

The latest data from the eurozone “looks like a resounding confirmation” of the single currency area’s resilience, said Unicredit.