Global businessThe Moscow Exchange, which was created in 2011 by the merger of Russia's two largest stock exchanges, said that it will soon launch an initial public offering of its shares. The Russian government is hoping the IPO will make the exchange more attractive to big domestic companies, many of which are part-listed on foreign stock markets.

A judge in London rejected a request for media anonymity from a group of bankers at Barclays whose names have been submitted to regulators investigating the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal. The judge is presiding over the first lawsuit in Britain relating to the LIBOR case, which will come to trial later this year.

Google said that its revenues passed the $50 billion mark for the first time last year. The Internet company enjoyed a bumper fourth quarter, in which it saw a much slower rate of decline in the money it takes from clicks on advertisements, a rate that investors usually fret about.

India's foreign-investment agency recommended IKEA's $2 billion investment plan to open 25 stores in the country during the next 20 years. The Swedish company will be the first foreign retailer wholly to own its Indian subsidiary under new rules on investment. A cabinet committee is expected to give its final approval soon.

The price of carbon on the European Union's Emissions Trading System fell below $7 a ton for the first time. A glut of polluting permits has caused carbon prices to fall by 70 percent since 2011, providing little incentive for companies to cut emissions rather than pay for the permits. Officials want to withdraw some of the permits in the hope that the price will rise, a step that some countries, notably Germany, are resisting.

Atari filed for bankruptcy protection. A pioneer in video games, Atari has had several owners since its heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and was snapped up by a French company a decade ago. Its assets include such groundbreaking games as Asteroids and Pong, as well as its logo.

In an effort to end decades of deflation, the Bank of Japan doubled its inflation target to 2 percent. The central bank made an "open-ended" pledge to buy unlimited amounts of short-term government debt to achieve its goal, starting next year. The move comes after intense pressure from Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, for the BoJ to do more for the "real economy."

China's economy grew by 7.8 percent last year, according to the official statistics agency. It was the slowest pace of growth since 1999, although manufacturing and retail sales rebounded in the fourth quarter.

Investor confidence in Spain improved markedly. Spain last week raised $9 billion in an auction of 10-year government bonds that was more than three times oversubscribed. In another boost for the euro zone, Portugal returned to the long-term bond markets for the first time since its bailout in 2011, issuing five-year notes.