Business this week

Stockmarkets swooned around the world in reaction to the nuclear crisis in Japan. In Tokyo the Nikkei index fell by almost 11% in one day. With one of the worst debt positions among industrialised countries, the cost of insuring against default on Japanese sovereign debt soared. Tokyo Electric Power Company, one of the world's biggest energy providers, which operates the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear-power facility, saw its share price slump, raising questions about its viability. See article

The ripple effects

Prices fell sharply on a wide range of commodities amid worries that the disaster in Japan could hurt trade in East Asia and beyond. But the spot price of liquefied natural gas increased when supplies were diverted to Japan to make up for the shortfall in nuclear power. Prices also rose for microchips, as many Japanese manufacturers of the components remained closed.

At a summit in Brussels the leaders of euro-zone countries agreed to beef up the bail-out facility for the currency block. Greece won a modest reduction in the interest rate it is paying on its loans, but Ireland received no such concession because it insisted on keeping its low corporate-tax rate. See article

Deutsche Bank revealed that its exposure to risk from sovereign debt in the euro area more than doubled at the end of last year, to €12 billion ($17 billion), because of its takeover of Postbank. Germany's biggest bank also said it was selling its twin-tower Frankfurt headquarters, dubbed Soll und Haben (debit and credit), to a mutual fund for €600m.

It emerged that regulators in America, Britain and Japan have launched an inquiry into the procedure for setting the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) that banks refer to when making loans to one another. The interest rate is supervised by the British Bankers' Association, which asks a panel of global banks what it would cost them to borrow funds for certain times and in ten currencies. The LIBOR was a gauge of market stress during the financial crisis, but critics argue that the method for setting the rate can be manipulated.

Oh, Renault!

Renault faced a storm of criticism over its botched internal investigation into an alleged case of company espionage. The carmaker sacked three senior executives earlier this year, claiming they had sold information about the company's electric-car business. It apologised to the men this week after French prosecutors found that a crucial piece of evidence had been falsified. Carlos Ghosn, Renault's chief executive, said that he and his chief operating officer, who offered to resign, would forgo their performance bonuses because of the imbroglio.

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway agreed to buy Lubrizol, a specialty-chemical company that produces additives for engine oil, among other things, in a $9.7 billion deal. With $38 billion in cash on hand, analysts expect Mr Buffett's company to make more sizeable acquisitions.

A joint venture formed by Carlyle Group and Tiger Group Investments, which is based in Hong Kong, launched one of the biggest private-equity financing deals to date in shipping. The venture will spend more than $5 billion on new container ships and work with Seaspan, an independent lessor, to lease the vessels to Chinese companies. The deal underscores the revival in shipping. Last month, Denmark's Maersk Line ordered at least ten new jumbo-sized container ships.

As expected, Hewlett-Packard unveiled plans to expand into cloud-computing services, in which data are stored and run directly from the web. HP has hitherto concentrated on selling the servers on which the data in the cloud are held.

The lingering weakness of America's housing market was ever more apparent with the release of data showing that construction starts of new homes had plummeted by 22.5% in February compared with January, the steepest fall since 1984. The number of building permits issued fell to the lowest level in 40 years.

Keep it to yourself

Microsoft released a new version of Internet Explorer, which includes a tracking- protection feature to give users more control over personal information that is shared with websites. Meanwhile, the White House threw its weight behind a push to establish tougher rules on the gathering of data on the web in a mooted “privacy bill of rights”. See article

PepsiCo announced that it had developed the world's first bottle to be made entirely of a plastic consisting of plant-based materials, which can be fully recycled. Its “green bottle” is composed of switch grass, pine bark and corn husk. Pepsi hopes to produce bottles in the future using orange and potato peels and other by-products from food.