Consumer prices in Hungary rose by 1.7 percent in April over 12 months, the lowest inflation rate since 1974, the national statistics office KSH said on Thursday.

The rate was down from a 2.2-percent in March.

Treasurer Wayne Swan vowed to keep Australia among the world's top economies and talked up his party's poll hopes Tuesday as he prepared to unveil a lean budget with little to offer a hostile electorate.

Swan's center-left Labor party is on track to lose September 14 elections in a landslide to the Tony Abbott-led conservatives according to opinion polls -- a prediction given weight on budget eve by independent lawmaker Tony Windsor.

European finance ministers bid Tuesday to unlock a trillion-euro annual crackdown on tax evasion, under pressure from EU leaders looking for new measures to boost job creation and growth at their Brussels summit next week.

The meeting is expected to be laborious, with Austrian seeking guarantees before agreeing to the automatic sharing of bank records and amid squabbling over the need for treaty change to fix a seemingly stalled banking union sold as the final fix for the debt crisis.

Bangladesh offers the global garment industry something unique: Millions of workers who quickly churn out huge amounts of well-made underwear, jeans and T-shirts for the lowest wages in the world.

But since a building collapse April 24 killed at least 1,100 garment workers in Bangladesh in one of the deadliest industrial tragedies in history, the country has gone from one of the industry's greatest assets to one of its biggest liabilities.

Iran is unhappy with the current oil prices, its oil minister said Monday, hinting at a proposal for the OPEC to lower its output to compensate for a drop in crude prices.

"Iran's suggestion has always been to reduce OPEC production ceiling," Rostam Qasemi told reporters at a petrochemical conference in Tehran.

Lloyds Banking Group said on Monday that chairman Winfried Bischoff will retire from the post by the middle of next year after overseeing a partial turnaround of the state-rescued British bank.

"The board of Lloyds Banking Group announces that its chairman since September 2009, Sir Winfried Bischoff, will be retiring no later than the shareholders meeting in May 2014. The exact date will be subject to the appointment of his successor," LBG said in a statement.

Japanese electronics giant Sharp will name a new president at its June shareholders' meeting, replacing its current chief after only a year in the job, the Nikkei business daily said Monday.

The struggling firm, which last year warned about its own survival, would name company veteran Kozo Takahashi as its new chief, the paper said.

Banks seized nearly 40,000 homes in Spain last year due to unpaid mortgages, official data showed Friday, as a sharp economic downturn and record unemployment took its toll.

A total of 39,167 homes were seized in 2012, the Bank of Spain said in a bulletin based on a survey of lenders which approve over 85 percent of mortgages in the country.

Bloomberg News said Friday it was curbing reporter access to certain data on its financial terminals after reports claiming its journalists used the devices to spy on Wall Street banks.

A Bloomberg spokesman acknowledged that "limited customer relationship data has long been available to our journalists," without "security-level" data, trading data or messages.

The Group of Seven top economies are set for a second day of talks on Saturday aimed at spurring growth amid U.S.-Europe divisions over the scale of austerity and renewed market focus on "currency wars" after the yen hit new dollar lows.

Our task is to nurture the recovery," British finance minister George Osborne said Friday as he opened the gathering amid pressure on Britain and other indebted European nations to scale back deep cuts to state spending, in order to support fragile growth.