Moody's held its French credit rating at Aa1 Friday but maintained a negative outlook, days after President Francois Hollande announced a batch of business-friendly measures to fire up growth.

The U.S. agency affirmed the bond rating one notch below the top AAA rating.

Apple is considering launching a mobile-payments service for its iPhone and iPad, which would compete with major players such as PayPal, The Wall Street Journal said Friday.

The newspaper, citing sources familiar with the matter, said Eddy Cue, Apple's iTunes and App Store chief, "has met with industry executives to discuss Apple's interest in handling payments for physical goods and services on its devices."

The risk of a hard landing for the economy in China as well as the threat of military conflict with Japan stoked fears at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Friday.

Days after the world's second-largest economy registered its worst rate of growth for more than a decade, top politicians and economists at the annual gathering of the global elite said the near-term outlook was bleak.

International credit rating agency Fitch affirmed Friday the top-notch triple-A rating on Germany's sovereign debt and said the outlook was stable.

"Germany continues to have the components of a declining public debt path. The economy is growing, the budget position is relatively favorable and nominal interest rates are low," Fitch said in a statement.

A U.S. judge has ordered Chinese units of the "Big Four" global accounting firms to be suspended from auditing U.S.-traded companies for six months, saying they had "willfully violated" U.S. laws.

The 112-page ruling by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) administrative law judge Cameron Elliot could temporarily leave more than 100 Chinese companies quoted on U.S. markets without an auditor and unable to trade.

The price of oil edged up Friday for a fifth day in a row on expectations for increased demand.

Benchmark U.S. crude for March delivery was up 22 cents to $97.54 a barrel at 0620 GMT in electronic trading on the U.S. Mercantile Exchange. Oil rose 59 cents to $97.32 on Thursday.

Kuwait's cabinet on Thursday approved a draft budget for the 2014-2015 fiscal year projecting a 1.62 billion-dinar ($5.7 billion, 4.2 billion euro) deficit for the oil-rich Gulf State.

The OPEC member has projected a deficit in each of the past 14 fiscal years but ended each year in the black, accumulating more than $300 billion in budget surplus.

The beleaguered Turkish lira recovered from alltime lows on Thursday after the central bank intervened in foreign exchange markets directly for the first time in two years.

The lira tumbled to 3.1061 to the euro and 2.2909 to the dollar in early trade but recovered to 3.0994 and 2.2688 by midday after the central bank action.

China's fiscal deficit came in at 1.06 trillion yuan ($175 million) last year, just 1.8 percent of the country's gross domestic product and lower than planned in the budget, official data showed Thursday.

The central government's fiscal revenue rose 10.1 percent to 12.91 trillion yuan, the Ministry of Finance said in a statement, with expenditure up 10.9 percent to 13.97 trillion yuan.

Chinese computer giant Lenovo will buy IBM's low-end server business for $2.3 billion, it said Thursday, giving it a platform to compete in that sector with U.S. giants Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

IBM will receive $2.07 billion in cash and the rest in shares for the x86 business, Lenovo said, in a deal seen as helping the Chinese firm diversify away from the slumping PC-sales sector.