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In the current credit market where access to syndicated loans to finance large transactions remains limited, one of the few places that deals are getting done in the U.S. is in the middle market, according to the Transaction Services group of PricewaterhouseCoopers. For the first half of 2009, 135 middle market deals were announced with an aggregate deal value of $39.2 billion. "As in the last recession, it's the smaller transactions that are getting financed because deals of that size don't require assistance from the capital markets or the structuring of highly leveraged loans," said Robert Filek, a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers' Transaction Services practice.

VRC (Valuation Research Corporation), a leading provider of valuations and value-related advisory services, recently completed a survey of financial professionals’ views on Fair Value Accounting (FVA), also known as mark-to-market accounting. The survey found a majority believed that market turmoil and the collapse of active markets for many assets caused implementation issues in Fair Value Accounting.

Reduced revenues will drive credit card issuers to introduce cards with annual fees to consumers in the near future, according to Auriemma Consulting Group, a management consulting firm that serves the cards and payments industry. Cards without annual fees will not feature rewards and will only offer cardholders basic benefits.

Business Climate Survey results in whole country showed that the national business climate index (BCI) was 115.9 in the second quarter, boomed 10.3 points quarter-on-quarter.

comScore, Inc. released an overview of the online gaming category among U.S. Internet users, which showed a significant increase in the size of its audience during the past year as consumers increasingly opt for cheaper entertainment alternatives, driven in part by the reality of economic challenges. The category attracted 87 million U.S. visitors in May 2009, up 22 percent versus year ago.

The unemployment rate for the OECD area was 8.3% in May 2009, 0.3 percentage point higher than the previous month and 2.4 percentage points higher than a year earlier.

The European Commission and industry announced the first round of research calls for proposals injecting €268million in three key market areas in order to trigger economic recovery and make it more sustainable and knowledge-based. A total of €3.2 billion has been earmarked for European public-private partnerships (PPPs) dedicated to develop new technologies in manufacturing, construction and the automotive sectors. These collaborations between the Commission and the industry will foster global competitiveness for European businesses, bring down the excessive energy consumption of Europe's buildings that make up one-third of EU CO 2 emissions, and develop new and sustainable forms of road transport.

The European Commission has put forward a further revision of EU rules on capital requirements for banks that is designed to tighten up the way in which banks assess the risks connected with their trading book; impose higher capital requirements for re-securitisations; increase market confidence through stronger disclosure requirements for securitisation exposures; and require banks to have sound remuneration practices that do not encourage or reward excessive risk-taking.

"I spent the better part of the last two weeks talking with economists from around the world. Although the content of those meetings is confidential, I can share my general conclusions about what the meetings suggest about the state of the global recession, the outlook for financial markets, and the world that we are likely to see emerge on the other side of the crisis," says Diane Swonk, chief economist of Mesirow Financial, in her special international edition of Themes on the Economy.

In the first half of 2009 a total of 413,000 counterfeit euro banknotes were withdrawn from circulation. This is an increase of around 17% on the quantity recovered in the previous six months.