Business week in pictures

Details of a motif on a door of Bank of England in the City of London. The City breathed a sigh of relief when investors turned out in force to buy government debt. The sale of £1.1bn of inflation-linked gilts was almost three times oversubscribed on Thursday. It contrasted with the auction the day before, when the government could not find enough buyers for its £1.75bn sale of 40-year government bonds - the first failure of a gilt auction in seven years. This cast doubt on the government's ability to borrow billions of pounds to lift the economy out of recession Photograph: Sang Tan/AP

The shadows of shoppers are cast on to the ground in Birmingham. The auction failure followed comments by Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, who warned that the deteriorating state of Britain's public finances ruled out a giveaway budget next month to boost the economy. In a move that allowed the Conservatives to claim that the bank backed their assertion that Britain could not spend its way out of recession, King told MPs that the chancellor needed to be 'cautious' about tax and spending measures that would lead to still higher borrowing Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters

Potatoes for sale at Inverness Street market in London. The government's key measure of inflation recorded a surprise rise as a plunging pound, a surge in food prices and the rising cost of beer, wine and spirits allayed City fears of deflation After declining for the past five months, the consumer prices index was up from 3% in January to 3.2% in February. An alternative measure of the cost of living, the retail prices index (RPI), fell by less than expected last month, from 0.1% to zero, but failed to turn negative as the City had predicted. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Concern about possible violence at next week's G20 summit heightened when the home of the former Royal Bank of Scotland chairman, Sir Fred Goodwin, was vandalised, leaving three windows shattered and the rear window of his black Mercedes smashed An anonymous email was sent to media organisations shortly after the attack threatening further action against "criminal" bank bosses Photograph: Murdo Macleod

An HSBC logo above a branch in London. Banking giant HSBC said another 1,200 of its UK staff could be made redundant following a review of the business that will see all calls from standard account customers answered overseas The firm, which employs around 58,000 people in the UK, said the cuts would hit backroom areas, with the majority in processing and operations, as well as finance, human resources and information technology. Customer service staff in HSBC branches will not be affected Photograph: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images

The global economy may be flirting with disaster but 11 of the world's top hedge fund managers still succeeded in taking home a combined total of nearly $10bn (£6.8bn) last year by outsmarting plunging financial markets. An annual ranking of the biggest moneymakers in the hedge fund industry was topped by Jim Simons, a chain-smoking 70-year-old mathematics professor whose sophisticated quantitative techniques for rapid-fire trading netted him $2.5bn (£1.7bn) Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

President Barack Obama showed a rare glimpse of anger during a nationally televised press conference at the White House when he was pressed over his slow response in the row over million-dollar bonuses to executives. Obama told journalists that the country and the world was going through an 'extraordinary crisis' and appealed for patience as it would take time to turn around 'the ocean liner that is the US' The president held the second prime-time press conference of his presidency after a difficult 10 days in which he has been forced on the defensive for apparently failing to anticipate the public backlash over the bonuses paid out at the insurance giant AIG Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

Songbird Estates, owner of more than half of London's Canary Wharf financial district, warned that plunging property values could put it near the limits of its banking covenants. Songbird said it had appointed advisers to negotiate a debt restructuring deal to ease pressure from creditors, who can push a company into administration if covenants (loan conditions) are breached Photograph: Kieran Doherty/Reuters

Erotic lingerie firm Agent Provocateur said it was 'going from strength to strength' as Britons kept recession at bay in the bedroom. The company has increased sales by 8% since the end of March last year, despite the growing pressure on retailers elsewhere Photograph: Axel Schmidt/AFP