Business week in pictures

A man is reflected in the window of a foreign exchange bureau in Paris. Stock markets around the world plunged after Standard & Poor's cut Greece's credit rating to junk status and downgraded its view of Portugal in the clearest evidence yet that the European sovereign debt crisis is spreading
Photograph: Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images

Pedestrians in Athens walk past posters calling for a general strike against strict austerity measures imposed by Greek government. Rescuing the Greek economy could require a €150bn (£130bn) bailout over the next three years, according to Goldman Sachs, but this would be politically impossible for European leaders to swallow
Photograph: Orestis Panagiotou/EPA

German chancellor Angela Merkel addresses a press conference. As the European debt crisis escalated, fears that Britain could become embroiled in Europe's deepening financial crisis intensified after Spain had its debt downgraded, Portugal announced tougher austerity measures and Germany questioned whether beleaguered Greece should ever have been allowed to join monetary union
Photograph: Michael Gottschalk/AFP/Getty Images

A news stand in Lisbon, Portugal. As markets looked for the next European domino to be toppled by Greece's debt crisis this week, all eyes turned to Portugal – a country that has become relatively poorer, in European terms, over the past decade
Photograph: Francisco Leong/AFP/Getty Images

Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of the Goldman Sachs Group, pushes away a television camera after testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and governmental affairs investigations subcommittee on Capitol Hill. The besieged Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs, which is fighting a $1bn (£650m) fraud prosecution, faced hours of attacks by angry lawmakers for putting its own profits before clients' interests as it dispensed complex mortgage-backed securities branded as 'shitty' by its own traders
Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Fabrice Tourre, executive director of Structured Products Group Trading at the Goldman Sachs Group, testifies on Capitol Hill. The Senate hearing heard Goldman Sachs trader Fabrice Tourre likened his investment vehicle to Frankenstein's monster turning against its investor
Photograph: Astrid Riecken/EPA

Protesters gather outside the US Capitol building in Washington to demand financial reform on Capitol Hill. America's major banks are pouring millions of dollars into an apparently successful attempt to weaken Barack Obama's finance reform bill, currently stalled in Congress by Republican opposition. In the face of deep public anger over the financial crisis and government bailouts, banks have flooded Congress with lobbyists seeking to curtail key parts of the sweeping regulatory bill
Photograph: Astrid Riecken/EPA

A boat works to collect oil that has leaked from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico. BP has smashed City forecasts with a 135% jump in profits, thanks to rising oil prices. But BP's strong performance was overshadowed by the explosion last week at a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven people are missing and presumed dead after Deepwater Horizon, hired by BP and owned by US firm Transocean, caught fire and sank
Photograph: Chris Graythen/Getty Images

A Royal Dutch Shell refinery, considered for purchase by the Essar Group, operates in Hamburg, Germany. Royal Dutch Shell also announced a 49% surge in first quarter profits as the energy giant joined rival BP in benefiting from higher oil prices. The Anglo-Dutch group reported earnings of $4.9bn (£3.2bn) for the first three months of the year - a day after BP posted a figure of $5.6bn
Photograph: Michele Tantussi/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Lloyds Banking Group surprised the market by revealing it had a made a profit in the first three months of the year – earlier then expected – after bad debt charges slowed and its costs were cut as it continued to merge the HBOS business with its Lloyds TSB operations
Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Stephen Hester, CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, arrives to attend the company's AGM in Edinburgh. Royal Bank of Scotland has given the clearest signal yet that it will need to change the bonus scheme of chief executive Stephen Hester because of the rise in the bank's share price
Photograph: Derek Blair/AFP/Getty Images

A pedestrian outside the headquarters of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in Canary Wharf. Commerzbank in London has been fined £595,000 for failing to comply with rules designed to stamp out financial crime. The German bank failed to submit correct reports linked to 1.3m transactions, according to a damning submission from the FSA
Photograph: Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The owner of Argos plans to pump £70m into modernising the British catalogue chain after profits fell more than 10% in the face of intensifying price competition from supermarket groups Asda and Tesco. Home Retail Group (HRG) chief executive Terry Duddy said 2009 had been the toughest trading environment in a decade in charge of the business, which also owns Homebase
Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters

Pharmaceuticals group GlaxoSmithKline revealed that bumper sales of the swine flu vaccine helped to boost profits by 16%. A 13% surge in H1N1 vaccine sales to £698m lifted first quarter revenues to a better than expected £7.4bn
Photograph: David Sillitoe for The Guardian