Business week in pictures

Chinese premier Wen Jiabao has pledged to boost government spending but dashed hopes of a new stimulus plan to fuel the world's third-largest economy Photograph: Guang Niu/Getty Images

Tesco has won an appeal against a proposal from competition watchdogs which could have severely restricted the number of new stores it can open Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

The credit crunch is hitting the income of the world's poorest people the most and will make the UN's Millennium Development Goals more difficult to achieve than ever Photograph: Andrew Biraj/Reuters

HSBC helped drag the stockmarket to six-year lows after embarking on a record-breaking £12.5bn cash call and admitting that it had lost the entire £10.7bn it had spent on its 'catastrophic investment' in the US sub-prime mortgage market Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP

Premier Foods, the company behind Bisto gravy and Hovis bread, is cutting its debt mountain by launching a £404m rights issue and teaming up with a private equity firm Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

The Bank of England cut interest rates by half a point to another record low and begun the process of pumping tens of billions of pounds of newly created money into Britain's troubled economy Photograph: Carl De Souza/AFP/Getty

The crisis-stricken insurance company AIG crashed £43bn into the red with the biggest corporate loss in US history after being crippled by policies protecting troubled banks against default on loans and derivatives Photograph: Stephen Chernin/EPA

About 80,000 long-suffering British shareholders in Eurotunnel got their first dividend since the company floated in 1987 Photograph: Jacques Langevin/Corbis

The world's most secretive tax havens are to be prised open after Barack Obama's new administration endorsed far-reaching legislation to crack down on them Photograph: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images

Shares across the insurance sector plunged after Britain's largest insurer, Aviva, admitted its investments had been hit by the financial crisis and sharp declines in world stockmarkets Photograph: AFP/Getty Images