RUSSIA: Russia's markets continued their fall after enjoying a brief recovery when they reopened from suspended trading -- a move by regulators to avert further damage. The RTS closed down 1 percent at 858.2 points after briefly breaching 900 points in the early afternoon. The MICEX dropped at one point in trading by 7.9 percent late afternoon but recovered most of its losses to close down also by 1 percent to 744.8 points. Efforts by the Russian government to prop up the country's troubled banking sector with cash injections did little to lift the markets.

JAPAN: Japanese shares dropped to the lowest in almost five years. The benchmark Nikkei 225 index lost 317.90 points, or 3.03 percent, to close at 10,155.90 -- its lowest since December 2003. The index at one point had tumbled more than 5 percent to 9,916.21 in the morning session, dropping under 10,000 for the first time in almost five years. But it managed to recover later in the day. Investors hardly reacted to the widely expected move by the Bank of Japan to leave its key interest rate unchanged at 0.5 percent.

ICELAND: Iceland nationalized its second-largest bank under day-old legislation and said it was negotiating a 4 billion euro ($5.4 billion) loan from Russia to shore up the nation's finances amid a full-blown financial crisis that had it on the brink of a national bankruptcy. The central bank also loaned 500 million euros ($680 million) to the country's biggest bank, to tide it through the crisis.

EUROPE: The European Union's 27 governments agreed to guarantee private savings of up to 50,000 euros for one year and set guidelines on how each country could rescue failing banks. But the EU failed to agree on a minimum bank guarantee of 100,000 euros because some smaller and poorer nations feared they could not cover such an amount.

BRITAIN: The Bank of England offered $10 billion in an overnight operation, the second day in a row that the bank offered short-term liquidity. Britain was the focal point of banking jitters with Royal Bank of Scotland Group shedding about 40 percent of its value amid ongoing liquidity and solvency concerns. Meanwhile, Lloyds TSB, which is in the process of taking over HBOS (Britain's largest mortgage lender), was down nearly 13 percent, while Barclays, which has denied it is asking for government funding, was 9 percent lower. HBOS itself was down 41 percent.

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