Washington  - US President Barack Obama went on the road Friday hoping to tout the success of his economic recovery plan by addressing a group of police cadets in Ohio whose jobs were saved by the funding in his stimulus package.

Obama appeared in the city of Columbus, where officials are facing a 13-million-dollar budget shortfall and had informed the graduating class that they would not be able to join the police force. Their jobs were saved after the city secured 4 million dollars from the stimulus package.

Budapest  - The Hungarian forint continued its downward spiral, hitting a new record low of 317.45 against the euro in early trading on Friday.

Although in afternoon trading the currency firmed to around 313 against the euro, this latest dip is worrying news for one of the EU's most fragile economies.

The weakening forint is bad news for ordinary Hungarians, who face increasing monthly repayments on foreign currency mortgages and loans. The forint was trading at around 250 to the euro last summer, before Hungary was hit hard by the global financial crisis.

Washington  - The world should adopt economic stimulus plans that carry well into 2010, and possibly 2011, to ease a global recession and must expand financial regulation across all sectors to prevent a similar crisis in future, the International Monetary Fund said in a series of reports released Friday.

The IMF warned that the world economic crisis was showing no signs of letting up, and urged greater international coordination ahead of a G20 summit next month in London of the world's leading economies.

Tokyo - Japan's foreign exchange reserves dropped 1.6 billion dollars in February after the US Treasury bond prices and the appraisal value of the nation's euro-dominated assets fell, the Finance Ministry said Friday.

The nation's foreign reserves fell for the second month in a row but remained barely above the 1-trillion-dollar level with 1.0093 trillion dollars.

As of the end of February, Japan held 892.34 billion dollars in foreign securities, while foreign currency deposits came to 87.81 billion dollars.

Washington  - Lenders are taking back homes in the United States at a record pace as families can't afford mortgage payments, according to an industry report Thursday indicating the country's housing crisis deepened further at the end of last year.

The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said 3.3 per cent of all mortgage-holders were in foreclosure at the end of 2008 - up 126 per cent from a year ago - and 7.88 per cent were behind on at least one monthly payment.

Both numbers were the highest ever recorded since MBA's records began in 1972.

London  - The Bank of England (BoE) Thursday applied the twin tools of interest rate cuts and a boost in the money supply to revive the recession-hit economy.

The bank's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) cut the key lending rate by 50 basis points to 0.5 per cent and injected an initial 75 billion pounds (105 billion dollars) into the economy through so- called quantitative easing.

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said the injection of liquidity was "absolutely essential to get the economy moving."