Boeing and flydubai announced Monday a firm order for 75 Boeing 737 MAX 8s and 11 Next-Generation 737-800s, the U.S. company's largest single-aisle airplane order in the Middle East.

The order is valued at $8.8 billion at list prices, the companies said in a statement. Aircraft orders are often negotiated at a discount.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Federal Reserve vice chair Janet Yellen to be the new head of the world's most powerful central bank Monday, the first woman ever to lead the Fed.

President Barack Obama's nominee earned bipartisan support in the bitterly divided chamber, but the vote was still closer than those for her predecessor Ben Bernanke, who steps down on January 31 after eight years in the job.

Switzerland's central bank said on Monday it lost billions in 2013 amid a sharp drop in gold prices and that it therefore would not pay dividends to Bern or the Swiss cantons.

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) said it expected to report a loss of 9.0 billion Swiss francs ($9.9 billion, 7.3 billion euros) in 2013, according to provisional figures.

The European Union is set to drop financial reforms that would force big banks to ringfence their retail departments from riskier investment operations, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

A draft European Commission paper, seen by the business paper, would no longer make banks automatically split operations and would give national supervisors more leeway in applying the reforms.

British finance minister George Osborne will warn that 2014 is to be the year of "hard truths" and public spending cuts when he sets out his plans for the year ahead on Monday.

He will tell an audience in central England that there is "still a long way to go" in reducing the public deficit, despite three years of austerity, according to extracts released by his office.

A Chinese tycoon said Monday he is serious about buying the New York Times and wants to work on "rebuilding its credibility and influence" by reforming its award-winning coverage of China.

Chen Guangbiao, listed as one of China's 400 richest people and a man known as much for his publicity stunts as his charitable giving, penned an op-ed in the state-run Global Times newspaper headlined: "I intend to buy The New York Times, please don't take it as a joke".

Cubans are eagerly flocking to Havana car dealerships as a new law takes effect eliminating a special permit requirement that has greatly restricted vehicle ownership in the country. To their dismay on Friday, the first day the law was in force, they found sharply hiked prices, some of them light years beyond all but the most well-heeled islanders.

A new Kia Rio hatchback that starts at $13,600 in the United States sells for $42,000 here, while a fresh-off-the-lot Peugeot 508 family car, the most luxurious of which lists for the equivalent of about $53,000 in the U.K., will set you back a cool $262,000.

Turkey's year-end inflation rate increased to 7.4 percent in December, official statistics showed on Friday, as the effects of a plunging lire began to take effect on household prices.

The rate was considerably higher that central bank forecast of 6.8 percent for 2013 and came a day after the Turkish currency touched a new low against the dollar.

The Labor Ministry says the number of people registered as unemployed in Spain fell by 107,570 in December, the best drop on record for the month and welcome news for an economy struggling to emerge from more than two years of recession.

The ministry said Friday the decrease left the country's total number of unemployed at about 4.7 million.

One of the largest producers of ammunition magazines for guns in the U.S. is leaving Colorado and moving operations to Wyoming and Texas because of new state laws that include restrictions on how many cartridges a magazine can hold.

Erie, Colorado-based Magpul Industries Corp. announced Thursday that it was moving its production, distribution and shipping operations to Cheyenne and its headquarters to Texas, making good on a vow it made to leave Colorado during last year's gun control debate.