Yields on Britain's 10-year gilts at one point jumped 13.5 basis points to 2.5% - their highest level since October 2011 - mirroring a rise in borrowing costs across Europe. Investors have been selling off bonds and other assets after the Federal Reserve indicated last week that it could start scaling back stimulus measures.

Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, heralded the end of an era of easy money when he said that if America’s economic health improves as expected, the Fed’s asset purchases would be scaled back later this year and end completely next summer.

Since it was the first journey of the honored guest to Ukraine, his chief purpose was to meet with the Greek, Latin, and Armenian Catholic communities and their respective leaders in a country that John Paul II had called “a laboratory of ecumenism” during his pastoral visit in June 2001. Cardinal Koch spent two days in Kyiv, the capital, then traveled on Saturday to Lviv in Galicia (Western Ukraine), a Catholic stronghold, and finally on Monday to Uzhorod and Mukachevo, near the border with Slovakia and Hungary.

Cardinal Koch is also the co-chairman of the Mixed Commission for Theological Dialogue between Catholic and Orthodox Churches. In that capacity he held talks, during his visit, with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church leader, Metropolitan Volodymyr, of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC MP), and other representatives of that Church. He also learned about the inter-confessional fellowship that takes place within the framework of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations, and about the work of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv.

On June 10, in a lecture at Ukrainian Catholic University, he explained that: “from the Orthodox point of view, the Church is present in every local church that celebrates the Eucharist, so each Eucharistic community is a complete church. Instead, from the Catholic point of view, a separate Eucharistic community is not a complete church. Therefore, a basis of the Catholic Church is the unity of separate Eucharistic communities with each other and the bishop of Rome. That is, the Catholic Church lives in the mutual intersection of local churches in one Universal Church”.

Anyone who considers himself a faithful Christian has no right not to remember the Commandment that Christ gave to the apostles at the Last Supper, saying: “Father, that all may be one, as You are in Me and I in You, so that they be united in Us, so that the world may come to believe that You sent Me.” The Head of the Church Himself says that evangelization can be successful only when there is a deep-felt unity among Christians.

A number of US news websites had reported in the past two days that a group of US soldiers will be deployed to Egypt in the near future for a nine-month peacekeeping mission aimed at "curbing riots … if protests and riots reach the point of threatening Israel's security."

"We are providing this clarification as we respect the right of the great Egyptian people to know the truth from its original sources and to prevent distortion of information by any instigators," Ali added. News of the US troop deployment started to raise controversy coming a week before opposition-backed anti-government protests scheduled for 30 June aimed at the removal of President Mohamed Morsi.

That the implication behind said warning was that QE can not continue at the current pace, was just as lost. A few short weeks later following the biggest plunge in markets since 2011 in the aftermath of Bernanke's taper tantrum, some are finally willing to listen.

However, they will certainly not like what the BIS just released as a follow up, both in the form of the BIS' 83rd Annual Report, and the speech by Jaime Caruana to commemorate said annual meeting. For the simple reason that it reads like a Zero Hedge sermon, which says, almost verbatim, that the days of kicking the can via flawed monetary policy are now over, and that the time for central banks to head for the exit has finally come.

The BIS message, as summarized by the FT, is that "central banks must head for the exit and stop trying to spur a global economic recovery... cheap and plentiful central bank money had merely bought time, warning that more bond buying would retard the global economy’s return to health by delaying adjustments to governments’ and households’ balance sheets."

Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience builds on a World Bank report released late last year, which concluded the world would warm by 4 degrees Celsius (4°C or 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century if we did not take concerted action now. This new report looks at the likely impacts of present day, 2°C and 4°C warming on agricultural production, water resources, coastal ecosystems and cities across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and South East Asia.

Carney, Bank of Canada (BoC) governor until earlier this month, may be celebrated as a policy innovator but, as his old BoC colleague David Longworth points out, in the UK “there’s not much left for him to try”. Interest rates have been at a historic low of 0.5% for more than four years, the BoE has bought a third of the national debt to the tune of £375 billion, banks are being plied with cheap credit, and taxpayers are underwriting risky mortgages.

In one sense, Carney is woefully underprepared for the challenges that will greet him on his arrival next week. Canada’s experience of the financial car crash of 2008 was as innocent bystander. The UK, in contrast, was at the wheel and travelling way over the speed limit. Britain’s banks were operating at leverage ratios of as high as 80 times. Canada’s regulators had set a limit of 21 times – lower even than the UK post-crisis standard of 33 times.

“There is a risk that poor communication could lead to stimulus being inadvertently withdrawn too soon,” Osborne [the British Finance Minister] said. “More clarity about the future path of interest rates could help keep financial markets more stable.” With the economy “out of intensive care”, as Osborne put it, market sentiment could change rapidly – pushing up government borrowing costs and making lending for households and businesses more expensive. “Guidance”, in the form of a “conditional commitment”, could smooth the transition, controlling the markets to ensure rates only rose once the economy was strong enough to bear it – “escape velocity”, in Carney’s language.

If the economic data continue to surprise, Carney may have to devise a plan sooner than he expected. Either way, QE exit will be his greatest challenge of all.

In our cover piece this week, Ross Clark explains why the chancellor’s reputation as a mad axeman is wholly undeserved: public spending is projected to rise by £2.6 billion in real terms this year. Even public sector pay, which Osborne is supposed to have "frozen", has climbed from £165 billion in 2009/10 to £171 billion.

Why spend £500 million (over the last three years) to send the offspring of diplomats and military officers to public school? Why do civil servants get a £75 evening dress allowance? Osborne, contrary to his protestations, has dodged every “tough decision”, putting off until tomorrow what he had to do today.

The official Saudi Press Agency said late Sunday that a royal decree takes effect this week after an advisory body in April recommended changing from the current system, in which the two-day weekend begins Thursday. A similar proposal in 2007 failed, but the Saudi business community has been lobbying for the switch for years to match the schedule in main regional commercial hubs, such as Dubai. Oman switched to Friday-Saturday weekends last month. Most other countries in the Gulf start their weekends Friday, the Muslim day of communal prayer.

One drug company executive said it was a “hallelujah” moment when the NHS announced in 2011 how much it was prepared to pay for common prescription drugs – because the price cap was so high. A Daily Telegraph investigation discloses that high street chemists are being offered all-expenses paid holidays throughout the world by drug companies desperate to profit from the lucrative NHS business. The price for the drugs are set by the NHS, but patients only have to pay a standard fee of up to £7.85 with the taxpayer funding the remainder of the cost, which can run into hundreds of pounds per prescription.

The disclosure that the system of regulated drugs is being exploited for excessive profit comes after this newspaper reported that drug companies and chemists stand accused of colluding to manipulate the sale of unregulated drugs. Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, ordered an investigation into the allegations, which he described as “deeply concerning”.

In just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal - an event called singularity - according to a futurist from Google. Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, also claims that the biological parts of our body will be replaced with mechanical parts and this could happen as early as 2100.

Kurweil made the claims during his conference speech at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York at the weekend. The conference was created by Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov and featured visonary talks about how the world will look by 2045. Kurzweil said: 'Based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold.'

He referred to Moore's Law that states the power of computing doubles, on average, every two years quoting the developments from genetic sequencing and 3D printing. This singularity is also referred to as digital immortality because brains and a person's intelligence will be digitally stored forever, even after they die.

In one recent image a smiling Rouhani was portrayed in his mullah's robes and turban, holding out an old-fashioned key to a door with an unmistakably digital lock. It was a witty way of suggesting that for all the excitement, solving Iran's problems could be beyond him. Rouhani, 64, is most often described as a moderate rather than reformist leader. But he is also a senior cleric with impeccable revolutionary credentials who has been an adviser to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and held highly sensitive posts in parliament and the regime.

Intriguingly, he served for two years as chief negotiator on the vexed issue of Iran's nuclear programme, at the heart of the country's tense confrontation with the west and the source of the sanctions that are crippling its economy – and was defrocked in 2005 for being too accommodating.

Ben Bernanke's super low interest rate policies have systematically pushed investors into stocks and real estate over the past several years because there were few other places where they could get decent returns. As this trade unwinds (and it will likely not be in an orderly fashion), we are going to see unprecedented carnage.

Stocks, ETFs, home prices and municipal bonds will all be devastated. And of course that will only be the beginning. What we are ultimately looking at is a sell off very similar to 2008, only this time we will have to deal with rising interest rates at the same time. The conditions for a "perfect storm" are rapidly developing, and if something is not done we could eventually have a credit crunch unlike anything that we have ever seen before in modern times.

At the moment, perhaps the most important number in the financial world is the yield on 10 year US Treasuries. A lot of investors are really concerned about how rapidly it has been rising.

Sadly, most Americans have absolutely no idea how vulnerable the financial system is. Most Americans have absolutely no idea that our system of finance is a house of cards built on a foundation of risk, debt and leverage. Most Americans have complete and total faith that our leaders know what they are doing and are fully capable of keeping our financial system from collapsing. In the end, most Americans are going to be bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

The agreement was signed by Rosneft chief executive Igor Sechin and CNPC head Zhou Jiping in the presence of Putin and visiting Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli. "An estimated value of the contract in current market parameters is absolutely unprecedented - 270 billion dollars," Putin told participants of the annual Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum.

Putin has made a priority of stabilising Russia's sometimes prickly relations with its giant eastern neighbour at a time when its ties with the West are becoming ever more problematic.

This was nowhere more obvious than in the impression he tried to convey that he was taking the lead in proposing a historic “free-trade deal” between the USA and the EU. But all this called for some rather severe correctives.

For a start, China and India might have had something to say about the BBC’s claim that this was a meeting of “the eight most powerful countries in the world”. Then it was not so much a “G8” as a “G8 plus Two”, as we saw from the prominent presence, alongside President Obama and the rest, of those two spectres at the feast, Presidents José Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy of the EU.

Third, and rather more significantly, Mr Cameron, as Prime Minister of the UK, has no direct status in this deal at all, since trade is an exclusively EU competence. The negotiations are to be conducted by Mr Barroso and the European Commission, not by any mere member state.

Fourth, what is being proposed is not just an EU-US deal but something much wider: between on one side, not just the EU but also the European Free Trade Area (Efta), including Norway and, on the other, not just the US but also Canada and Mexico, as members of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

Fifth, what is being proposed is not so much a “free-trade area” as a deal allowing trade between the two groups of countries subject to the harmonising of tens of thousands of regulations. This will require years of negotiations, which will be so complex and intractable that a deal may never come off at all.

It is hard to conceive, for instance, that any agreement could be reached between the powerful and highly protectionist farming lobbies on both sides. US agribusiness would find it impossible to accede to the EU’s strict animal welfare rules. The EU, so suspicious of GM, will scarcely welcome a flood of meat and cereal products made much cheaper by America’s wholesale embrace of genetic modification.

As bitter rivals in the world airline market, the US and European aviation industries have long been embattled over their rival state-subsidy schemes, each side claiming the other’s to be illegal. EU manufacturers will not be enthused by an influx of all those manufactured goods made competitive by much lower US energy costs, thanks to shale gas. The list of issues on which negotiations could founder goes on and on.