Washington  - Timothy Geithner, a career civil servant heavily involved in current efforts to bring stability to the crumbling US financial system, offers a large degree of continuity as president-elect Barack Obama's Treasury secretary.

Geithner, who was named to the post Monday, has been battling the current credit crisis for more than a year as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Come January, he will be in charge of rescuing the United States from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Since the US mortgage market collapse sent Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc into bankruptcy in September, Geithner has become a key player in the government's attempts to halt the downward spiral of the US financial system.

London  - The British government Monday unveiled plans to cut Value Added Tax (VAT) as part of a massive fiscal and financial package of 20 billion pounds (30 billion dollars) to stimulate the economy in the face of a looming recession.

The measures are expected to push government borrowing to 78 billion pounds this financial year and to 118 billion pounds in 2009, Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told parliament.

But he defended the Labour government's decision to respond to the impending recession by stimulating growth and increasing national debt to 8 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GdP) next year.

Stockholm  - The main stock exchanges in the Nordic region ended on a high note Monday, buoyed by the news of a US government plan to rescue banking giant Citigroup.

Paris  - France and Germany agree that lowering the Value Added Tax (VAT) is not an effective response to the economic crisis, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday.

Despite signs that a sharp economic contraction was taking hold, the two leaders also reaffirmed that they expected the European Union to hammer out an agreement this month on climate change.

"When we lower the VAT, what does that bring? Only lower prices. We think other measures, such as emphasizing innovation and research, would be more effective for our economies," Sarkozy told journalists after a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Washington  - The US government's decision to rescue banking giant Citigroup sent stocks soaring Monday, and President George W Bush said similar decisions to safeguard the financial system would be made again in the future, if required.

Citigroup, which lost more than 60 per cent of its value last week, bounced back 52 per cent Monday after the government agreed to give it 20 billion dollars from the
700-billion-dollar financial rescue plan, in exchange for stock with an 8 per cent dividend to the Treasury Department. The bank will face restrictions on executive pay and other areas under the deal.

London  - The British government Monday set out plans for a massive 20-billion-pound (30 billion dollars) programme to stimulate the economy as it heads for recession.

It proposed to cut value-added tax (VAT) on consumer goods from 17.5 per cent to 15 per cent until the end of 2009, and announced an increase in the top tax rate for higher earners to 45 per cent.

The measures were aimed at tackling the effects of an "unprecedented global crisis," the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, told parliament.

They would make sure that the economic downturn would be "shorter and shallower" than would have been the case otherwise.