Dell, the world's third-largest computer-maker, gave details of its plan to take itself private. Michael Dell, who started the company 30 years ago from his college room in Texas, is heading a buy-out consortium that includes Silver Lake, a private-equity firm, and Microsoft. If the $24.4 billion deal is successful it will be the biggest leveraged buy-out since the start of the financial crisis in 2007. Dell's share price has fallen by half over the past five years as the firm has struggled to make its mark in smartphones and tablets. One to watch Liberty Global, the international cable-television part of John Malone's media empire, agreed to buy Britain's Virgin Media in a merger they valued at $23.3 billion. The deal puts Mr Malone in direct competition with Rupert Murdoch, whose BSkyB is the biggest pay-TV broadcaster in Britain. America brought a $5 billion civil lawsuit against Standard & Poor's for dragging its feet over changes to its models before the financial crisis, which led to over-optimistic ratings of mortgage-backed securities. The government maintains that S&P was concerned about losing business. S&P says the case has no legal merit, and that "hindsight is no basis to take legal action against the good-faith opinions of professionals." The Irish government rushed through a bill to liquidate Anglo Irish Bank. It did this to pave the way for a deal it is trying to strike with the ECB to cut the cost of state support it has provided for the defunct bank in the form of promissory notes. The €3.1 billion ($4.2 billion) annual repayments on the notes are almost equivalent to Ireland's austerity cuts. The governor of the Bank of Japan, Masaaki Shirakawa, said he would step down on March 19th, nearly three weeks before his term in office is due to end. Mr Shirakawa has been under intense pressure from the new government to do more to tackle deflation and the strong yen. A new governor is expected to be named by the end of February. The People's Bank of China pumped 450 billion yuan ($72 billion) into money markets to hold down interbank lending rates ahead of the Chinese new year, when large amounts of cash are withdrawn by savers to buy gifts. It was the largest-ever one-day liquidity action conducted by the central bank. The Royal Bank of Scotland settled with regulators in America and Britain over the LIBOR rate-rigging scandal and will fork out £390m ($610m) in penalties. A subsidiary in Japan pleaded guilty to a criminal charge. RBS is recouping some of the money for the fines from staff bonuses. Meanwhile, George Osborne, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, sent a bill to Parliament to bring in most of the sweeping banking reforms recommended by the Vickers commission. In a fiery speech Mr Osborne said the message is clear: "If a bank flouts the rules, the regulator and the Treasury will have the power to break it up altogether, full separation, not just a ring fence." UBS reported a net loss of SFr1.9 billion ($2.1 billion) for the last quarter of 2012, as it set aside cash to pay fines related to its part in the LIBOR scandal (it settled with the authorities late last year). The Swiss bank also introduced a new bonus system that is intended to reduce risky behaviour by including payouts in bonds linked to its own capital levels. Getting older, not any wiser The independent Congressional Budget Office said it expects America's budget deficit to fall below $1 trillion in 2013 for the first time since 2008, to $845 billion. It also predicted that the deficit as a percentage of GDP would decline over the next few years, but then rise again as government spending swells on entitlement programmes for baby-boomers. The Moscow Exchange set a price range for its shares in its forthcoming IPO, which could see it valued as one of Europe's biggest bourses. It hopes its flotation will raise $500m, some of which will be put towards upgrading its technology systems in an attempt to lure Russian companies away from listing on foreign exchanges, notably London. Chinese regulators cleared HSBC's sale of a 16% stake in Ping An, an insurer, to a conglomerate run by Dhanin Chearavanont, a Thai-Chinese tycoon. The BRIC builder Goldman Sachs announced that Jim O'Neill is to retire from the bank. Mr O'Neill created the "BRICs" acronym in 2001 to sum up the rising influence of emerging economies (specifically Brazil, Russia, India and China). Since 2010 he has headed Goldman's asset-management division, which has always been a poor relation of its other businesses.