07.52 Miner BHP Billiton has cut bonuses to its top executives to "more closely align the experience of shareholders and executives." The new chief executive Andrew Mackenzie gave up shares worth nearly £1m. 07.40 The Independent reports this morning that Tesco is in talks to take over Hong Kong's leading supermarket chain, ParknShop with its Chinese partner, China Resources Enterprise. ParknShop is currently owned by Hutchinson Whampoa, the Hong Kong conglomerate headed up by Li Ka-shing, who tops Forbes' Asia rich list. 07.27 Tokyo's Nikkei has surged overnight to close up 2.21pc, rising as much as 3.06pc during the session. Stocks enjoyed a boost from upbeat signals from the US and eurozone, where surveys of manufacturing and services firms pointed to economic growth. A weaker yen also bolstered exporters' stocks, helping lift the index. 07.18 It's not just Brazil where central banks and government's are scrambling to save falling currencies. As Ambrose Evans-Prtichard writes in this morning's Telegraph, an emerging market rout is threatening the global economy right now. The $9 trillion (£5.8 trillion) accumulation of foreign bonds by the rising powers of Asia, Latin America and the emerging world risks going into reverse as one country after another is forced to liquidate holdings to shore up its currency, threatening to inflict a credit shock on the global economy. A string of countries have been burning foreign reserves to defend exchange rates, with holdings down 8pc in Ecuador, 6pc in Kazakhstan and Kuwait, and 5.5pc in Indonesia in July alone. Turkey's reserves have dropped 15pc this year. "Emerging markets are in the eye of the storm," said Stephen Jen at SLJ Macro Partners. Their currencies are in grave danger. These things always overshoot. 07.05 In Brazil, the central bank has unveiled a $60bn intervention to support the country's tumbling currency, which is languishing at five-year lows against the US dollar. The four-month programme, which launches today, will see the bank sell $500m of currency swaps, contracts which provide investors with a hedge against a weaker Brazilian real, on Mondays through Thursdays. On Fridays, it will offer $1bn on the spot market through repurchase agreements. Both are designed to prevent companies and individuals with dollar obligations from scrambling to the market at the same time, afraid that waiting will force them to pay more to buy dollars. When that happens, the real tends to weaken further and faster. The move follows a day of crisis meetings in Brazil in which Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's president, held an emergency meeting on Thursday with her top economic officials to halt the real's slide after it hit a five-year low against the dollar. The central bank chief, Alexandre Tombini, meanwhile, cancelled his trip to the Fed's Jackson Hole conclave in order "to monitor market activity" amid reports Brazil is preparing direct intervention to stem capital flight. "They are moving currency intervention off balance sheet, but the net position is deteriorating all the time," said Danske Bank's Lars Christensen. Photo: Bloomberg