U.S. stock index futures pointed to a slightly higher open on Wall Street on Friday, with futures for the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones up 0.2 percent and Nasdaq futures up 0.3 percent at 4:41 a.m. EDT. Japan's Nikkei average dived 3 percent on Friday to log a seventh straight week of losses, its longest such run since the third quarter of 2001, as investors sold stocks and other risky assets on concerns over slowing global growth and a deepening euro zone crisis. Incoming French President Francois Hollande meets with U.S. ...

LONDON (Reuters) - The U.S. dollar climbed, world shares fell and German borrowing costs hit record lows on Friday as a deepening Spanish banking crisis, uncertainty about Greece's future in the euro zone and lackluster U.S. data provoked a rush for safe-haven assets. World stocks, as measured by the MSCI index, dropped 0.85 percent and are now below where they began the year, having relinquished all their first quarter gains which were fuelled by the European Central Bank's creation of more than a trillion euros of three-year money. ...

(Reuters) - Investors are bracing for Facebook's Wall Street debut on Friday after the world's No.1 online social network raised about $16 billion in one of the biggest initial public offerings in U.S. history. Valued at $104 billion, Facebook is larger than Starbucks Corp and Hewlett-Packard combined, sparking intense speculation on how much higher its valuation will rise once shares start trading. "A 15 to 20 percent pop is in the realm of possibility," said Tim Loughran, a finance professor at the University of Notre Dame. ...

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's borrowing costs shot up at a bond auction on Thursday and its troubled banks suffered a double blow, with shares in part-nationalized Bankia diving and 16 lenders - including the euro zone's biggest - having their credit ratings cut. Official data confirmed Spain was back in recession and a newspaper reported a big outflow of deposits from Bankia, but the government said it had taken a fundamental step to strengthen Spain's credibility by agreeing big budget cuts with the country's free-spending regions. ...

PARIS (Reuters) - Market turmoil over the euro zone crisis could last another 12 to 24 months, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said on Friday, saying it was up to the Greeks to decide if they wanted to stay in the single currency. Schaeuble said he was confident France's new Socialist government would ratify Europe fiscal pact because policymakers were working on a strategy to improve growth, as demanded by French President Francois Hollande. "Regarding the crisis of confidence in the euro ... ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Jamie Dimon has agreed to testify before Congress over the bank's recent trading losses, which have ignited a political debate over whether large U.S. banks need to be reined in by regulators or new laws. U.S. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson said in a statement on Thursday that his panel will invite Dimon to appear before Congress. ...

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's annual economic growth could slow to 7.5 percent in the second quarter, largely due to curbs on the property sector and headwinds from external demand, the State Information Center, a government think-tank, said in a report published on Friday. If the GDP forecast is accurate, growth in the second three months of 2012 would be the slowest since the first quarter of 2009, when the global economy was in the grip of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The forecast is in line with the government's official 2012 growth target of 7. ...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Shooting from the hip may have got Jamie Dimon into deep trouble -- shooting straight may help to get him out of it. The JPMorgan Chase & Co CEO made the crisis over the bank's trading loss of at least $2 billion far worse because he had assured financial markets back in April that news reports about massive bets the bank's Chief Investment Office had taken were "a tempest in a teapot". It meant that when the bank disclosed the big and probably growing loss on May 10, it not only had to admit a sizable problem, but also that it had been misleading investors. ...

DETROIT/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook may only have itself to blame for why General Motors rained on its IPO parade this week. GM announced the decision to drop Facebook paid ads on Tuesday in what was the first highly visible crack in Facebook's strategy and illustrated doubts about its perceived advantage over traditional media. GM's decision followed Facebook officials' failure to convince top marketing executives at the U.S. automaker of the benefits of Facebook's paid ads at a meeting that took place in the past few weeks, people familiar with the meeting said on Thursday. ...

QINGDAO, China (Reuters) - When metals warehouses in top consumer China are so full that workers start stockpiling iron ore in granaries and copper in car parks, you know the global economy could be in trouble. At Qingdao Port, home to one of China's largest iron ore terminals, hundreds of mounds of iron ore, each as tall as a three-storey building, spill over into an area signposted "grains storage" and almost to the street. ...

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's borrowing costs shot up at a bond auction on Thursday and its troubled banks suffered a double blow, with shares in part-nationalized Bankia diving and 16 lenders - including the euro zone's biggest - having their credit ratings cut. Official data confirmed Spain was back in recession and a newspaper reported a big outflow of deposits from Bankia, but the government said it had taken a fundamental step to strengthen Spain's credibility by agreeing big budget cuts with the country's free-spending regions. ...

MADRID (Reuters) - The Spanish government has hired Goldman Sachs to carry out an independent valuation of Bankia , the ailing bank taken over by the state last week, Spanish newspaper Expansion said on Friday. The U.S. bank will review Bankia's and its parent company BFA's books and determine within a month how much the state should inject to refloat the lender, which had to be rescued after its auditor, Deloitte, identified several gaps in last year's accounts. ...

(Reuters) - The legal team winding down MF Global's bankruptcy estate, led by former FBI director Louis Freeh, estimates the fees charged by the team and other professionals have reached nearly $25 million since the bankruptcy was filed in October. Now a customer group is planning to ask that the case be streamlined so that those professionals -- especially Freeh -- receive less and customers receive more. On Friday, a coalition of former MF Global customers plans to argue in U.S. ...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks hit a four-month low on Thursday as rising Spanish bond yields increased investor anxiety over that country's banks and another round of weak data undermined hopes for U.S. economic recovery. Growing worries over developments in the euro zone and lackluster economic data pushed the S&P's losing streak to five consecutive days. The index, which closed at a level not seen since mid-January, has now relinquished more than half of its gains from the first quarter. ...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Lloyd Blankfein, Warren Buffett and other well-known chieftains of corporate America might be called to testify at the insider trading trial starting on Monday of former Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Procter & Gamble Co director Rajat Gupta. Blankfein, who runs Goldman, and Buffett, who runs Berkshire Hathaway Inc , are among dozens of people that lawyers for the government and for Gupta said on Thursday might be mentioned or might testify at the trial, which is expected to last about three weeks. ...