Early in 1907, Paul Warburg, a German born American banker warned in a piece published in the New York Times Annual Financial Review, that without a properly structured central bank, the U.S. would undergo the most severe and far reaching money panic in its history.

FORBES: How The Fed Came To Be

Paul Donovan, an economist at Warburg Dillon Read, has tried to quantify all this.

ECONOMIST: Financial markets and the euro

"I would interpret these deals as Iraq desperately trying not to lose what little support they may still have left after their recent hardline attitude towards Lukoil, " said Paul Collison, an energy analyst at Brunswick UBS Warburg in Moscow.

BBC: Russia strikes Iraq oil deal