From his 33rd-floor penthouse apartment with sweeping views of the Nile River, Naguib Sawiris, Egypt’s best-known billionaire and most prominent Christian, can hear the chants of Friday prayers in the distance. As he sits down to a breakfast of taameya and ful, dishes made from fava beans, demonstrators are gathering in Cairo’s Tahrir Square for a planned protest, this time aimed at stopping military trials of thousands of civilians arrested during the revolution that brought down the regime of President Hosni Mubarak.

Nicolas Berggruen can’t sit still.

Kerry Stokes made his first billion dollars operating television stations and selling dump trucks in his native Australia. Now, he’s betting a chunk of that fortune on a bank that operates in the backwaters of rural China.

The Burger King hamburger chain made a dramatic decision in August. It dethroned the King -- the mascot who had danced through its advertising in various guises for more than 50 years. The marketing move was made by the struggling company’s new management, appointed after it was taken private in 2010 by 3G Capital Inc., a New York-based investment firm with roots in Brazil.

Neville Power gazes out the window of a chartered jet at the rust-red, mineral-rich Australian Outback.

Yoshihiro Murai, governor of Miyagi, the prefecture that was the ground zero of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, stands before a gathering in Tokyo of 300 representatives of Japan’s biggest companies and community organizations.

Iowa native Justin Bruch marveled at the opportunity when Morgan Stanley called in late 2007 to recruit him for an unusual assignment.

In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.

It’s a quiet September morning outside the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Liberty Street in downtown Manhattan.

On a cool July evening, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff hosts a cocktail party for 50 leaders of her governing coalition, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue. Speaking from the foot of a red-carpeted staircase in the living room of Alvorada Palace, where she lives with her mother and aunt, Rousseff tells the gathered politicians that these are the best times for Brazil, according to four people who attended.

Anthony Scaramucci fist bumps investors as he makes his way through a poolside party at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas on a May evening.

Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates LP, boasts 15 percent annualized returns over two decades for his main hedge fund and 25.3 percent this year (through Aug. 31) amid extraordinary economic turmoil. He runs more money than any of his macro rivals.

In 1961, Martin Feldstein faced a choice: Become a doctor -- or an economist. He had finished his bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard College and been accepted to Harvard Medical School. He went with economics, enticed by a Fulbright scholarship to study at Oxford University in England. Once there, he found a way to combine his two areas of interest, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its October special issue on the 50 Most Influential people in global finance. The first paper he published was an economic analysis of Britain’s National Health Service.

The event was a June 8 American Bankers Association conference on international economics in Atlanta, and the keynote speaker was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. During a question-and-answer period, Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., waited patiently while several other bank executives threw polite queries at the central bank head, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its October special issue on the 50 Most Influential people in global finance.

A week after becoming the only woman in history to take charge at the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde notched another milestone: she nominated Zhu Min, a former deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, as a deputy. Zhu is the first Chinese deputy managing director since the fund’s founding in 1945.