Every workday morning in London, at about 10 o’clock, representatives from 19 banks make a series of decisions that affect financial transactions around the world, from what homeowners pay on their mortgages to the underlying value of credit-default swaps and corporate bonds.

The helicopter swooping over once- pristine spruce forests provides a close-up view of why the province of Alberta, Canada, is among the planet’s most coveted -- and contested -- petroleum hot spots.

The helicopter swooped over Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor trailing a huge red-and-white banner: RMB SOVEREIGN BONDS. There were billboards on buses and banks and at the entrance to the cross-harbor tunnel.

Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone ushered team managers into his trailer at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Nearby, mechanics tended to an array of million-dollar racing cars.

Ramon Ang, president of San Miguel Corp., greets visitors to his eighth-floor Manila conference room wearing a plain black suit, white shirt, red tie and $200 Seiko titanium watch.

Aliaksei Yafimau shudders at the memory of the burly thug who threatened to kill his relatives. Yafimau, who installs satellite television systems in Babrujsk, Belarus, answered an advertisement in 2010 offering easy money to anyone willing to sell a kidney.

Antonio Guglielmi was in Italy watching a dull, tied-at-zero soccer game between AC Milan and S.S. Lazio of Rome, his hometown, at the beginning of February when his mind wandered to the subject of Europe’s banks. That’s something he thought about every day as a financial company analyst at Milan-based Mediobanca SpA.

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.

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

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.