Facebook has made its first ever billion-dollar quarterly profit - beating all market predictions.

Between October and December, net profits rose to €1.4bn - 80% of its profit during the period came from mobile advertising.

The company's total revenue for 2015 now stands at more than €16bn.

The key monthly active users metric rose by 14% to 1.59 billion users.

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The EU’s clampdown on corporate tax avoidance is set to intensify as the European Commission prepares to unveil a set of proposals in Brussels today.

Among the main proposals will be an initiative to curb the practice whereby companies in the EU shift their profits to lower-tax countries in the EU.

Ireland has been in the spotlight regarding tech giant Apple's taxes in the country - the Commission is already investigating these payments.

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The US Federal reserve left interest rates unchanged last night, it said that it is "closely monitoring" global economic and financial developments, this implied that it has not abandoned plans to continue to tighten its monetary policy during 2016.

This decision was expected, as market conditions have changed dramatically since the Fed announced its first post-boom rate hike in December of last year.

Policy makers said that the US economy is still growing modestly and that the labour market in continuing to improve.

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Oil prices have jumped after Russia indicated that it would be prepared to cooperate with OPEC to cut global oil prodiction.

The remarks from Russia's energy ministry pushed the price of oil 5% higher. Oil prices were also rose due to an increase in demand due to the blizzard in the US.

Russia is the biggest non-OPEC producer of oil.