Twenty-four miles northwest of Accra in Ghana, Anthony Botchway rips a pineapple plant from the ground with his bare hands. Wearing dirty boots, a short-sleeved shirt and jeans, he looks like any other farmworker, in a region where the daily minimum wage is less than $2.

Barry Silbert was born to trade.

As Muammar Qaddafi ’s forces strafed crowds of protesters in Tripoli with automatic gunfire on Feb. 21, the dictator’s money manager fled the city in a car to the airport to escape the violence.

South Korean investors were crushed by the market crash that swept the world three years ago. The Seoul stock exchange’s Kospi Index lost 41 percent during 2008, while the most popular mutual fund fell 39 percent.

For much of 2006 and into 2007, Environmental Defense Fund had been battling to stop TXU Corp., Texas’s largest power producer, from building 11 coal-fired plants. The barrage of lawsuits, town-hall meetings and online community groups was also becoming a major headache for KKR & Co. , TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s private-equity arm, which were planning the world’s biggest leveraged buyout of the utility company.

At Banco Santander SA headquarters on the outskirts of Madrid, Joaquin de Ena says he’s gotten used to wearing his sweater vest indoors after the bank turned down the heat to trim power use and greenhouse-gas emissions.

On a stormy night in October 2009, Mary Schapiro , the newly appointed head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, returned to her alma mater, Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to be inducted into the hall of fame for student athletes. Receiving her award, she grasped the podium, confessed she was near tears and spoke of how she had never even seen a lacrosse game before attending college.

It will be objected that the euro has to be preserved to keep the European Union together.

As an immigrant to Argentina in 1992, Zheng Jicong had to learn Spanish and adapt to local customs. As he’s built a chain of three supermarkets in Buenos Aires, he’s still adapting to inflation that’s about six times the rate in his native China.

Nuclear engineer Jose Reyes jolted awake at 4:45 a.m. on March 11 when his son called to warn him that a massive earthquake had unleashed a tsunami that rocked Japan. Giant waves were heading for the Oregon coast, about an hour from Reyes’s Corvallis office.

Vibhav Nuwal was once an enthusiastic supporter of the global carbon market. The 32-year- old Indian-born banker started in September 2009 developing carbon credits to target investors in Europe and Japan for Mumbai-based private-equity fund Managing Emissions. Less than a year later, he quit his job, convinced that the United Nations’ failure to broker a global agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions meant the carbon credit market was effectively dead.

Casino billionaire Francis Lui fakes a puzzled frown as he poses for a photo shoot behind a mountain of chips at a baccarat table normally reserved for high rollers who bet as much as $250,000 a hand.

Investment bankers, whose institutions have already been bailed out to the tune of $817 billion across the globe, now have something else to thank taxpayers for: deals.

The merger boom that started in 2010 isn’t looking like any of the past three. The takeover binge of the 1980s was fueled by Michael Milken ’s junk bonds; the late- 1990s wave of Internet and telecom deals, by inflated stock prices; and the private-equity frenzy that produced a record year for deals in 2007, by leveraged loans.

The year that China officially became the world’s second-largest economy marked another milestone. In 2010, Beijing gave investors the world’s biggest- ever initial public offering -- the $22.1 billion share float of Agricultural Bank of China Ltd . in Hong Kong and Shanghai.