Streets littered with potholes and garbage. Alcohol and drug treatment centers shut down. Vulnerable adults and children left without care. That is the grim picture of Britain’s future painted by the County Councils Network, which warned on Thursday that local councils will be forced to slash more than $1 billion from their budgets next year in cuts that will very likely result in services being whittled to the bone.

Eurozone consumer confidence fell sharply in September to hit its lowest level in more than a year, in the latest sign of lingering weakness in the region’s economy, the Financial Times reported. A flash estimate showed the official consumer confidence indicator published by the European Commission dropped to minus 2.9 from minus 1 in August. Economists polled by Thomson Reuters had expected a smaller decline to minus 2. Confidence has not been below that level since May 2017.

It is too soon for financial risk to be shared more broadly across the euro zone, Germany's European Central Bank representative said on Thursday, a day after its head made the case for a deeper union. Germany has long resisted calls for more risk-sharing, and Jens Weidmann said high government debt and piles of soured bank credit were created under national responsibility so should not be pushed onto a community which had had no chance to mitigate them, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Italy wants the public debt of all euro zone states to be brought below 60 percent of gross domestic product, via a long-term restructuring underwritten by the European Central Bank, its European Affairs Minister wrote. The proposal was made in a paper posted on the website of Paolo Savona's ministry and sent to the European Commission, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Insolvent German charter carrier Small Planet Airlines hopes to attract a buyer following a debt restructuring, its administrator told Reuters on Wednesday, saying he saw good a chance of a deal, Reuters reported. Small Planet, which employs 400 staff and has nine aircraft, mainly flies tourists to Mediterranean destinations. The company filed for insolvency this week in a bid to stay in the air while a buyer is found. “Talks are going on with investors, and they are now being intensified under new conditions,” court-appointed administrator Joachim Voigt-Salus told Reuters.

Italy’s new populist government is facing a difficult decision: How to reconcile its expensive election promises with the reality of the country’s fragile finances. It is a test of whether Europe’s rising antiestablishment parties can bring change to countries still bearing the scars of the Continent’s long economic downturn—or whether the constraints of life in the eurozone will force them to follow policies they long denounced, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The UK Pension Regulator is facing criticism over a 2013 deal that allowed Kodak UK to jettison it pension liabilities but now looks set to create a £600m hit to the country’s pensions bailout fund, the Financial Times reported. Kodak had sought approval from the regulator to be released from its duty to support its 15,000 member retirement plan, following the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of Eastman Kodak, its US parent company, in 2012.

Unemployment in the UK now stands at its lowest level in four decades. Gross domestic product growth at the start of the third quarter of 2018 also shows an economy in decent shape, having grown faster than in the prior two quarters. But we should not be complacent about those numbers. The UK faces the highest risk of recession of any of the 13 economies for which The Conference Board tracks business cycles and our leading economic index suggests the British economy may start shrinking over the course of the next year, the Financial Times reported in a commentary.

Britain will support Zimbabwe to get on to an interim IMF staff program to help the country quickly clear its foreign arrears, Britain's ambassador in Harare said on Tuesday. Clearing the $1.8 billion in arrears to the World Bank and African Development Bank is seen as a major step for Zimbabwe to start accessing foreign credit, especially for the private sector as well as foreign direct investment, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

The liquidators of the former Anglo Irish Bank claim a US legal action by businessman Paddy McKillen over his “Maple 10” loan is an attempt to frustrate their work. Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richardson, the liquidators of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, claim the action taken by Mr McKillen and his partner Tony Leonard in July is an attempt to “end-run IBRC’s properly commenced recovery action in Ireland” through a “poorly disguised” adversary proceeding, The Irish Times reported.