Russia and Venezuela may sign an agreement on restructuring Venezuelan debt by the end of the year if terms drafted by their finance ministries are approved, said Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov. “In general, we worked out with the finance ministry such conditions,” Siluanov told reporters in Washington, where he attended the International Monetary Fund fall meeting, Bloomberg News reported.

Italian banks are being backed by some investors to withstand tougher European Central Bank rules on bad-loan provisioning that sent their shares tumbling, Bloomberg News reported. A 6.9 percent drop in a gauge of the nation’s lenders in the six days through Tuesday was blown out of proportion, according to Ronald Petitjean, a Paris-based fund manager at LA Francaise Inflection Point. With the International Monetary Fund increasing its growth forecasts for Italy on Tuesday, a resilient economy will disprove any concerns about the health of the country’s banks, he says.

Ireland’s recovery from the crash that led to an international bailout has reached a symbolic turning point as the country’s “bad bank” pays off the final slice of the €30.2bn senior debt it borrowed to clean up the financial system, the Financial Times reported. Nama, the national asset management agency, has signalled it will redeem the final €500m of the government-guaranteed debt this month, three years ahead of the target set at the outset of its work in 2009.

Lufthansa reinforced its position as Germany’s largest airline on Thursday by signing a 210 million euro ($249 million) deal to buy large parts of insolvent Air Berlin, Reuters reported. Lufthansa plans to use the Air Berlin assets to quickly expand its Eurowings budget business. News of the deal pushed Lufthansa shares up more than 3 percent to their highest level in nearly 17 years. Air Berlin, which has struggled to turn a profit over the last decade, filed for insolvency on Aug.

Britain’s consumer borrowing boom may be about to hit a wall. Major banks are now more wary about extending unsecured credit than any time since 2008, shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. According to a Bank of England survey published Thursday, lenders are starting to see an increase in defaults and have tightened the criteria they set for borrowers, Bloomberg News reported. The change comes in the wake of multiple warnings from regulators that the pace of borrowing, with credit growth still running close to 10 percent a year, poses a risk to financial stability.

Budget carrier Norwegian Air Shuttle is interested in slots made available by the collapse of British holiday airline Monarch, its chief executive told Reuters, but said the process is unclear. Monarch collapsed earlier this month, stranding thousands of people, and sparking speculation about what will happen to the take-off and landing slots it occupied at airports such as London Gatwick and Luton, Reuters reported. “We could very well use the slots, but it’s not that easy to actually transfer slots,” Norwegian Air CEO Bjorn Kjos told Reuters on the sidelines of the CAPA Global Summit.

Lufthansa is poised to agree a deal to buy assets from insolvent Air Berlin, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, ahead of a deadline on Thursday, Reuters reported. Germany’s largest airline is set to buy Air Berlin’s Niki leisure unit, its LG Walter regional airline and some additional short-haul aircraft, the source said on Wednesday. “The deal with Lufthansa is done, there is agreement,” the person said, adding that no contract had been signed yet.

Berlin has quickly rejected plans by Brussels to revive talks on a eurozone bank deposit guarantee scheme, in a sign of how hard it will be to win German backing for further steps to pool responsibility for the bloc’s financial system. The European Commission on Wednesday proposed compromises aimed at ending two years of deadlock over the plans for a European Deposit Insurance Scheme, or EDIS. The plans have strong support from Paris and southern Europe but are viewed with deep misgivings in Germany, the Financial Times reported.

National Bank of Greece has sold a €750m covered bond, marking the first time the country’s banking sector has tapped international capital markets since 2014. Covered bonds are issued by banks and backed by pools of loans, providing the investor with additional safety in the event of default, the Financial Times reported. The three-year bond, which is rated single B by Fitch, pays a coupon of 2.75 per cent. The yield on the Greek 2-year sovereign is currently at 3.14 per cent.

Ireland's finance minister sought to raise over 800 million euros (714.89 million pounds) in extra revenue in a budget on Tuesday to give taxpayers a "modest" break and help tackle a housing crisis. He also sought to balance the state's books for the first time in a decade. Ireland started reversing years of savage spending cuts and tax hikes in 2014 - about the time its economy began to rebound sharply from a deep financial crisis, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.