How rich is the irony that a lender should withdraw its support from Fairpoint, the debt management business. Last week, Fairpoint’s bank, AIB, said the UK junior market company needed to find alternative funding, the Financial Times reported. That stopped the group signing off its 2016 accounts and forced it to suspend its shares at 10p, valuing the company at £4.8m or a quarter of borrowings. Fairpoint is the Lancashire company set up in 1997 to help people drowning in debt to deal with their banks.

Shareholders in National Bank of Greece have confirmed the sale of 75 per cent of the group’s wholly-owned insurance subsidiary to Calamos-Exin, a US-Dutch consortium, for €718m. National Insurance, the largest Greek insurer, was offered for sale under a restructuring plan agreed with the EU and International Monetary Fund as part of the country’s current €86bn bailout, the Financial Times reported. NBG, the country’s second-largest lender, undertook to dispose of non-core assets and focus on domestic banking in line with benchmarks set by creditors.

Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan on Thursday defended Italy's closure of two failed regional banks using public funds, saying the costs pale in comparison with the large sums that Germany and Britain pumped into their banks after the financial crisis, Reuters reported. Writing in German weekly magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Padoan said the decision to wind down the two banks at a possible cost of up to 17 billion euros was a necessary intervention to save the economy of the Veneto region.

Italy’s north-south disparity is one of its best-known economic problems — but awareness of the issue does not seem to make it any easier to solve. As the eurozone economy recovers, the Financial Times has analysed greenfield investment data for Italy, one of the bloc’s growth and employment blackspots. The analysis shows that Italy’s attractiveness to foreign investment has increased in the past year but still lags behind most of its peers, the Financial Times reported.

A global sell off in the bond market spread to equities on Thursday amid fears that the post-crisis era of easy money from the world’s largest central banks was coming to an end. While bond yields remain exceptionally low, recent remarks by the heads of the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada have convinced many investors the period of historically-low interest rates and unprecedented central bank bond buying will soon recede, the Financial Times reported.

Consumer credit continued to grow at a double-digit pace in May, underlining why Bank of England officials took action to protect banks against the risk of a debt bubble, Bloomberg News reported. Unsecured lending rose 10.3 percent from a year earlier, the same as in April and close to its fastest rate since 2005, the U.K. central bank said on Thursday. It grew 1.7 billion pounds ($2.2 billion) on the month, the biggest increase since November last year.

To keep senior bondholders happy as they rescued two failed banks over the weekend, Italian regulators found an elegant solution: they put them beyond the reach of EU law, Bloomberg News reported. That’s no cause for celebration, according to Paul Smillie, a Singapore-based analyst at ColumbiaThreadneedle, which manages about $467 billion globally including bank bonds of peripheral nations that rallied following the news. Instead, the decision revives concerns that the market for European bank debt might be ruled by the vagaries of individual political systems.

Financiers are set to take a tougher stance towards distressed shipping loans including more enforcement action to recoup funds, while capital on offer to the industry is expected to shrink further, a leading transport survey showed on Wednesday. The global shipping sector is reeling from a near-decade-long downturn, which has seen companies collapse and banks scale back exposure or exit entirely from providing finance, Reuters reported.

European central bankers learnt this week that any move towards normality in monetary policy will require meticulous communication amid jittery financial markets that have long gorged on the abundance of extremely cheap money, the Financial Times reported. At a European Central Bank forum in Sintra, Portugal on Tuesday, Mario Draghi appeared to misjudge the mood. The ECB president gave a speech that suggested — at least to skittish investors — a hawkish policy shift compared with his words at the central bank’s last policy meeting on June 8. The ECB spent Wednesday explaining itself.

The European Commission's decision to let Italy spend up to 17 billion euros ($19 billion) to clean up the mess left by two failed banks is bad news -- and not just for Italy's taxpayers. It's also a setback for the euro zone's putative banking union, and for the European Union's efforts to supervise anti-competitive state aid, a Bloomberg View reported. Over the weekend, the Italian government wound down Banca Popolare di Vicenza and Veneto Banca, two regional lenders struggling under the weight of non-performing loans.