Until Ben Bernanke mentioned it, tapering was a word rarely heard outside barber shops. The former US Federal Reserve chairman coined the term to describe a slowing of his central bank’s asset purchases. It sounded neat, but it roiled global financial markets hooked on large-scale bond-buying and threw the Fed off course, the Financial Times reported. No wonder Mario Draghi was insistent that scaling back asset purchases by the European Central Bank was different.

The chief executive of Bus Éireann has told staff that the company’s finances are in a “perilous state”and that its losses must be addressed, the Irish Times reported. In a letter to the company’s 2,600 employees, Martin Nolan urged staff representatives “to engage meaningfully” with the company on the implementation of a controversial new commercial plan for the business. He said there was no money available at present for pay rises for staff.

Policy makers in Prague may introduce negative interest rates to discourage inflows into the koruna around the time they are ending their three-year-old limit on the exchange rate, a policy maker said, Bloomberg News reported. As the Czech National Bank prepares to scrap its Swiss-style cap on the koruna next year, its main challenge is to avoid excessive currency gains that could choke nascent price growth and make the export-led economy less competitive.

Deutsche Bank AG employees may have manipulated internal indexes as part of an allegedly fraudulent scheme to help Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA conceal losses, according to an audit commissioned by German regulators. The study, requested by watchdog Bafin and seen by Bloomberg, says an internal Deutsche Bank review described “abnormalities” in the values of proprietary indexes used to set the price for the Monte Paschi deal in December 2008.

European antitrust regulators on Wednesday fined Crédit Agricole, HSBC and JPMorgan Chase a total of just over 485 million euros for colluding to fix benchmark interest rates tied to the euro, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. The penalties, equivalent to about $520 million, came more than two years after the European authorities issued a statement of objections — a formal step in antitrust investigations — against the three banks. The inquiry began in 2011.

The chief executive of the Irish League of Credit Unions, Ed Farrell, is “quietly confident” that there won’t be a repeat of events at Rush Credit Union (RCU), which was placed into liquidation recently following the emergence of a €4.7 million hole in its reserves and alleged criminal activities. “I don’t think that if we are here this time next year that there will be any contagion,” he told the Irish Times when discussing ILCU’s results for last year.“The credit union family would feel let down by it . . .

Italy is demanding the European Central Bank give it more time to rescue Monte dei Paschi di Siena and is preparing to blame the bank for losses imposed on bondholders if Rome is forced into an urgent state bailout, the Financial Times reported. The board of MPS, which has the Italian Treasury as its largest shareholder, is asking the ECB’s supervisory arm to give it until mid-January to pull off a €5bn equity injection and try to avoid forcing losses on some debtholders as required under new EU bailout rules, say four people close to the process.

A rapid recovery in the euro and Italian bonds in the wake of the nation’s failed referendum hasn’t convinced investors that they are immune to political risks, Bloomberg News reported. Parity between the euro and dollar and a near-doubling of the yield on Italy’s 10-year bonds would be “totally possible” if new elections were held, said Indosuez Wealth Management chief economist Marie Owens Thomsen. Such a situation would make both assets an obvious sell, according to Aberdeen Asset Management Plc’s James Athey. Janus Capital Group Inc.

Events are testing the eurozone yet again. The latest shock comes from Italy, where Matteo Renzi’s comprehensive defeat in the constitutional referendum has caused his resignation. Italy, which has the eurozone’s third-largest economy, is an important country. Mr Renzi’s departure may not prove a decisive event. But, so long as the eurozone fails to deliver widely shared prosperity, it will be vulnerable to political and economic shocks. Complacency is a grave error. Read more. (Subscription required.)

The European Central Bank may run out of room to buy Irish Government bonds within weeks under its massive €1.7 trillion quantitative easing programme if its president, Mario Draghi, does not move on Thursday to ease the terms of the plan, according to analysts, the Irish Times reported. Cantor Fitzgerald’s head of fixed income strategy in Dublin, Ryan McGrath estimates that the ECB, Irish Central Bank and other euro-zone monetary authorities currently hold about €31.34 billion of eligible Irish bonds under the quantitative easing plan.