Brexit could push Northern Ireland into recession given it’s relaince on the UK, an economist has said, the Irish Times reported. Business activity increased in Northern Ireland in the weeks before the EU referendum. The Ulster Bank purchasing managers’ index said June was the 14th month in a row in which companies recorded an increase in new orders. The latest report signalled that growth was maintained at the end of the second quarter, with sharper expansions of output, new orders and employment recorded.

Italy and the European Commission are in emergency talks over plans to shore up the country’s ailing banks, with the two sides said to remain deeply divided, The Herald Scotland reported. Matteo Renzi, the Italian Prime Minister, wants to pump in billions of taxpayers’ cash to shore up confidence, but Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and other eurozone members have historically opposed state bailouts, unless private creditors also shoulder the losses.

As Irish shares threaten to enter a bear market for the first time since 2011, the outlook may depend on two events: how the UK “bails out” of the EU and whether Italy is forced to “bail in” bondholders in its ailing banks. While the Iseq index rallied almost 3 per cent in the last two days to 5,580 points, it remains 14 per cent below its May highs, driven by a sharp slump following the Brexit referendum.

The European Commission said Thursday that Spain and Portugal didn’t take sufficient measures to bring their 2015 budget deficits within European Union limits, triggering a process which could eventually lead to financial sanctions, The Wall Street Journal reported. Whether, and by how much, the two countries will eventually be fined is a decision the European Commission—the EU’s executive arm—will make later in the summer and after the bloc’s finance ministers endorse its opinion at a meeting next week.

German industrial output plunged unexpectedly in May, posting its steepest monthly drop since August 2014. The latest data suggests Europe’s largest economy lost steam in the second quarter after its surprisingly strong start to the year. The weak output figures followed data on Wednesday showed that German industrial orders were flat in May, before Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, and were weaker than expected, pointing to an economic slowdown.

Even as Europe grapples with repercussions of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, a dispute over tens of billions of dollars is also threatening to roil the region’s $16 trillion economy, the International New York Times reported. The Italian government, according to some estimates, needs to spend $45 billion to shore up its banks burdened with bad loans.

Greece’s Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said the country won't be able to reach its primary surplus budget target after its current bailout program expires in 2018 and called on the creditors to renegotiate for lower goals, The Wall Street Journal reported. “We guarantee that we are going to reach the [3.5% primary] surplus, even if we have to use the fiscal brake, but only once in 2018,” Mr. Tsipras said late Wednesday during a briefing to journalists on the plane while traveling from China to Athens.

The Swedish Riksbank is increasingly nervous that its 16-month experiment with negative interest rates is yielding the kind of undesired byproduct that textbooks often predict: a real-estate bubble. Stockholm has become one of Europe’s hottest property markets, one where prices rose 14% last year and money keeps flowing thanks to the central bank’s ultraloose interest rate of minus-0.5%. To cool demand for mortgage loans, the Riksbank had been planning to start increasing interest rates by the middle of next year.

Irish credit unions have seen their loan book shrink by 45 per cent in the past eight years, leaving their loans-to-assets ratio at a “dismal” level that raises serious questions about the movement’s future, according to a Government-commissioned report. The report by the Credit Union Advisory Committee, chaired by Donal McKillop, a financial services professor at Queen’s University Belfast, recommended a full review of Central Bank lending limits.

The three top executives at Greece’s bank rescue fund resigned on Wednesday as the country’s Syriza-led government buckled under pressure from the international creditors eager to accelerate a clean-up of the financial sector, the Financial Times reported. Aris Xenofos, chief executive of the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund, his deputy, Giorgos Koutsos, and a third team member, Anastasios Gagalis, were appointed less than a year ago by the leftwing Syriza-led government.