Global stocks are on the precipice of a bear market as a fresh slide in crude and the perceived creditworthiness of European banks added to doubts about the strength of the worldwide economy, the Irish Times reported. The Iseq in Dublin completed its biggest six-day slump since 2011, down another 0.5 per cent yesterday. Bank of Ireland came under pressure, along with the rest of the European banking sector. Traders said it was the most heavily traded stock on the exchange, with more than €100 million worth of its stock changing hands.

Fianna Fáil has said it will “examine the feasibility” of EBS being demerged from AIB and sold separately as a standalone mortgage player. The move would be targeted at stimulating competition for home loans and savings products, the Irish Times reported. The party’s economic strategy document for the general elections said this would “acknowledge the fact that the loss of the building societies [since the 2008 financial crash] has had a long-term negative impact on the mortgage market”.

The rescheduled extradition hearing at which former Anglo Irish Bank chief executive, David Drumm, is now expected to agree to return to the State from the US is set to take place in Boston late on Thursday, the Irish Times reported. He had been due in court on Monday, but bad weather forced the hearing’s postponement. On Tuesday, it was rescheduled to begin at 8pm Irish time on Thursday. The State is seeking his extradition to face 33 charges arising from transactions carried out during his time at Anglo, which he led in the period before its collapse in 2009.

Deutsche Bank AG became the largest lender in at least four years to feel compelled to reassure investors and employees that it has enough cash to pay its debts, Bloomberg News reported. Germany’s biggest bank said in a statement Monday that it has more-than-sufficient means to pay coupons on its riskiest debt both this year and in 2017.

Days after central banks initiated a stress test of two trade-plumbing firms in Europe, LCH.Clearnet Group Ltd. said a German bank had defaulted on its financial obligations at the clearinghouse operator, The Wall Street Journal reported. Martin Pluves, chief executive officer at LCH, declared Frankfurt-based Maple Bank GmbH to be a “defaulter” in a Feb. 8 notice posted to the clearinghouse’s website. Maple, whose parent company Maple Financial Group Inc.

The Bank of Italy has long been considered a bastion of competence and stability in the eurozone’s third-largest economy — a counterweight to the often flighty economic stewardship of successive governments in Rome. But the sharp sell-off of Italian financial shares since the turn of the year — as investors fret over tough new EU “bail-in” rules and the large pile of non-performing loans on banks’ balance sheets — has turned up the heat on the central bank amid charges that it failed to protect the banking system.

Multinational companies would be forced to publish a country-specific breakdown of the profits they make and the taxes they pay under plans being prepared by Brussels to counter tax avoidance, the Financial Times reported. According to EU officials, the European Commission is preparing a draft law to extend to other sectors a version of a set of rules that already exist for banks and the extractive industries. The measures are in response to a growing public and political backlash in Europe against corporate tax avoidance.

Two of Europe's most powerful central bankers have called on the eurozone to form its own treasury and push forward with a quantum leap in integration to secure the single currency's future, The Telegraph reported. Germany's Jens Weidmann and France's newly appointed François Villeroy de Galhau urged member states to move towards a "comprehensive sharing of sovereignty" which would include a common 19-member treasury and an "independent fiscal council" with a eurozone parliament.

The European Commission approved Portugal’s 2016 draft budget yesterday after the new Socialist government promised to hike indirect taxes to meet EU budget rules while also easing austerity to keep its leftist allies happy, the Irish Times reported. The decision by the commission will come as a relief to Portugal’s government, which was able to maintain most of its initial budget promises, such as hiking civil servants’ wages and raising the minimum wage, but had to lower its economic growth outlook.

The surge in lending to emerging markets that helped fuel their own — and much of the world's — growth over the past 15 years has come to a halt, and may now give way to a "vicious circle" of deleveraging, financial market turmoil and a global economic downturn, the Bank for International Settlements has warned, CNBC reported on a Financial Times story.