The State Savings Bank of Ukraine reached an agreement with a creditor group to restructure $1.3 billion of debt even as talks over the nation’s sovereign debt remain deadlocked, Bloomberg News reported. AT Oschadbank, as the lender is known, agreed with creditors holding about half the debt to extend maturities on its 2016 and 2018 dollar-denominated bonds and a 2017 subordinated loan by seven years and to raise coupons on all three securities, the bank said in a statement on its website. Principal will be repaid in installments starting 2019, according to the statement.

Can misbehaving bankers be reined in? In the wake of seemingly endless banking scandals, Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, promised on June 10th to do just that. “The age of irresponsibility is over,” Mr Carney declared. The bank, the Financial Conduct Authority (a fellow regulator) and the Treasury hope to adopt and export a new model for regulating scandal-ridden fixed income, currency and commodities (“FICC”) markets. Recent wrongdoing in this area includes the rigging of LIBOR, a benchmark interest rate, and the manipulation of currency markets.

Only a week ago, officials on both sides of the negotiating table believed that a solution to Greece’s agonising and excruciating stand-off with its creditors was mercifully at hand, the Financial Times reported. In a late-night meeting on the 13th floor of the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, Jean-Claude Juncker, the commission’s president, presented a five-page plan for Greece that had been hammered out days earlier among Europe’s most powerful leaders in private talks at the chancellery in Berlin.

The media in Austria's larger northern neighbor once envied the country's economic success, dubbing it ''the better Germany.'' Things are different now, Bloomberg News reported. Since that title was applied in a Stern magazine article in 2005, annual GDP growth in Austria has slid downward, to 0.1 percent last year from well above 2 percent then. Having outpaced the euro area's biggest economy for most of the past 15 years, the Alpine republic is now lagging behind Germany, also its most important export market.

Ukraine’s largest creditors say they are deeply concerned by the country’s declaration that it may stop making debt payments unless investors agree to a restructuring plan, as a crucial deadline looms over negotiations, the Financial Times reported. Talks between the two sides have stalled in recent weeks with both accusing the other of intransigence.

The British government is ready to exit the banking business, even if it means that it will record a loss on some of its holdings, the International New York Times reported. George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a speech here on Wednesday night that the government would begin to sell down the 80 percent stake that it holds in the Royal Bank of Scotland. The speech was at the Lord Mayor’s annual banquet for the financial industry at the Mansion House in the City of London. The government is projected to sell some R.B.S. shares at a loss — at least initially.

Signs of a possible breakthrough on the Greek impasse emerged from Brussels on Wednesday evening, amid reports that Germany was privately in favour of providing a staggered aid deal to Greece, the Irish Times reported. Despite indications earlier in the day that negotiations on Greece would not take place on the fringes of yesterday’s EU-Latin America summit, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras met German chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande on Wednesday night.

Ukraine could stop paying its sovereign creditors within weeks if they do not agree to a debt restructuring, the country’s finance minister said on Wednesday, offering a provocative option over one of the country’s economic problems amid signs of a deadlock in negotiations, the Financial Times reported. The government in Kiev and the International Monetary Fund have set the end of this month as a target to agree on a restructuring of Ukraine’s $70bn in sovereign debt aimed at saving it more than $15bn in debt payments over the next four years.

Economists at the European Central Bank have claimed that government austerity works, saying policies of the sort imposed by the troika on weaker euro-area member states lessen the longer-term pain associated with high levels of government debt, the Financial Times reported. The paper comes at a time of heightened tension between Greece and its international creditors, with the Syriza-led government rebelling against attempts to reshape its economy, and highlights differences within the troika on how best to handle the ongoing crisis.

Greece has submitted yet another last-minute economic reform proposal to its bailout creditors — and its creditors have once again dismissed it as lacking, the Financial Times reported. The back-and-forth was the latest document exchange between Athens and Brussels as Greece tries to break a months-long impasse and gain access to desperately needed bailout cash. The process has become numbingly familiar in recent weeks — so much so that the European Commission has even given it a name: “paperology”.