France and Italy, still struggling to meet the euro zone’s tough budget targets, may be gaining support for an effort to relax the rules, the International New York Times reported. The effort, backed by Socialists in the newly elected European Parliament, could color discussions in Luxembourg on Thursday and Friday, when the bloc’s finance ministers gather for their monthly meetings. The European Union is finally emerging from a six-year economic crisis that threatened to destroy the euro currency.

Austria's draft law on restructuring heavily indebted Hypo-Alpe-Adria Bank International AG could lead to higher financing costs for the country's banks and damage investors' trust if enacted, the president of the Austrian Bankers' Association said Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Italian government has asked ArcelorMittal SA to consider investing in or buying troubled Italian steel producer Ilva, the chief executive officer of the world's largest steelmaker said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. "We have been invited by the Italian government to look at it. That does not mean that we are going to acquire it," CEO Lakshmi Mittal said on the sidelines of the Steel Success Strategies conference in New York.

Spain is looking at extending a law enacted in March which helps struggling companies cut debt and avoid bankruptcy to firms already in the liquidation process, Economy Minister Luis de Guindos said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The rules were designed to ease loan refinancings by making it harder for small creditors to veto deals between companies and their lenders and create a mechanism for creditors to write off part of the debt. The amendment would be passed in the next few weeks, de Guindos said.

Greece’s creditors will not accept any changes to the core of the country’s streamlining program, only limited peripheral fine-tuning, as is the case during every assessment of the program, according to a top eurozone official in Brussels, ekathimerini.com reported. The two sub-tranches set for the end of May and end-June, each amounting to 1 billion euros, have been linked to six prior actions “whose implementation we are still awaiting,” said the same official.

The UK economic recovery has been dealt a blow after figures showed retail insolvencies have hit an unexpected five-year high and the number of shoppers visiting high streets fell for the second month in a row, The Telegraph reported. Almost 1,300 retailers were declared insolvent during 2013, an increase of 12pc on a year earlier, as rapid expansion of the supermarket convenience store format drove the UK’s cornershops and traditional small retailers to the brink, according to accountancy firm Wilkins Kennedy.

The annual cost of servicing the debt associated with the financial sector bailout in Ireland in 2008 is estimated at about €1.6 billion, according to figures provided by Minister for Finance Michael Noonan, the Irish Times reported. This is from an expected cost of €8 billion to service Ireland’s sizeable national debt this year. The Department of Finance has also estimated that about €41 billion of our national debt is associated with the cost of rescuing the financial sector, said the Minister in a written reply to Fianna Fáil’s finance spokesman Michael McGrath.

The cost of insuring against global bank defaults has plunged to its lowest level since the financial crisis in a sign that investors are willing to bet the industry has become safer, the Financial Times reported. Buyers of bank debt often purchase “credit default swaps,” a type of derivative that helps insure their investments against a default. The price they are paying for that protection is now the lowest since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. “We’ve gone back to pre-crisis levels,” said Brian Monteleone, analyst at Barclays.

Facing the prospect of bankruptcy for the second time in five years, the board of Italy’s troubled flagship airline, Alitalia, agreed on Friday to a strategic partnership that would give a stake of up to 49 percent to the state-owned Abu Dhabi carrier Etihad Airways, the International New York Times reported. With no other viable alternative, and the company’s cash reserves dwindling, Alitalia’s chief executive, Gabriele Del Torchio, told reporters in Rome that the board had voted in favor of Etihad’s offer.

Competition to acquire the French energy equipment maker Alstom was expected to intensify on Monday, as Siemens of Germany and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan were said to be preparing to make a joint offer that could pressure General Electric to improve its $13.5 billion bid, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. G.E.’s bid for Alstom’s power generation and transmission business, made in April, has been opposed by French government officials even though Alstom’s board approved the deal.