A digital clock inaugurated by Paulo Portas, Portugal’s deputy prime minister, has begun marking the six-month countdown to Lisbon’s planned exit from its €78bn bailout programme. But a senior International Monetary Fund official has warned that it could take at least another 10 years to address the country’s deep-rooted structural challenges.

As mortgage defaults rise, lenders will have to set aside money to cover losses, hurting profits, according to Juan Villen, head of mortgages at Spanish property web site Idealista.com, Bloomberg reported. Spanish banks absorbed 87 billion euros ($120 billion) of impairment charges last year after Economy Minister Luis de Guindos forced them to record more defaults on loans to developers. The government took 41 billion euros in European assistance to shore up its failing lenders.

European Union finance ministers agreed late Wednesday on a new system to centralize control of failing euro-zone lenders, in the hope that it will stop expensive banking crises from ruining the finances of entire countries, The Wall Street Journal reported. The deal brings to an end a monthslong standoff between Berlin and other European capitals over the design of the so-called Single Resolution Mechanism, and particularly over its ability to tap European taxpayer money as a last resort.

The liquidation vehicle for Ireland's failed Anglo Irish Bank has been granted bankruptcy protection in the United States, it said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The bank, whose failure cost Irish taxpayers some 30 billion euros ($41 billion) in the financial crisis, was put into an accelerated liquidation process during an emergency session of Ireland's parliament in February. Now known as Irish Bank Resolution Corp, or IRBC, the liquidating bank applied in August for U.S. court protection to prevent creditors from going after more than $1 billion in U.S. assets.

If events go smoothly for Ukraine’s cash-strapped government, Russia will begin bailing out the country as early as this week with a first purchase of $3bn in Ukrainian bonds, the Financial Times reported. Relief on the energy front is also imminent because Moscow will cut Kiev’s natural gas bill by one-third from the start of the new year. Those are the chief benefits promised this week by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in a deal that will keep Ukraine firmly rooted in Moscow’s orbit and that appears to mark another foreign policy triumph for the Kremlin over the west.

Italy's finance minister has threatened to hold up a deal on a new system for winding down failing euro-zone banks unless Germany and other rich countries agree to simplify decision-making and commit more financing. "I am convinced that we should not hurry for a defective Banking Union, but rather take the time which may be needed to build a properly function[ing] one," Fabrizio Saccomanni wrote in a letter to some of his counterparts dated Dec. 13 and seen by The Wall Street Journal. Mr.

The U.K.'s official statistics agency said Tuesday it plans to change the way it calculates data on the public finances, a move that will revalue the British government's debt upward by more than a hundred billion pounds, The Wall Street Journal reported. The overhaul will reverse an accounting maneuver by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne last year that lowered the government's borrowing figures in the short term. But the new debt calculations would apply retroactively and thus would be unlikely to require a policy response. Mr.

Talvivaara won court approval to restructure the entire company's debt, allowing the nickel miner to continue production and helping it fend off bankruptcy, Reuters reported. Talvivaara, hurt by falling nickel prices and chronic production problems, was waiting for court approval to include the debt of a subsidiary, Talvivaara Sotkamo, in its reorganisation plans.

Ukrainian anti-government protesters demanded to know what President Viktor Yanukovych had ceded to seal $15 billion of Russian financial aid and a one-third discount on energy imports, Bloomberg reported. Russia will buy Ukrainian state debt this year and next and will cut the price it charges for natural gas to $268.5 per 1,000 cubic meters, President Vladimir Putin said after meeting Yanukovych in Moscow yesterday. The two leaders said they didn’t discuss a Russia-led customs union after speculation Ukraine was close to joining riled pro-European demonstrators in Kiev.

Iceland's central bank said on Monday it will begin selling just over 100 billion crowns ($8.6 bln) worth of bonds held against assets and claims left with it as the nation's banks collapsed during the global financial crisis, Reuters reported. The sale of the indexed bonds by the Central Bank of Iceland Holding Company ehf (ESI) would begin within the next six months and be carried out in stages over five years, the bank said in a statement on its website.