Finance ministers from the biggest euro-zone countries reached a political understanding on a new system for winding down failing banks, officials said early Wednesday, but final signoff will have to wait until next week, The Wall Street Journal reported. Under the proposed deal, decisions on the shuttering or downsizing of banks would be more centralized and the costs of such resolutions would eventually be shared among European countries.

It's been a good year for the eurozone crisis in the sense that flare-ups have been few and minor. But here comes thinktank Capital Economics with the gloomy diagnosis that Greece's public debt (currently at 170% of GDP) is still unsustainably high and "the country's crisis is not yet over". That is despite the clear improvement in the public finances since the second bailout in 2012, The Guardian reported in a commentary. The problem is not the short-term one of plugging a funding gap (of maybe €11bn) for 2014 and 2015 that will appear next year.

As street protests in Ukraine enter their third week, a new crisis is brewing that could force President Viktor Yanukovych’s hand. The nation’s currency reserves have fallen so low that the central bank may soon be unable to support the hryvnia at its current value. Traders’ bets on a weaker hryvnia reached a one-year high on Dec. 10, following a 9 percent plunge in foreign reserves last month, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. Borrowing costs by lenders have soared in recent weeks, suggesting that the government’s efforts to prevent a devaluation are creating cash shortages.

Alitalia SpA succeeded in raising enough money so Italy's post office will invest in the airline, increasing the likelihood that it will have sufficient capital to keep flying for at least a year as it looks for a partner to ensure its long-term survival, The Wall Street Journal reported. Alitalia, which nearly went bankrupt in October, has raised €225 million ($308 million) from shareholders and creditors, a person familiar with the situation said Monday. That amount was the minimum that Poste Italiane SpA had set as a condition for it to invest €75 million in the airline.

Retroactive recapitalisation of the Irish banks “doesn’t seem very likely”, the head of the European Stability Mechanism, Klaus Regling, has said, striking a blow to Ireland’s campaign to receive retrospective aid for AIB and Bank of Ireland, the Irish Times reported. Speaking last night in Brussels, the head of the euro zone’s rescue fund said that, while the process does not require treaty change, it is a “very complicated process” which requires unanimity by member states.

The euro zone's bailout fund should be allowed to lend to help finance the closure of banks in the bloc, a proposal prepared for euro zone finance ministers showed on Monday, Reuters reported. European countries are seeking to reach a deal before the end of the year on how to close failing lenders, as part of an ambitious plan to create a banking framework and fix broken banks, whose problems have festered since the financial crisis.

For a year and a half, Antonis Samaras has kept Greece’s bailout programme broadly on track despite his coalition government’s shrunken parliamentary majority and resistance within his cabinet to implementing tough structural reforms, the Financial Times reported. For the Greek premier, stern admonitions from Angela Merkel, German chancellor, and other EU leaders that Athens must work harder to fulfil its obligations to international lenders have given way to recognition of the “sacrifices made by the Greek people” as fiscal targets are finally met.

Eastern Germany's savings banks have written down their stake in stricken Landesbank Berlin (LBB) to 1 euro, the head of the association representing them said. "We have drawn a line under it in the hope that we're through now," OSV President Michael Ermrich told Reuters, adding that he did not expect a dividend from LBB in the next two to three years. On Friday, sources had told Reuters that Germany's savings banks would have to shoulder as much as 1.2 billion euros ($1.6 billion) in further writedowns on LBB, which is being dismantled into a savings bank and a real estate business.

Aer Lingus is threatening legal action if Siptu goes ahead with a strike in the latest twist in the ongoing row over the €780 million hole in the pension fund that it operates jointly with Dublin Airport Authority (DAA), the Irish Times reported. Siptu is set to begin balloting members in the airline and airport operator next week for industrial action as the trade union says there is growing frustration over the delay in resolving the dispute.

The fight over defunct Nortel Networks' $7.5 billion in cash will be decided in joint U.S.-Canadian court hearings and not in arbitration, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Friday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia upheld a bankruptcy court ruling in March that there was never an agreement to use arbitration to divide the pile of cash among various Nortel estates around the world. Nortel sought protection from creditors in courts around the world in 2009 and its businesses were quickly sold, reducing a once-global corporate giant to little more than a pile of cash.