Tesco's US chain Fresh & Easy has filed for bankruptcy as the next step of the British supermarket's retreat from across the Atlantic, The Guardian reported. The retailer, which is due to reveal its half-year trading figures on Wednesday, has agreed to sell the majority of its US stores to billionaire Ron Burkle, lending his Yucaipa investment vehicle £80m to take on about 150 stores. A further 33 will close while another 20 remain under negotiation.

Banks in Britain may have to hold more capital than their international rivals under proposals for an annual stress test of lenders put forward by the Bank of England on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The BoE spelled out how it will begin checking for the first time that banks do not pose risks to the UK economy by being short of reserves, both individually and as a sector. It will start an annual test for the top eight UK lenders like Barclays, RBS and HSBC in 2014. The test will be broadened out over five years to include big UK subsidiaries of major international banks, the BoE said.

Some of Britain’s leading mortgage lenders have expressed misgivings about the government’s latest “Help to Buy” initiative, leaving the state-backed banks Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds as the only pair to have endorsed the scheme, the Financial Times reported. Help to Buy, launched in April, was originally designed as a government loan scheme to support buyers of new-build houses. But the second phase of the scheme, fast-forwarded to this week from its original launch date of next year, offers a government guarantee for higher-risk mortgages on any kind of home.

Jobless Britons could be forced to do community work to keep their unemployment payments, Britain’s top economics minister said Monday, announcing the latest in a series of moves to tighten benefits rules and crack down on “welfare dependency," the International Herald Tribune reported. Under the plan, those out of work for more than two years could be required to take on tasks like cooking for the elderly or cleaning up litter to keep their payments. The initiative represents a significant hardening of policy in a country that once considered the idea of “workfare” taboo.

Irish voters are preparing to shutter one of the two chambers of parliament in a referendum that will take place on Oct. 4, one of the few examples of austerity reducing the number of politicians, The Wall Street Journal reported. Having survived in one form or another for an almost uninterrupted stretch of over 90 years, the parliament's 60-seat upper house now faces oblivion if voters decide by a simple majority to get rid of it. Opinion polls suggest that over 60% of those voting Friday will cast ballots for the 'Yes' proposition, sealing the fate of the upper house.

The Gathering has failed to halt the flow of companies in the Republic’s hospitality sector going to the wall, according to the latest figures, the Irish Times reported. Figures highlighted yesterday by the Insolvency Journal show show that 118 companies in the hospitality industry went to the wall between January and September, a 2 per cent increase on the same period in 2012, when the number was 116.

Investors awaiting the finer points of Monte dei Paschi's restructuring plan could soon find themselves wishing their bank had run aground at another time and place in the euro zone financial crisis, Reuters reported. After approving more than 5 trillion euros of state aid to its financial system over the past five years, the European Union has switched the burden of bank bailouts away from taxpayers and onto shareholders, bondholders and big depositors.

The head of the euro zone's bailout fund has cast doubt on official assessments of how much Greece's debt is really weighing on its economy, in the latest signal that the currency bloc is stepping away from commitments to reduce the country's debt mountain.

A rented office overlooking a dusty rail track near Madrid’s airport was until recently the workplace of what would appear to be the most productive worker in all of Spain. From here a single employee presided over a company that from 2009 to 2011 made €9.9bn of net profits, all while earning an annual salary of only €55,000, the Financial Times reported.

The decision to liquidate IBRC could lead to “substantial savings” for the Government, the Fiscal Advisory Council has claimed, but it warned that the level of savings would depend on the market view of the country’s creditworthiness, the Irish Times reported. The Government decided in February to liquidate State-owned IBRC to reduce the annual cost of toxic lenders. Estimates at the time placed the annual savings at around €1 billion. However, the advisory committee said the gains from the move relative to the size of Government debt would be small.