Troubled Scandinavian airline SAS and its labor unions on Monday pushed on with talks aimed at ensuring the group's survival and avoiding bankruptcy after a midnight deadline for a deal passed, The Chicago Tribune reported on a Reuters story. The Scandinavian airline, hit by competition from lower-price rivals, last week announced plans to cut some salaries by up to 17 percent, reduce overall headcount to about 9,000 from 15,000 and reduce costs.

The shadow banking industry has grown to about $67 trillion, $6 trillion bigger than previously thought, leading global regulators to seek more oversight of financial transactions that fall outside traditional oversight, Bloomberg reported. The size of the shadow banking system, which includes the activities of money market funds, monoline insurers and off- balance sheet investment vehicles, “can create systemic risks” and “amplify market reactions when market liquidity is scarce,” the Financial Stability Board said in a report, which utilized more data than last year’s probe into the sector.

Workers protesting austerity on the streets of southern Europe weren't to know it, but earlier this month there was also a strike at the heart of the European Union - by bureaucrats fighting possible cuts, Reuters reported. For an increasing number of Europeans, cuts in Brussels are what is needed. The European capital has told member states to reduce spending, but as millions in Spain, Portugal and Greece feel the pain in pay, pensions, and social services, people are looking to the centre and finding what looks like fat. Britain has led the way.

Indebted Irish publisher Independent News & Media plans to ask its lenders to write off up to 100 million euros ($127 million) of debt as part of a wider overhaul, Britain's Sunday Times reported. The company on Friday said it will need urgent and substantial restructuring in response to high levels of debt and tough trading. A spokesman on Sunday declined to comment on the report that the company was seeking to write off debt. The publisher hopes to secure agreement on the debt write-off with a consortium of eight banks by early next year, the newspaper reported without citing sources.

Things are not looking good for the Dutch economy. The Dutch statistics agency on Thursday said the euro zone’s fifth-largest economy contracted 1.1% in the third quarter. It was one of the European Union’s worst third-quarter GDP outcomes and much worse than the flat growth for the quarter that the European Commission forecast just last week, The Wall Street Journal Brussels Beat blog reported. Were there any bright spots? No. Consumption fell 1.8% compared to the quarter a year ago. Investment was down a whopping 6.4%. Export growth slowed substantially.

Greece’s eurozone lenders are in a bind: how can they further trim the country’s unsustainable debt pile, but not take any losses themselves? the Financial Times reported. One proposal floating around European policy circles is a voluntary debt buyback of Greek bonds held by the private sector. A painful restructuring of more than €200bn of debt has still left about €62bn of bonds of varying maturities held by investors.

Britain's housebuilders face a dose of harsh economic reality next year as government steps to kickstart sales falter and strategies to bolster their balance sheets run out of steam, Reuters reported. Housebuilders have enjoyed stable sales for 18 months as the government put housing centre-stage in its battle to spark economic growth, with plans like NewBuy and Funding for Lending, and any slump would hit these wider ambitions.

General strikes and sporadic violence against government austerity programs racked Spain, Portugal and Greece, but they appeared unlikely to sway the leaders of countries that are becoming inured to protests after four years of economic distress, The Wall Street Journal reported. Protest fatigue, declining levels of unionization and factionalism within the labor movement have combined to take much of the bite out of strikes as tools for changing government policy, analysts said.

Spain will need no further austerity measures until the end of next year even though it will easily miss its deficit targets, the EU’s top economic official announced on Wednesday in the clearest sign yet Brussels is backing away from an austerity-focused crisis response, the Financial Times reported. The clean bill of health from Olli Rehn, EU economic commissioner, does not set new budget targets for this year or next. Instead, his assessment gives approval based on the structural reforms proposed by Madrid as part of its budget plan unveiled in September.

Nervous investors Wednesday paid Germany for the privilege of parking their funds at a bond sale for the first time since July as renewed concerns over Greek finances stoked an appetite for the euro zone's safest securities, The Wall Street Journal reported. Investors are flocking back to German debt as Greece's problems intensify and the positive impact of the European Central Bank's bond-buy pledge starts to fade.