Hungary's government said the International Monetary Fund and European Union are ignoring the economic risks of excessive austerity measures and that Budapest can't make deeper spending cuts now, despite a punishing reaction from markets after bailout-loan talks between the two sides broke off this weekend, The Wall Street Journal reported.

B3 Cable Solutions is to close after the firm's receivers, Deloitte, failed to secure a new owner for the company. The Longford firm which manufactures copper-based cable has been based in Aghafad for three decades and employed approximately 100 full and part-time staff. The firm had traded in a challenging environment in recent years and was placed into receivership earlier this month by its English owners, the Manchester-based B3 Cable Solutions. Deloitte’s had been engaged in an extensive process to sell the business and assets of the company as a going concern.

Europe may be hoping its long-awaited bank stress tests are anti-climactic, judging from the confident comments coming from officials, Reuters reported. Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the euro zone finance ministers, doesn't expect any "big catastrophes" when results from the tests of 91 European banks are released on Friday. Mario Draghi, governor of the Bank of Italy, said the tests will show Italian banks have "adequate" resources to absorb losses if loans go bad.

The future of BP PLC has shifted in recent days from a death-watch discussion to a debate about how valuable the British oil giant will be after it finishes paying for the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, the Associated Press reported. BP gained temporary control of its broken well in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday and is counting on shutting it off permanently within weeks. Its shares have regained more than a quarter of the value lost in the wake of the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

Hungarian assets could come under selling pressure on Monday after the International Monetary Fund and European Union postponed the conclusion of a budgetary review in Budapest, insisting that the government must rethink its proposals, the Financial Times reported. Although Hungary is not in urgent need of IMF financing, the failure of the negotiations could unsettle investors who were uneasy about the country’s debt levels.

Record numbers of cash-strapped individuals and companies were pursued through the courts in the first half of the year as Irish creditors chased over €1 billion in debt, InsolvencyJournal.ie reported. Figures released by debt monitor Stubbs Gazette reveal that judgments against debtors rose a massive 416% in the first six months of the year, rising from €248 million in 2009 to over €1 billion in the first half of 2010. A judgment essentially changes the status of a debt into a Court demand, entitling the creditor to take enforcement proceedings to recover the debt.

The National Asset Management Agency (Nama) and the State will ask the Commercial Court next Monday to fast-track the first legal challenge to the agency by businessman Paddy McKillen and 14 of his companies over the proposed transfer to Nama of €80 million of the companies’ loans, The Irish Times reported. Mr McKillen claims the €80 million credit facilities from Bank of Ireland are “fully performing”, not impaired, there is no default on repayments and transfer of the loans would have a “drastic and significantly detrimental” impact on his business and property rights.

Europe's banks, two years ago gripped by liquidity crisis, this month are enjoying a widening access to willing buyers of their bonds in global capital markets. It was only in late 2008 that leaders such as the U.K.'s then-finance minister Alistair Darling described how the banking system was only hours away from apocalyptic collapse, The Wall Street Journal reported in a commentary. What's clear is that two years of massive infusions of central bank cash, state-funded bank bailouts, new emergency funding facility for governments and other new buttressing have soothed many nerves.

Bailed-out Bank of Ireland won European Union regulatory approval on Thursday for its restructuring plan after pledging to sell assets and wind down some portfolios, Reuters reported. Ireland's biggest bank by market value received 3.5 billion euros ($4.45 billion) of capital injection and other state aid last year due to the credit crisis and the bursting of the Irish property boom. Under the restructuring scheme, the bank will reduce its presence in certain markets by selling assets as previously announced, the European Commission said.

Italy’s Senate is on Thursday expected to approve the centre-right government’s controversial €25bn austerity package, with Silvio Berlusconi resorting to a vote of confidence to ram through his cuts in the face of considerable dissent from within his own coalition, the Financial Times reported. The unpopular package is then expected to be taken to the lower house for final approval, again in a vote of confidence, by the end of the month.