Chancellor Angela Merkel roundly rebuffed U.S. President Barack Obama's call for Germans to aid the global recovery by spending more and relying less on exports, even as she warned that Europe's own financial crisis is far from over. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in her Berlin chancellery, an unapologetic Ms. Merkel said the nations that share the beleaguered euro have merely bought some time to fix the flaws in their monetary union.

A mass strike against the French government's plan to raise the retirement age disrupted transport and shut down schools on Thursday, with unions hoping to get millions of protestors into the streets, Agence France-Presse reported. The government last week unveiled proposals to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 by 2018, increasing the number of working years required for a state pension, as part of efforts to cut France's big budget deficit. Unions say the move puts an unfair burden of reform on workers.

Icelandic banks may face a second crisis as a court ruling banning some foreign currency loans saddles lenders, mostly owned by international creditors, with losses on $28 billion of debt, Bloomberg reported. The Supreme Court ruled June 16 that loans indexed to foreign-currency rates were illegal in three cases involving private car loans and a corporate property loan.

Banks in Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain account for more than two-thirds of the increase in lending to eurozone financial institutions by the European Central Bank since the summer of 2008 as many struggle to access financial markets, the Financial Times reported. The heavy reliance of these banks on the ECB for funding is a sign of the growing stresses in the eurozone as investors and other banks refuse to lend to them because of fears that the debt crisis in the 16-nation bloc will deepen.

The chief executive of General Motors Co.'s Adam Opel GmbH division, Nick Reilly, said he wants to complete almost all of the planned restructuring measures by the end of this year in a bid to turn around the business as soon as possible, Dow Jones reported. Thanks to the revamped Meriva and Astra models, Opel's market share in the second half of the year is expected to rise to slightly more than 9% from currently just under 9%, Reilly said.

Banks in the UK will be forced to pay more than £2bn in a new annual levy, George Osborne, the chancellor, announced on Tuesday, in what was expected to be the first of a series of taxes on large financial institutions in several developed economies, the Financial Times reported. The tax, to be paid from January, will be imposed on UK banks and building societies as well as the UK operations of foreign banks. Mr Osborne stressed that France and Germany had also pledged to introduce a similar bank levy, although full details have not yet been provided.

Bank levies and a global transaction tax: those two items will be at the top of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's wish list when she travels to Toronto this weekend for the G-20 summit, Spiegel Online reported. With the economy on the slow road to health, so goes her logic, it is time to introduce far-reaching reforms of the global financial system. Opposition to her reform proposals is widespread and, more ominously, frustration is building with Germany's new focus on budget consolidation and debt reduction.

Barclays Plc's President Robert Diamond said on Monday that the British bank's comments to the media about its deal to acquire parts of Lehman Brothers may not have been official disclosure to the U.S. bankruptcy court, which approved the takeover, Reuters reported. At issue is whether the British bank received an unfair $11 billion windfall when it acquired parts of Lehman Brothers after the investment bank's collapse in Sept., 2008. Diamond said that Barclays had tried to craft a deal to take over Lehman's core U.S. brokerage business in a way that Barclays would see a gain.

French bank Credit Agricole SA's Emporiki Bank of Greece SA unit said Tuesday that it now expects to return to profit in 2012—instead of its previously forecast 2011—because of rising loan losses, The Wall Street Journal reported. The bank said that the amount it needs to set aside to cover loan losses had increased by €450 million ($553 million) through 2013 compared with expectations last year when it first outlined its restructuring plan. It said most of the additional risk costs will be concentrated in 2010 and 2011.

Societe Generale SA, France’s second-largest bank by market value, could have been forced into bankruptcy by Jerome Kerviel’s unauthorized positions had they not been unwound immediately, a trader told a Paris court today, Bloomberg reported. The bank lost 4.9 billion euros ($6 billion) in the process of liquidating Kerviel’s accounts over three days in January 2008 as markets worldwide fell. The timing was “bad luck,” said Maxime Kahn, who liquidated the positions. “It was impossible to wait,” said Kahn, now head of European trading at Paris-based Societe Generale.