Ireland’s Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan TD, today announced the Government’s agreement to the establishment of a single fully integrated regulatory institution, the Central Bank of Ireland Commission, Finfacts reported. This new structure will replace the current board structure of the Central Bank and the Financial Services Regulatory Authority to achieve the highest performance standards for the new organisation. Substantial additional staff has been promised.

A plan to tighten financial-market regulation is pitting the U.K., home of Europe's financial center, against other members of the bloc, The Wall Street Journal reported. At a European Union summit starting Thursday, a key issue will be how much power should be handed to regulatory bodies that the EU's executive arm, the European Commission, wants to establish, and who will head them. The U.K.'s resistance to the EU plan comes amid tensions among British officials over financial regulation. In a speech Wednesday, Mervyn King, the head of the Bank of England, warned that the U.K.

A senior Swedish government official said on Tuesday it remained unclear whether Sweden would need to make guarantees for European Investment Bank financing in support of a deal to sell General Motors unit Saab. GM Europe said earlier on Tuesday a preliminary agreement had been reached to sell Saab to sports car maker Koenigsegg. "We do not yet know if Koenigsegg group will need loan guarantees or not," Joran Hagglund, state secretary for Sweden's industry ministry, told Reuters. GM Europe did not disclose terms but said the sale involved expected financing that would be guaranteed by Sweden.

Swedish car maker Koenigsegg Group AB has reached an agreement to acquire General Motors Corp.'s Saab Automobile AB unit for an undisclosed sum, the companies said Tuesday. Saab was granted creditor protection in Sweden Feb. 20 and GM, also in bankruptcy protection, said it wanted to offload the unit by the year's end. The sale, expected to close by the end of the third quarter of this year, includes an expected $600 million funding commitment from the European Investment Bank guaranteed by the Swedish government, the companies said in a statement.

The European Central Bank says euro-zone banks will need to write down $283 billion more by the end of next year and sees the bloc's total crisis-related losses at $649 billion, far below the $904 billion the International Monetary Fund forecast in April. In a grim edition of its twice-yearly Financial Stability Review, the ECB, which sets interest rates for the 16 countries that share the euro currency, warned that risks to euro-zone financial stability "remain high" despite some signs of stabilization in the economy, as well as in equity and money markets.

Beijing is diversifying its overseas investments and pressing U.S. officials for an "exit strategy" from the ultra-loose fiscal and monetary policies that China fears will eventually inflate away the value of its U.S. bond holdings and fell the dollar. But China's pragmatic policymakers also know there is no practical alternative to the dollar as the world's main reserve currency.

Differences about bank stress tests and the timing of exit strategies from government measures to deal with the recession overshadowed the start of a G8 finance ministers meeting in southern Italy on Friday night, the Financial Times reported. Germany’s Peer Steinbrück said it would be difficult to find support for a discussion on exit strategies, although Jim Flaherty, Canada’s finance minister, had said the time had come to begin to talk about how to wind down economic stimulus measures. Fragility of the eurozone’s recovery was underlined on Friday.

Arcandor AG's filing for insolvency presents an opportunity to implement restructuring moves for a better future, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday, Dow Jones Newswires reported. The filing for insolvency doesn't mean the end of the troubled retail and tourism company, "but offers the chance for a reasonable restructuring," Merkel said at the Day of Germany's Industry, organized by the BDI Federation of German industries.

The problems of Greece's homes market pale in comparison with those of Spain and Ireland, but the pain is seeping through the economy. About 135,000 properties, mostly residential, remain unsold in Greece, compared with well over one million in Spain and about 70,000 in Ireland. Construction accounts for 11 percent of Greece's GDP -- a significant factor taking the economy into recession after years when Greece grew by about 4 percent annually, well above its euro-zone peers. This recession will be its first since 1993.

German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said Tuesday that the German government foresees major restructuring and a wave of mergers for the country's state-owned banks, the Los Angeles Times reported on an Associated Press story. Germany has eight public sector banks, or Landesbanken, owned by regional governments such as Bavaria and Berlin that play a key role in Europe's largest economy by funding local businesses. But big bets on global financial markets and large investments in securitized debt linked to the U.S.