François Hollande, the Socialist opposition candidate and opinion-poll leader, said that if he is elected France's president in May, he will seek help from the only institution he feels can salvage the euro: the European Central Bank, The Wall Street Journal reported. Speaking in an interview at his campaign's headquarters in central Paris, Mr. Hollande, 57 years old, said only the ECB has enough credibility and financial firepower to restore investor confidence and unravel the debt crisis that has been roiling the euro zone for two years.

David Cameron was at the centre of a furious row with Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday after Paris tried to isolate the prime minister at the EU summit by suggesting that Britain is seeking to exempt the City of London from all European regulations, The Guardian reported. In a move dismissed by officials in Brussels as an attempt to set Britain up as the "fall guy", senior French figures said Cameron wanted an "opt out" from EU financial services regulation.

Dexia SA, the French-Belgian lender that’s being broken up, said it won’t have to comply with capital rules set by the European Banking Authority because it’s planning to “radically shrink in size,” Bloomberg reported. The EBA, Europe’s banking regulator, said today that Dexia would need to raise 6.3 billion euros ($8.4 billion) by mid-2012 to reach a 9 percent target for core Tier 1 capital after markdowns of sovereign-debt holdings, a figure the company said shrank to 4.2 billion euros after the Belgian government’s takeover of Dexia Bank Belgium SA on Oct. 20.

A day ahead of a crucial gathering of European Union leaders in Brussels, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have outlined their plan for solving the euro crisis through deeper fiscal integration, The Wall Street Journal Euro Crisis blog reported. In an open letter to European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Merkel issued an ultimatum to the 27 EU governments, saying they must decide whether they will accept greater central control over their national budgets.

Seeking to restore confidence in the euro, the leaders of France and Germany jointly called on Monday for changes to the European Union treaty so that countries using the euro would face automatic penalties if budget deficits ran too high, the Los Angeles Times reported. But not everyone on Wall Street was reassured that Europe would get control of its 2-year-old debt crisis. Stock prices rose and borrowing costs for European governments dropped sharply in response to the changes proposed by French President Nikolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

French Finance Minister François Baroin yesterday rebuffed concerns over the country's rising financing costs after Moody's Investors Service Inc. warned rising bond yields amplify France's fiscal challenges, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. As the second-largest economy in the euro zone, France is being pushed to get its public finances in order and avoid getting caught up in the debt crisis of the periphery.

The row between France and Germany over whether to use the European Central Bank to rescue the eurozone has intensified, further shattering international confidence that a solution can be found to the escalating debt crisis, The Guardian reported. On a day when the US president, Barack Obama, accused the eurozone of suffering from a "problem of political will", Paris and Berlin clashed over whether the ECB should be called on to do more to bail out countries that are struggling to borrow.

France came under heavy fire on global markets on Tuesday, reflecting fears that the euro zone's second biggest economy is being sucked into a spiralling debt crisis, Reuters reported. Global stocks and the euro fell as Italian bond yields climbed back to unsustainable levels on doubts that Italy's Mario Monti and new Greek leader Lucas Papademos, unelected technocrats without a domestic political base, can impose tough austerity measures and economic reform.

German and French officials have discussed plans for a radical overhaul of the European Union that would involve setting up a more integrated and potentially smaller euro zone, EU sources say. "France and Germany have had intense consultations on this issue over the last months, at all levels," a senior EU official in Brussels told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.

Dexia SA, the Belgian-French bank navigating a government-orchestrated dismantling, Wednesday booked a EUR4.1 billion ($5.6 billion) loss on the sale of its Belgian subsidiary and a EUR2.3 billion loss on its holdings of Greek sovereign debt, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. Dexia didn't report third-quarter earnings because of the break-up, which will see the bank's public finance business sold to French savings banks and other businesses sold off once buyers are found.