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.

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.

France said it would cut public spending by €45 billion ($54.48 billion) over the next three years and raise its retirement age, following other European nations that have announced austerity measures, The Wall Street Journal reported. The announcement came ahead of a week in which President Nicolas Sarkozy is scheduled to have talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, and the French government is expected to announce details of a rise in France's current standard retirement age.

French and German banks have lent nearly $1 trillion to the most troubled European countries and are more exposed to the debt crisis than the banks of any other countries, according to a new report that is likely to add pressure on institutions to detail their holdings, The New York Times reported.

European Union finance ministers meet in Madrid today to discuss how to curb swelling budget deficits as Greece moved closer to asking for emergency aid to finance the region’s biggest shortfall, Bloomberg reported. Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou yesterday asked for a meeting with the EU, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, which agreed last week to back a 45 billion-euro ($61 billion) rescue package for the cash-strapped nation. Talks will begin in Athens on April 19.

Workers at a French timber subsidiary in Gabon held managers hostage in a French-style "bossnapping" to secure their pay demands, both sides said Tuesday, Agence France-Presse reported. The managers, including the new Chinese buyers of the firm, were released on Monday several hours after being held at their plant in the port of the capital Libreville. The dispute took place at the premises of Leroy Gabon and Pogab, which are both subsidiaries of the French plywood company Plysorol, which was placed in receivership last week by a French court.

France and Germany traditionally have been the “motor” of the European Union, but relations between the two countries are badly strained over the Greek debt crisis, which is just the latest example of a new German willingness to resist the demands of Europe and assert its self-interest under Chancellor Angela Merkel, The New York Times reported. The European Union is facing a serious crisis over financing and its currency, the euro.

Irish house prices may continue to fall for another 18 months according to Brian Lucey, professor of finance at the Trinity College School of Business, Finfacts reported. Lucey says in a commentary in the latest Daft.ie report that on the basis of a straight line projection of average declines in value since the peak, another 18 months of declining prices would be expected."That would be 50 months of house price falls, or just over 4 years, towards the lower end of historical experience.

Greece has run out of cash and it is fast running out of the ability to borrow at anything but the most punitive rates. Yet borrow it must, thus putting itself in an ever more precarious position, The Wall Street Journal reported. It is the originator of its difficulties, but, far from helping, those fellow euro-landers it turned to for salvation have merely exacerbated its problems. This became painfully apparent this week as the country's attempts to refinance its maturing debt managed only a grudging response, despite an interest coupon struck at an excruciatingly high 6%.