The owner of German department store chain Karstadt, Nicolas Berggruen, is interested in buying insolvent drugstore chain Schlecker, a person close to the U.S.-German investor said on Thursday, Reuters reported. A creditor meeting is scheduled for Friday to decide over Schlecker's future and possibly pick a buyer for what's left of the chain, which has closed 2,000 of its outlets. Daily paper Stuttgarter Nachrichten earlier said Berggruen entered the sales process two weeks ago, bidding between 100 million and 500 million euros ($126-$630 million).

Germany dismissed a French-led call for euro zone governments to issue common bonds, a day before a European Union summit which investors are looking to for new measures to counter the bloc’s debt crisis, the Vancouver Sun reported. After a torrid week, stock markets rallied on optimism that the Wednesday summit would produce measures to foster growth and ward off the threat of contagion should Greece exit the euro.

The head of German carmaker Opel, under pressure from parent General Motors to end losses, refused to promise workers at its plant in Bochum on Monday that their jobs would be safeguarded after 2014, Reuters reported. The plant, located in the rust-belt Ruhr region devastated by coal mine closures, is expected to shut after the company chose to build the next generation of its popular Astra compact in Britain and Poland where wages are cheaper.

Private equity investor Cerberus has agreed to acquire roughly 22,000 German flats from insolvent Speymill Deutsche Immobilien (SDIC), Reuters reported. As part of the deal, Cerberus is restructuring 985 million euros ($1.25 billion) in SDIC's debt and will inject an undisclosed sum of fresh capital, the administrator and the private equity investor said in a joint statement on Wednesday.

German solar-power company Sovello GmbH filed for insolvency and will attempt to restructure in the process, Bloomberg reported. Sovello, based in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, cannot pay its debts and has asked the Dessau insolvency court to be allowed to restructure under its management, the company said in a statement on its website today. Attorney Bernd Depping has been appointed as preliminary administrator, the company said. “We have checked alternative scenarios to regain solvency,” Chief Executive Officer Reiner Beutel said in the statement.

Germany is facing a unique dilemma as many euro-zone counterparts debate how much fiscal belt-tightening their citizens can withstand to restore sound public finances: how much inflation it can stomach to help its southern neighbors, The Wall Street Journal reported. On Friday, Germany's central bank rejected speculation that it is softening its anti-inflation rigor, as its leader tried to keep a largely economic debate about restoring growth in Southern Europe from damaging the Bundesbank's cherished reputation in Europe's largest economy.

French President-elect Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have each been prescribing the same salve — growth — to ease Europe’s economic ills. But the medicines vary sharply on either side of the Rhine, The Washington Post reported. And though European leaders will meet later this month to try to work out their differences, the 17 countries that share the euro currency remain far from abandoning the debt-funding spending cuts that Germany has long championed. Hollande’s version of growth involves spending more money to stimulate jobs and economic recovery.

Countries around the world envy Germany's economic success and look up to it as a role model. But a closer look reveals a much bleaker picture. Only a few are benefiting from the boom, while stagnant wages and precarious employment conditions are making it difficult for millions to make ends meet, Spiegel Online reported. "Prosperity for all" was once the credo of Ludwig Erhard, the first economics minister of postwar Germany. This promise shaped the country for decades and set it apart from many other economies. But how much is this promise still worth today?

German aluminium smelter Voerde Aluminium launched insolvency proceedings on Friday but said the business would continue to operate and it would seek to restructure, Reuters reported. The company, which produces around 115,000 tonnes of aluminium annually and has 410 employees, said it had hit liquidity problems because aluminium prices had fallen since July last year while production costs have risen it. The smelter was sold by British group Corus in 2009 to BaseMet, owned in turn by investor Gary Klesch.

He is not the best-known player in the euro crisis, but over the next couple of years Jens Weidmann, who this week celebrated his first anniversary as president of Germany’s Bundesbank, will be one of the most important. The euro zone’s future hinges on when and how its peripheral economies can return to growth. And, put crudely, their ability to do so will depend a lot on whether Mr Weidmann and the Bundesbank will tolerate higher inflation in Germany, The Economist reported. Asking a central banker to accept higher inflation may seem like asking a cardinal to accept more sin.