German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday said Greece doesn't need financial support and European Union leaders shouldn't make the question of aid for Greece the focus of their summit later this week, The Wall Street Journal reported. In an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio, Ms. Merkel warned other European leaders against unsettling financial markets by raising "false expectations" that there will be a decision on aid for Greece this week.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou is racing to secure an explicit pledge of European aid and cut his country’s borrowing costs as €20 billion ($27 billion) of debt comes due in the next two months, Bloomberg reported. With investors still demanding Greece pay 3 percentage points more than Germany on its 10-year debt, Papandreou says Greece can’t afford to hold out much longer at current market rates. His government still needs to raise another €10 billion to repay bonds maturing on April 20 and May 19.

Germany hasn't ruled out International Monetary Fund aid for Greece, a spokesman said Friday, Dow Jones reported. Ulrich Wilhelm, Chancellor Angela Merkel's main spokesman, told reporters Friday that because Greece hasn't requested aid from Germany or the European Union, there's no basis for making a decision. "It's an open question," Wilhelm said, adding that whether and how to provide aid for Greece would be "decided quickly" if Greece were to make such a request. "The government has not ruled out financial aid from the IMF," Wilhelm said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, adopting a harsher tone toward Greece than the one expressed by some other European leaders, said Wednesday that Europe needed better rules to police its members, and she tacitly endorsed a proposal to eject wayward countries from the group of countries that use the euro, The New York Times reported. Speaking before a session of Parliament in Berlin, Mrs. Merkel referred to a proposal made last week by Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister.

Michel Barnier, the European commissioner in charge of financial market regulation, said he would propose controls to curb speculative trading in credit default swaps, (CDS) a form of debt insurance that has been blamed for worsening Greece's economic problems, Telegraph.co.uk reported. His measures will target so-called naked selling of CDS, where insurance contracts are sold to buyers who do not own the debt. The cost of CDS on Greece rocketed when fears grew that the country could default on its debt.

Greece should turn to the International Monetary Fund if it needs aid, the chief finance spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party said, in a reversal that signals a rift with European leaders Jean-Claude Trichet, Jean-Claude Juncker and Nicolas Sarkozy, Bloomberg reported. “We have to think about who has the instruments to push for Greece to restore its capital-markets access” if ultimately needed, Michael Meister, a lawmaker with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said in an interview in Berlin.

Across Europe, from profligate Greece to newly strait-laced Ireland, countries are promising deep, painful cuts in public spending even as they face the likelihood of a new recession, The New York Times reported. To protect the value of the euro, satisfy investors and appease Europe’s economic taskmaster, Germany, the region’s most heavily indebted nations consider that they have no choice but to slim down. Reviving economic growth and reducing unemployment must wait until countries put their fiscal houses in better order, the thinking goes.

The cash-strapped Greek government is putting a host of state assets on the block, but has drawn the line at off loading islands in a bid to reduce its crushing debt burden, The Wall Street Journal reported. Officials plan to sell some of the country's eclectic holdings, which include jumbo jets and stakes in banks and a famed casino.

Providing aid to Greece shouldn't be a "rash decision," and expulsion from the euro zone must be a possible consequence for countries that threaten the bloc's stability in the future, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. Ms. Merkel said that the crisis in Greece, where a budget deficit above 12% has prompted fears about the government's ability to pay its debts and the euro zone's power to stabilize a struggling member, presented the greatest challenge yet to face the common currency and exposed a need for broad new regulations.

Credible efforts by Greece's government to clean up its finances have so far negated the need for any bailout from the European Union, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said Friday. In offering a strong vote of confidence in the new Greek government, Ms. Lagarde said in a Wall Street Journal interview that Greece had "for once, over-delivered from what was expected" in terms of legislation intended to cut spending. Whereas she had expected cuts worth 1.5% of gross domestic product, the government had come up with 2%, she said.