Greece should lose voting privileges in the European Union if it gets a bailout from the 27-nation bloc, said the head of the business caucus of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. As one of the EU’s 27 members, Greece would be able to block demands accompanying a rescue if the conditions are “too tough,” Kurt Lauk, the head of the CDU’s Economic Council, said.

Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts, The New York Times reported. As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.

As Greece resists European demands for wider austerity measures, the contrast with the Baltic states couldn't be starker, The Wall Street Journal reported. Faced with similar market worries about their fiscal positions a year ago, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia bit the bullet. Now there is light on the horizon: Standard & Poor's has lifted its rating outlook on all three to stable from negative, citing the successes achieved in fiscal consolidation. Greece should take note. All three have retained effective currency pegs rather than take the option of devaluation.

European leaders said they wouldn't let Greece succumb to its credit crisis, in an unprecedented pledge of support that could push the 16 countries that share the euro currency closer to collective responsibility for their budgets and debts, The Wall Street Journal reported. Countries belonging to the euro "will take determined and coordinated action, if needed, to safeguard financial stability in the euro area as a whole," leaders of the European Union declared at a summit in Brussels on Thursday, after discussing Greece's budget crisis.

The tiny Baltic states have pursued closer integration with Europe with enormous zeal. But the price of monetary union may be giving them pause, The New York Times reported. Economists and ordinary citizens alike are watching the protests rumbling through the streets of Athens and the slow response to Greece’s problems coming out of Brussels. “Countries like Estonia and Latvia were once desperate to get in,” said Alf Vanags, director of the Baltic International Center for Economic Policy Studies in Riga.

European Union leaders will express support on Thursday for a financial rescue plan for Greece to be designed and supervised by eurozone finance ministers and the European Commission, EU officials and diplomats said, the Financial Times reported. The plan will require a cast-iron commitment from the Greek government to put its public finances in order and will draw on the technical expertise of the International Monetary Fund without tapping IMF funds, they said.

European debt markets were edgy in early trading Thursday, poised for short-term gains if the European Union summit produces the expected bailout for Greece but still showing signs of nerves, The Wall Street Journal reported. The cost of insuring European government bonds against default was volatile, sinking at the outset of trading before rising back up to the levels it held Wednesday. The iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which lets investors buy or sell default insurance on a basket of 15 European sovereign borrowers, traded at 0.97 percentage point.

As Europe edges toward emergency guarantees to stem market panic over one of the most profligate members of the euro bloc, the country that the region turns to for leadership, Germany, is suffering from growing doubts about the European experiment it long championed, The New York Times reported. Reluctant German leaders now find themselves forced to help Greece remain solvent, or risk watching markets attack one weak member after the next, from Portugal to Spain to Italy, threatening the stability of the euro, the European currency Germany fought so hard to create.

Greece has one apparently simple option for reining in a budget deficit that has roiled financial markets: Clamp down on widespread tax evasion, which costs the country an estimated €15 billion ($20.5 billion) a year, an amount that would pay off a big chunk of the budget deficit. The trouble is, tax evasion in this Mediterranean country is extremely difficult to eradicate, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Any deal by European officials to guarantee the debt of Greece and other troubled nations might keep the crisis from worsening, but it raises another big problem: moral hazard. The concern is that by rescuing a country that for years flouted fiscal discipline, the European Union would be encouraging such behavior rather than discouraging it, The Wall Street Journal reported. One of the strengths of the euro was the idea that when a country joined the European Union it was a one-way trip that came with strict fiscal responsibilities.