Headlines

In a related story, the reported that eurozone finance ministers will miss next week’s deadline for an agreement with the International Monetary Fund to release €7bn in aid to Greece, forcing the bailout fight into the Dutch and French election season where diplomats fear it could become highly politicized. EU officials said that the two sides remained at loggerheads over an IMF demand that Athens be granted significant debt relief and easier surplus targets, meaning that a deal that had been hoped for at a high-stakes ministerial meeting on Monday may now be months away.

The rise of populist parties in France and Italy is awakening an old fear in Europe: that public debt may be forcibly switched back into former national currencies if countries exit the monetary union, Bloomberg News reported. The concern is reminiscent of the depths of the euro region debt crisis, when doubts about Greece’s ability to meet its obligations sent investors scrambling to offload exposure -- and dust off their legal textbooks.

The Central Bank has sold a further €500 million of bonds that were linked to the restructuring four years ago of the bailout of now-defunct Anglo Irish Bank, the Irish Times reported. The Central Bank received €25 billion of government bonds in February 2013 under a complex restructuring of promissory notes used by the State during the financial crisis to rescue the bank, which was subsequently named Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC). IBRC had been using the promissory notes as collateral for emergency funding at the Central Bank.

The number of companies listed on the New Zealand sharemarket will continue to shrink this year, according a forecast on the capital markets. Law firm Chapman Tripp has released a trends and insights report on New Zealand's Equity Markets and is predicting more departures from the NZX and just three new companies to list - a number in line with previous years, The New Zealand Herald reported.

Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic promised the IMF to restructure, close or sell hundreds of money-losing companies that robbed the budget of as much as $1 billion a year, Bloomberg News reported. The list includes coal miner JP PEU Resavica, the Rudarsko-topionicarski basen Bor copper miner, and chemical producers Azotara doo and Metanolsko Sircetni Kompleks MSK. After Serbia pared its fiscal gap to 1.4 percent of economic output last year from 6.6 percent in 2014, ending aid to companies would “cement gains,” Sosa said, though “vested interests” may make trims more difficult.

Tata steelworkers in the UK have voted to accept the closure of their £15bn pension fund, a historic sacrifice that brings the industry closer to resolving the crisis in British steel, the Financial Times reported. Thousands of trade union members backed a rescue package that Tata Steel offered its British operation, whose future came under threat after the Indian group threatened to quit the country last March. A key condition of the plan — aimed at saving thousands of jobs and maintaining production — was shutting the British Steel Pension Scheme to further contributions.

Spain’s inflation rate has been confirmed at a more than four year high of 2.9 per cent in January, coming in just below a 3 per cent initial estimate but still underscoring the diverging inflationary performances of countries in the Eurozone, the Financial Times reported. EU-harmonised consumer prices in the eurozone’s fourth largest economy leapt from 1.6 per cent in December, pushed up by the cost of housing and electricity. The 2.9 per cent reading is the highest since December 2012.

For several weeks near the end of last year, Indian banks were besieged by snaking queues of customers waiting to deposit banknotes that had suddenly been declared obsolete by the government, the Financial Times reported. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dramatic demonetisation helped drive a Rs5.1tn ($76bn) increase in bank deposits in the final three months of last year — giving the sector a burst of cheap funding and pushing millions of Indians towards the formal banking sector.

Greece's talks with its official lenders on concluding a crucial bailout review have made progress, but more steps are needed to wrap it up, European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs Pierre Moscovici said on Wednesday.

The Government will seek EU funding to help businesses affected by the UK’s departure from the union, the Taoiseach said on Wednesday afternoon, in a major speech on the Coalition’s Brexit policy. Speaking at an Institute of International and European Affairs event at the Mansion House in Dublin, the Taoiseach said that “stabilisation and adjustment measures” for the businesses most affected by Brexit will be funded by the Government, the Irish Times reported. He said support for these measures will be sought from Brussels.