Headlines

Foreign investors are looking to snap up what is left of Germany's once-booming solar industry, in time to benefit from an expected global recovery in the sector, Reuters reported. During the last decade, Germany pioneered the solar industry by throwing billions of euros in subsidies at it, making it the world's largest market for solar panels in the process.

Greece's four big, systemic banks will need another €5.8 billion ($8.0 billion) to shore up their fragile balance sheets, the country's central bank said Thursday, in order to cope with a growing mountain of bad loans that have become another painful legacy of Greece's protracted debt crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported.

A former deputy governor of Indonesia's central bank was charged Thursday with allegedly taking bribes and abusing power in a bank bailout, as corruption emerges as a top issue in coming elections, The Wall Street Journal reported. Budi Mulya denies any wrongdoing in the US$750 million bailout in 2008 of PT Bank Century, now called PT Bank Mutiara. "I understand all the sentences, but I don't understand the substance," Mr. Mulya said in his only comment after state prosecutors finished reading the charges for trial, which began Thursday and is expected to last three to six months.

NAMA has so far placed 296 individual developers or groups of developers into receivership, the Irish Independent can reveal. Based on figures provided, since its inception in 2009 the National Asset Management Agency has moved against 37pc of the developers it has dealt with, including high-profile ones such as Sean Dunne, Paddy Shovlin, Bernard McNamara, Richard Barrett and Johnny Ronan of Treasury Holdings. But last night, Fianna Fail finance spokesman Michael McGrath said he was "highly concerned" at the high number of developers who have been moved against.

Japan’s government said Bitcoin isn’t a currency amid calls for its regulation a week after the bankruptcy of Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based exchange that was once the world’s biggest. There is no law to define Bitcoin and relevant ministries are gathering information on it, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet said in a statement in response to questions from an opposition party lawmaker. Bitcoin transactions can be taxed, according to the statement obtained by Bloomberg News. Japan isn’t the only country grappling with the regulation of Bitcoin.

Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins says he was forced to increase bonus payments to senior executives after hundreds of key staff left the investment bank in America and he feared a “death spiral” could grip the organisation, The Guardian reported. Revealing the reasons behind the controversial decision to increase bonuses by £200m in 2013 despite profits falling at Barclays, Mr Jenkins said that he had to act or the investment division would suffer.

European Union authorities on Wednesday said Italy's economic woes require strict monitoring and "strong policy action," putting more pressure on Rome to cut its government budget deficit amid record unemployment, The Wall Street Journal reported. But officials at the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, declined to take a similar step for Germany because of its large current-account surplus, the broadest measure of a country's trade and financial flows with the rest of the world. The U.S.

One thing we can tell you about the Mt. Gox bankruptcy case: It won’t be like any other bankruptcy case you’ve seen, The Wall Street Journal MoneyBeat blog reported. MoneyBeat had a very enlightening and interesting talk with Christopher Mirick, a partner at the international law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, operating in the firm’s Insolvency & Restructuring practice.

Approximately one-fourth of listed Korean companies are on the brink of insolvency, BusinessKorea reported. Consulting firm AlixPartners held a press conference on March 4 at the Westin Chosun Hotel in Seoul, saying that about 17 percent of the 1,600 or so companies it examined corresponded to On-Alert or a worse condition as of the end of the third quarter of 2013. AlixPartners used its own Corporate Distress Index, which considers the financial and stock price data of corporate entities, to obtain the analysis result.

It’s just over two months since Jose Manuel Barroso stoked controversy when he said that the euro was a victim of the Irish banking crisis at a leaders’ summit in Brussels, just as Ireland had exited its bailout. This evening he will have the first opportunity to return to the topic of Ireland when he addresses an audience at University College Cork, the Irish Times reported.