Headlines

Cash-strapped Chinese solar panel maker Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd is seeking to sell some assets and bring in a strategic investor to repay debt and revitalise the company, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday. "It is looking for buyers for some of its projects and downstream assets," said the source, who asked not to be identified as he was not authorised to speak to the media. "It is also seeking to bring in a strategic investor to take a stake in the company." "Suntech is in dire need of cash," the source added.

Euro-zone countries will foot 10-20% of the bill for recapitalizing their ailing banks even when the facility enabling the bloc's bailout fund becomes operational, a senior euro-zone official said Wednesday. The point, he said, was to exclude "negative disincentives'--namely countries taking advantage of the European Stability Mechanism's presence and relaxing their bank supervision--and to ensure the member states "keep skin in the game," Nasdaq.com reported on a Dow Jones Business News story.

French chemicals maker Arkema will book a first-quarter charge of 125 million euros ($163 million) to reflect its exposure to unprofitable vinyls business Kem One, which it spun off in July 2012, Arkema said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. A French commercial court opened bankruptcy proceedings for Kem One in March at the request of its new owner, Klesch Group, led by American investor Gary Klesch. A court-appointed administrator is due to oversee Kem One's operations as part of the initial six-month procedure.

Investors in one-time market darling Poseidon Concepts Corp. are unlikely to recover any value despite the company winning temporary court protection from creditors, a Calgary analyst says, the Edmonton Journal reported. On Wednesday, the Calgary oilfield fluid-handling company that once had a market value of $1.3 billion announced it had been granted a Court of Queen’s Bench order under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act. It was Poseidon’s first official word since Feb. 26, when it announced two executives had quit, and Feb.

Cyprus yielded only to rich Luxembourg among euro-area countries in household wealth rankings as recently as 2010, while Germans were the statistical paupers in the bloc, according to data released by the European Central Bank on Tuesday, the Financial Times reported. The study, the first of its kind, is bound to fan indignation in Germany and other northern members of the currency union who see themselves as being the paymasters for heavily indebted southern countries, like Cyprus, Greece, Spain and Portugal, that have all sought international bailouts.

The U.K. economy narrowly avoided slipping into its first triple-dip recession after eking out fractional growth in the first quarter of the year, Britain's leading independent economic institute said Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research said its estimate of the U.K.'s gross domestic product shows the economy squeezed out growth of 0.1% in the first three months of the year.

The cost of fixing Slovenia's banking sector could be significantly higher than estimated, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. Slovenia's government may exceed its estimate of the €1 billion ($1.3 billion) needed to boost the capital of the country's ailing banks because it has based its cost estimates on a "most likely already outdated" analysis, the OECD said.

The UN is warning that austerity measures are hitting children hard, with a ranking of kids' well-being in rich countries topped by northern Europe and Britain climbing out of the bottom tier, The Australian reported. As governments turn to austerity to avoid passing on huge debt loads to the next generation, they must reflect on how their cuts are affecting children today, says Chris de Neubourg, who heads social and economic policy research at the UN's children's agency.

China’s sovereign credit rating has been cut by a major international agency for the first time since 1999 with Fitch raising concerns on Tuesday that the country’s rising debt problems will require a government bailout, the Financial Times reported. Fitch downgraded China’s long-term local currency rating from AA- to A+, citing a number of “underlying structural weaknesses” in the Chinese economy, including low average incomes, lagging standards of governance, and a rapid expansion of credit.

Bank regulators need to develop much simpler rules to make it harder for large financial firms to game the supervisory system, Bank of England official Andrew Haldane said on Tuesday. "We need to do a radical pruning, simplifying of our regulatory apparatus (that) places much less emphasis on what are unreliable measures of risk," Haldane, the BoE's executive director for financial stability, told a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.