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It has no direct experience of supervision, no dedicated staff for the job, and faces outright hostility from some of its putative charges. Other than that, the European Central Bank is ideally placed to take over the supervision of 6,000 banks in the eurozone, the Financial Times reported.

There is no shortage of current candidates for the uncoveted title Sick Man of Europe: Greece, obviously, since it's in the midst of a deep depression and has just defaulted on its debts for a second time in a year via its deeply discounted debt buyback; Portugal and Ireland, since they are still subject to euro-zone bailouts; Spain, where unemployment is running at over 25%; Italy, whose economy has barely grown for 20 years and whose dysfunctional politics have returned to center stage now that former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has withdrawn his party's support for Mario Monti's govern

Newfoundland and Labrador called on the Harper government Friday to change corporate bankruptcy laws after it lost a major environmental appeal before the Supreme Court of Canada, the Canadian Press reported. The province failed in its bid to force the newsprint giant, formerly known as AbitibiBowater Inc., to pay for an environmental cleanup, as the Supreme Court sided with the company in a 7-2 ruling. The province's attorney general called for legislative changes after Friday's ruling, which acknowledged the so-called "polluter pay" principle.

Greece is near to reaching its target in a buyback of sovereign debt that will unlock aid from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, according to a Greek government official, Bloomberg reported. The amount offered in the buyback of Greece’s bonds is close to 30 billion euros, the official at the Finance Ministry said on condition of anonymity, referring to the face value of the securities. The transaction went “very well,” Prime Minister Antonis Samaras told reporters in Munich late Saturday after meeting leaders of the German state of Bavaria.

Germany’s economy may be skidding towards recession, the Bundesbank has warned, after it cut its 2013 growth forecast from 1.6 per cent to almost 0.4 per cent, the Irish Times reported. Europe’s largest economy will grow just 0.7 per cent this year, the central bank forecast, with contraction in the fourth quarter and likely stagnation in the first quarter of next year. The bank attributed the slowdown to a growing chill in the country’s important export sector.

China's largest maker of auto parts won a politically sensitive auction for A123 Systems Inc, a bankrupt maker of batteries for electric cars that was funded partly with U.S. government money, A123's investment banker said on Saturday, Reuters reported. Timothy Pohl of Lazard Freres said Wanxiang Group Corp's bid of about $260 million topped a joint bid from Johnson Controls Inc of Milwaukee and Japan's NEC Corp for the maker of lithium-ion batteries. Siemens AG of Germany had also qualified to bid, according to two people familiar with the auction, who asked not to be identified.

By the time voters next go to the polls in 2015, the number of higher-rate taxpayers in the United Kingdom will have doubled in 20 years, following chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne’s budget changes on Wednesday, the Irish Times reported. An extra million people will have been dragged into the 40p rate by 2015 because of Mr Osborne’s decision to increase income tax thresholds by just 1 percentage point, the respected Institute of Fiscal Studies declared – bringing the total to five million.

The European Central Bank has slashed its eurozone growth forecasts and warned that recession will drag on into the middle of next year, sending the euro plunging below €1.30 to the dollar, The Telegraph reported. Mario Draghi, the ECB’s president, said the governing council had discussed a cut in overnight deposit rate to below zero for the first time, and was "operationally ready" to do so if needed, The comment sent the euro into a nosedive, dropping from $1.3075 to $1.2950 in just two hours.

A bank raises money from its customers to make an off-the-books investment packaged by a private investment company as a loan to a pawn shop, which in turn makes loans to companies that banks aren’t willing to lend to because they’re not comfortable with the credit risk. Welcome to the wheels-within-wheels of China’s shadow banking system, the China Real Time blog reported. But the complexity being unwound by the recent default of a $22.5 million wealth management product sold by Huaxia Bank Co. to its customers doesn’t stop there.

Italy faces a deep crisis as its biggest steel plants struggle for survival, putting it in the forefront of a permanent decline in western Europe's steel sector and increasing cost pressures on many of the region's industries, Reuters reported. Producing crude steel in the European Union, where supply is 30 percent more than demand, has become too costly. Only the most technologically and environmentally advanced plants are set to survive. Italy's largest steel producers, ILVA and Lucchini, face potential shutdowns, which could cost the country 25,000 to 30,000 direct and indirect jobs.