Headlines

Bank of England policymakers said on Tuesday they would press ahead quickly with a new curb on banks' risk exposure and would not be deflected by industry lobbying against the plan, Reuters reported. Paul Tucker, the central bank's deputy governor for financial stability, told British lawmakers that the new rule, which would require UK banks to meet a limit on lending as a proportion of their capital, should be introduced now. Ratcheting up the pressure on banks, Tucker said lobbying was "completely unacceptable", pointless and regulators would not be deflected "one iota" from their tasks.

France aims to make budget savings of around €28 billion over the next two years to restore public finances to order, finance minister Pierre Moscovici said Tuesday, the Irish Times reported. The government is struggling to find the right balance between belt-tightening and tax increases as it seeks to rein in the public deficit without hitting the already faltering economy. Speaking ahead of a parliamentary debate on next year’s budget, Mr Moscovici said that the government wanted savings of €14 billion in 2014.

Fairness. Everyone loves being fair, right? So who can resist a fairness tax? Not the Belgian government, The Wall Street Journal Brussels Beat blog reported. In late-night negotiations to trim billions off the country’s budget and meet European Union goals, the usual tweaks (more duty on cigarettes, some cuts to defense spending) were accompanied by this shiny new tax, presented by finance minister Koen Geens.

The insolvency of Alpine, Austria's second-biggest construction group, takes pressure off an overcrowded sector and could help profits at rivals, the former head of market leader Strabag SE told a newspaper, Reuters reported. "In Austria we certainly have an overstaffed market. If capacity is limited, that is certainly positive for the market," Hans Peter Haselsteiner, who is still a major shareholder in Strabag, told Die Presse in an interview printed on Tuesday.

Greece has three days to reassure its lenders it can deliver on conditions attached to its international bailout in order to receive the next tranche of aid, wire service Reuters is reporting. Athens and its creditors resumed talks on Monday, with a view to unlocking €8.1 billion in rescue loans, after a two-week break during which the government almost collapsed over redundancies at state broadcaster ERT.

Vítor Gaspar, Portugal’s finance minister and the chief strategist behind the country’s €78bn bailout programme, has resigned in a surprise move that highlights the unpopularity of the government’s tough austerity measures. Mr Gaspar, formerly a Brussels-based economist with no previous political experience, is to be replaced by Maria Luís Albuquerque, currently treasury secretary, the office of President Aníbal Cavaco Silva said on Monday, the Financial Times reported.

Unemployment in the euro zone continued its steady rise in May, according to data published Monday, underscoring the human effects of a downturn that has lasted a year and a half, the International Herald Tribune reported. The jobless rate in the 17 countries that belong to the euro zone was 12.1 percent in May, adjusting for seasonal effects, the report from Eurostat, the European Union statistics agency, said. That figure compared with 12 percent in April, which was revised down from 12.2 percent reported earlier. Based on the revised figures, May unemployment was a record high.

China's leaders are struggling not only to calm markets and redirect China's economy, but to address rumors that have sprung up in the absence of clear communication, interviews and internal documents show. The People's Bank of China instigated the cash shortages that catapulted Chinese interest rates to nosebleed highs over the past two weeks because the central bank felt it had no alternative amid what it saw as out-of-control credit growth, according to an internal document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Britain's biggest coal producer, UK Coal, will be placed in administration and most of its mines and pension liabilities transferred to a state-run pensions agency in a bid to save 2,000 jobs, according to a union leader and a newspaper report. The British coal industry has struggled to break even in recent years because of rising costs, hefty pension liabilities and competition from cheap imports from Colombia and the United States, Reuters reported.

Spain's bank-bailout fund will try in the coming months to sell two loss-making lenders the government nationalized last year, a senior official at the fund said Monday, four months after a previous attempt to sell one of them failed, The Wall Street Journal reported. He said the bailout fund, known by its Spanish acronym FROB, will soon hire two investment banks to analyze the balance sheets of NCG Banco SA and Catalunya Banc SA and open discussions with would-be buyers.