Headlines

Barclays PLC cut Chief Executive Bob Diamond's pay packet by a third to £6.3 million ($9.97 million) in 2011, as a series of major U.K banks lowered executive bonuses amid weakening competition to retain top talent in the sector and glum financial results, The Wall Street Journal reported. In its annual report, Barclays said it cut its total 2011 remuneration for top executives and directors by 22% to £62.2 million compared with a year earlier. Bonus pay at Barclays's investment-banking arm fell by around a third to £1.74 billion. Mr.

British banks are in denial over their failure to deal with the financial crisis and the need to restructure their existing banking model, the Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King said in a newspaper interview on Monday. King said Britain's banks blamed him for not offering more support during the crisis because they could not "face up" to their own failures and the need for a restructured model, Reuters reported. "I think it is because they found it very, very difficult to face up to the failure of their banking model.

Portugal's economy continued to contract in the final three months of 2011, the country's statistics agency said Friday, as austerity measures hit domestic demand and the euro-zone crisis slowed exports, The Wall Street Journal reported. Portugal's gross domestic product shrank 2.8% in the fourth quarter on an annual basis, and fell 1.3% from the third quarter, according to final calculations from the National Statistics Institute. The annual drop was slightly deeper than the 2.7% contraction reported in an estimate last month.

Fears of a hard landing in China are looking increasingly overdone, indicators in the past few days show, and investor fears of sudden slowdown in the world’s second largest economy are easing, the Irish Times reported. Data at this time of year are always skewed by the two-week holiday for Chinese new year, but the trend remained upbeat. February inflation dropped more than expected to give a 3.2 per cent year-on-year rise, its slowest pace in 20 months, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, and compared to 4.5 per cent the previous month.

Finance Minister Michael Noonan has told RTÉ that the Government is currently in discussions with European authorities to reduce Ireland’s debt burden from the banking crisis, thejournal.ie reported. Speaking on The Week in Politics, which will be broadcast later tonight, Noonan confirmed negotiations on a major restructuring of Ireland’s banking debts were already underway. The talks are not only focused on Anglo Irish Bank promissory notes but will also take in loss-making tracker mortgages at AIB and Bank of Ireland, he said.

The Greek government might have been on course on Thursday night to conclude a €206bn debt restructuring but not before meeting some embarrassing opposition to the deal, the Financial Times reported. Hours before the deadline Thursday night for offers six Greek state-controlled pension funds, which together own €3.3bn of government bonds, were still holding out. Nine other state-controlled funds with another €3bn of bonds had agreed to participate in the debt swap.

In the years of economic crisis since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, Spanish leaders have always been able to boast to nervous investors that Spain’s public debt burden – however bad its annual budget deficits – is smaller than Germany’s and well below the European Union average, the Financial Times reported. Economists, business executives and even government officials, however, have started to sound the alarm about the rapid and unsustainable growth of the country’s public debt.

Jeweller Mattia Cielo opened his exclusive boutique on top Italian luxury street Via Montenapoleone last October, only to see the flow of clients peter out after the government curbed the use of cash. So when Rome bowed to pressure and scrapped the 1,000-euro ($1,300) limit on cash use by foreigners after only eight weeks, Cielo uncorked a bottle of champagne in celebration.

An arcane system at the heart of a global investigation into whether banks colluded in setting interest rates may endure simply because it is so deeply embedded in trillions of dollars' worth of financial contracts, Reuters reported. The London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, is a daily poll that asks a group of banks at what rate they think they will be able to borrow. The rate is supposed to reflect the level at which banks lend to one another.

The long-awaited restructuring of Europe's banking industry has creaked into motion, but the pace may remain sluggish thanks in part to the European Central Bank's recent wave of cheap lending to the Continent's banks, The Wall Street Journal reported. On Thursday, French bank BNP Paribas SA agreed to sell a stake in a French property company to U.S. shopping-mall giant Simon Property Group Inc., and Banco Bilbao Viczaya Argentaria SA, Spain's second-largest lender, agreed on Wednesday to buy nationalized Catalonian savings bank Unnim.