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.

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.

In one of its last moves before being disbanded last week, Britain's Financial Services Authority did something few bank regulators have done since the financial crisis: They relaxed rules on some financial-services firms, The Wall Street Journal reported. The thrust of the new policy by the FSA and the Bank of England is to lower barriers to entry for new banks by reducing capital requirements and speeding up the approval process.

Restructuring specialist Hilco is set to throw British entertainment retailer HMV a lifeline in a 50 million pound deal that will save 2,500 jobs, Reuters reported on a Sky News story. The deal, which could be struck as soon as Friday, will see HMV emerge from administration, Sky News said on its website, with the chain expected to be run by incumbent HMV executives together with newly-appointed Hilco executives. As part of the deal, Hilco will acquire about 130 HMV stores and all nine outlets operating under the Fopp brand, Sky News said.

A planned EU tax on transactions would raise the cost of issuing UK debt by nearly four billion pounds if it were in force this year even though Britain will not impose the levy, a study said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Eleven euro zone countries intend to introduce the tax on stock, bond and derivatives transactions next January to help to make banks pay for aid they received in the financial crisis. There are provisions to ensure the levy is applied no matter where in the world securities from the 11 states are traded.

A group of shareholders in Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has launched a multi-million pound lawsuit against the state-owned bank for misleading investors at the height of the credit crisis in 2008, Reuters reported. In the first court document filed in the UK over the bank's record 12 billion pound cash call in April 2008, a group of 21 claimants - including international investors and pension funds - allege the bank published a defective prospectus littered with misstatements and omissions.

U.K. banks must come up with £25 billion ($38 billion) in fresh capital this year, the Bank of England warned Wednesday, piling pressure on partly state-owned banks Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC and Lloyds Banking Group PLC to step up the pace of asset sales, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee said banks' capital buffers need to be higher to withstand the effects of the weak domestic economy and euro-zone crisis. Gov.

Britain's banks discover on Wednesday how much extra capital they need to keep regulators happy when the outcome of an inquiry into their financial health is revealed, Reuters reported. The Bank of England will release the capital requirements on Wednesday morning. The BOE's Financial Policy Committee, tasked with spotting system-wide risks, said in November that the shortfall could be anywhere between 24 billion and 60 billion pounds. Analysts expect the final number to be around the middle of that range.

Britain's 'bad bank' running down the loans of two bailed-out lenders repaid 4 billion pounds to the government last year, chipping away at a total owed of more than ten times that amount, Reuters reported. UK Asset Resolution (UKAR), a 'zombie bank' that does not take new business, owes the government 43.4 billion pounds, down from 48.7 billion when it was created in October 2010. Chief Executive Richard Banks said he was "very confident" taxpayers would get back all the money the government spent on rescuing Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley during the 2008 financial crisis.

The DVD and games rental store Blockbuster has been sold to restructuring specialists Gordon Brothers Europe after filing for a form of U.K. bankruptcy earlier this year, the Associated Press reported. The company had gone into administration - a form of bankruptcy in Britain - in January. Blockbuster U.K. at the time had 528 stores. Hundreds of shops were shut in the weeks after its financial collapse. Administrators for the company from accounting firm Deloitte said Saturday that Gordon Brothers Europe had purchased Blockbuster for an undisclosed sum, saving 2,000 jobs and 264 U.K. stores.