Euro fin mins to discuss potential Spain rescue

Eurozone finance ministers eyed an up to 100-billion-euro ($125 billion) strings-attached rescue of Spain's distressed banks at emergency talks on Saturday.With banks in the eurozone's fourth largest economy hobbled by heavy losses on real estate, finance ministers in the 17-nation Eurogroup held an emergency conference call to outline a rescue deal for Spain."The amount on the table at the moment is as much as up to 100 billion euros but this hasn't been decided yet," a senior EU official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Euro zone finance officials acknowledged being "in a mess" over Cyprus during a conference call on Wednesday and discussed imposing capital controls to insulate the region from a possible collapse of the Cypriot economy. In detailed notes of the call seen by Reuters, one official described emotions as running "very high", making it difficult to come up with rational solutions, and referred to "open talk in regards of (Cyprus) leaving the euro zone".

BRUSSELS/BERLIN – Germany signaled on Wednesday it was ready to back plans for the European Central Bank to be made the chief supervisor of banks, raising the prospect of a breakthrough on the European Union’s most ambitious financial reform. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told the German cabinet he was “optimistic” about a deal ahead of a meeting of EU finance ministers in Brussels on Wednesday, a German official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

LONDON — The messy deal to bail out Cyprus has averted the latest threat to the break-up of the euro but at the cost of raising new questions about the single currency’s long-term viability. Savers in other eurozone banks appear so far to be taking the freezing of balances over 100,000 euros in Cyprus’s two biggest lenders in their stride. Perhaps they judge that events in a tiny, far-away island with outsize banks and a reliance on deposits from Russian oligarchs hold little relevance for them.

After insisting no bailouts would be needed, Spain to spend billions on bank rescue Spain is planning a state bail-out of Bankia, the country’s third biggest bank by assets, in a move likely to involve the injection of billions of euros of public money into the troubled lender.

British finance minister George Osborne called Thursday for a rapid recapitalisation of Spain's troubled banking sector using the eurozone's rescue fund.Osborne spoke ahead of British Prime Minister David Cameron's trip to Berlin, where the premier will meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel for key talks on the eurozone's sovereign debt crisis.