Bailouts, Eurozone Bailout | featured news

Europe has spent hundreds of billions of euros rescuing its banks but may have lost an entire generation of young people in the process, the president of the European Parliament said.

BERLIN —Greece’s new leaders have had only a month to confront their country’s dismal tangle of economic problems, but some in Europe think the troubled Mediterranean country is up against a hopeless task.

The Spanish government's most recent reforms will slash 56.4 billion euros ($69 billion) from the public deficit in the next two and a half years, an official document showed on Saturday, leaving a gap to be filled by taxes on energy.

Italy and Spain, battling searing market pressure in the euro zone's widening debt crisis, blocked agreement on measures to promote growth at a European Union summit on Thursday to demand urgent action to bring down their borrowing costs.

Cyprus, the fifth euro zone country to seek emergency funding from Europe, may need a bailout of up to 10 billion euros — over half the size of its economy — officials said.

Greece's new government promised on Thursday to renegotiate the terms of the country's bailout without endangering its future in the euro, responding to intense pressure to ease mounting social tensions but also risking a showdown with European powers.

Greece's new government is to ask lenders for two more years to hit fiscal targets, responding to huge public pressure for a softening of an international bailout but setting up a showdown with its euro zone partners.

Debate over Greece’s rescue plan now shifts to the International Monetary Fund, which must decide if it is willing to risk more on a bailout effort that the fund’s own analysis shows has a strong probability of failing.

Latest austerity cuts approved as 100,000 take to the streets in protest; 93 buildings damaged in Athens.

Slovakian lawmakers on Thursday approved expanding the size and powers of the EU bailout fund, overcoming an earlier rejection and removing the last hurdle to the fund's use as the continent's main weapon against the debt crisis.