European Union governments and parliamentarians will try to reach a compromise this week on how to wind down failing banks, in marathon talks intended to settle who decides to close banks and who picks up the bill.
A deal in the negotiations, set to span three days, would be the final step in a European banking union that would mean one supervisor for all eurozone banks, one set of rules to close or restructure those in trouble and one common pot of money to pay for it. The banking union, and the thorough clean-up of banks' books that will accompany it, is meant to restore banks' confidence in one another and boost lending to other businesses and households.
New lending has been throttled by banks' efforts to raise capital and reduce the bad loans that proliferated in the recession triggered by the global financial crisis and deepened by the eurozone's sovereign debt crisis. Policymakers agreed last year that the European Central Bank (ECB) will be the single supervisor for all eurozone banks and will take on its new responsibilities from November. But talks on a single European agency to wind up or close failing banks, and on a single fund to back it up, have entered a crucial stage: EU governments, represented by finance ministers of the 28-nation bloc, and the European parliament must reach a deal next week. If they don't, there won't be enough time to complete the legislative process for the resolution mechanism before the last sitting of the current parliament in mid-April. The key law would be delayed by at least seven months, probably more.
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The AP has tweeted that Malaysia’s civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman says no plane debris has been found at the spot identified in Chinese satellite images. Earlier tweets were quoting Vietnamese authorities saying they too had searched the area in the photographs to no avail.
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