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Italy’s new premier pressed on Wednesday for the creation of a full-fledged European banking union and said he wants results before the EU summit next month. Enrico Letta said at a news conference Wednesday with French President François Hollande that “we mustn’t waste time on this.” …

Ireland's expected exit from a European bailout program later this year should be a morale boost to other euro zone countries in crisis, its European affairs minister said on Saturday.

Ireland has done everything demanded by the EU’s creditor powers, and seemingly survived. It has endured a fiscal squeeze of 16pc of GDP. It has stabilized the colossal debts left from taking on the gambling losses of Anglo Irish Bank at EU behest, that is to say from shielding German, British, Dutch and Belgian lenders from systemic contagion at a critical moment. It has clawed its way back to market credibility, issuing bonds at respectable rates. “Our last issue of routine 3-month treasury bills was at 0.26pc, not quite what Germany gets but very low,” said finance minister Michael Noonan....

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble is determined to end the euro crisis once and for all. On Sunday he effectively ruled out a Greek bankruptcy, and is now proposing far-reaching reforms to stabilize the currency union. Under his plan, Brussels would be granted far greater powers over national budgets. … The European commissioner for economic and currency affairs is to become equally powerful as the commissioner for competition. The competition commissioner is entitled to make decisions independently and does not require the agreement of the other commissioners in making those decisions. If the currency affairs commissioner were truly independent when...

Greece should start paying half of its pensions and state salaries in drachmas as part of a gradual exit from the eurozone, a leading German conservative was quoted on Monday as saying. Alexander Dobrindt, general secretary of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavaria-based sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), has long argued that Greece would be better off outside the eurozone. "With Greece we have reached the end of the road. There must not be any further aid. A country which does not have the will to fulfil the conditions, or is not able to do...

The European Central Bank (ECB) could take on the key role of supervising the eurozone's strained banking system very quickly if necessary, a German financial daily reported on Tuesday. "The institution is credible; it could do it and quickly," French central bank head Christian Noyer told Tuesday's edition of Germany's Handelsblatt business daily. "All we need is a plan for overall supervision of the eurozone banks. It that was ready today, then you could put it into effect tomorrow," he said. …

The leaders of France and Germany joined in a symbolic celebration of unity on Sunday (8 July), hailing a relationship that has brought peace to Europe for 50 years. French President François Hollande underlined that the proposed banking union is the “first step to a budgetary union, which will open the way to stability, growth, and tighter ties.” Taking a pause from more than two years of constant crisis management that has strained Franco-German ties, President François Hollande welcomed his German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel, to the city of Reims in eastern France. Hollande said France and Germany must defend...

… Everyone knows what is at stake. "If the euro fails, Europe will fail," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a May 2010 speech in the western German city of Aachen. Since then, the Europeans have held summit after summit and pledged bigger and bigger sums of money in a bid to get the situation under control. But it's only become worse. … Like a dangerous fungus, the crisis within the common currency threatens to eat away at Europe's foundations. By now, there is nothing less at stake than an entire lifestyle, one that millions of Europeans have come to...

When Jean-Claude Trichet called last June for the creation of a European finance ministry with power over national budgets, the idea seemed fanciful, a distant dream that would take years or even decades to realize, if it ever came to be. One year later, with the eurozone's debt crisis threatening to tear the bloc apart, Germany is pushing its partners for precisely the kind of giant leap forward in fiscal integration that the now-departed European Central Bank president had in mind. After falling short with her "fiscal compact" on budget discipline, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is pressing for much more...

BRUSSELS—German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said transferring more powers to EU institutions rather than increasing the size of the eurozone's future bailout fund is the way to overcome the euro crisis. "We have said right from the start that we want to stand up for the euro, but what we don't want is a situation where we are forced to promise something that we will not be able to fulfil," Merkel said Wednesday (25 January) in the opening speech of the World Economic Forum, an informal gathering of leaders and business magnates held every year in Davos, a Swiss mountain...