BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) – Students are protesting on Barcelona’s elegant boulevards, public-sector wages are being cut for the second time in three years and resentment is growing against the central government and beneficiaries of bank bailouts.

Such is the daily fallout from the euro zone’s debt crisis. Like the rest of Spain, Barcelona is looking at several years of hard grind as the country adjusts to living within its means after the collapse of a debt-financed housing bubble that has brought much of the banking sector to its knees.

BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) – Students are protesting on Barcelona’s elegant boulevards, public-sector wages are being cut for the second time in three years and resentment is growing against the central government and beneficiaries of bank bailouts.

Such is the daily fallout from the euro zone’s debt crisis. Like the rest of Spain, Barcelona is looking at several years of hard grind as the country adjusts to living within its means after the collapse of a debt-financed housing bubble that has brought much of the banking sector to its knees.

LONDON (Reuters) – Spain’s plan to rid banks of toxic real estate assets is reviving the politically heated debate over how creditors and taxpayers should share the vast losses still being incurred by the euro zone debt crisis.

Nowhere is the issue in sharper relief than in Ireland.

The government took an 85 billion euro IMF/EU rescue package to bail out the country’s banks, felled by a reckless decade-long building boom, and extended a blanket guarantee to 440 billion euros of the banks’ liabilities, including senior bonds.

LONDON, May 4 (Reuters) – Spain’s plan to rid banks of toxic
real estate assets is reviving the politically heated debate
over how creditors and taxpayers should share the vast losses
still being incurred by the euro zone debt crisis.

Nowhere is the issue in sharper relief than in Ireland.

The government took an 85 billion euro IMF/EU rescue package
to bail out the country’s banks, felled by a reckless
decade-long building boom, and extended a blanket guarantee to
440 billion euros of the banks’ liabilities, including senior
bonds.

LONDON, April 30 (Reuters)- From Beijing to Bucharest,
emerging market policymakers are as worried as those in Brussels
that the rapid contraction in western European banks’ balance
sheets will compound the debt crisis and further delay economic
recovery.

In a striking indication of that concern, the International
Monetary Fund said developments in the euro area pose a greater
risk to the Asia-Pacific region than either a hard landing in
China or a rise in commodity prices.

LONDON (Reuters) – It’s early days, but powerful political currents could be sweeping Europe away from its hair-shirt obsession with reducing debt and deficits regardless of the economic cost.

Any course correction will be a tug on the tiller rather than a U-turn. The euro zone will not suddenly abandon budget discipline and spend its way back to growth as Germany, Europe’s paymaster, would not stand for it. Nor, in their current mood, would the bond markets.

LONDON (Reuters) – It’s early days, but powerful political currents could be sweeping Europe away from its hair-shirt obsession with reducing debt and deficits regardless of the economic cost.

Any course correction will be a tug on the tiller rather than a U-turn. The euro zone will not suddenly abandon budget discipline and spend its way back to growth as Germany, Europe’s paymaster, would not stand for it. Nor, in their current mood, would the bond markets.

LONDON (Reuters) – Thursday’s Spanish debt auction results have set the tone for a year of muddling through: Yields are too high to be sustainable in the long term, yet not high enough to trigger a near-term meltdown.

In the same vein, an agreement taking shape to lend the International Monetary Fund $400 billion (250 billion pounds) so it could help bail out Spain (or Italy) is unlikely to be a game changer for sceptical markets.

LONDON (Reuters) – Thursday’s Spanish debt auction results have set the tone for a year of muddling through: Yields are too high to be sustainable in the long term, yet not high enough to trigger a near-term meltdown.

In the same vein, an agreement taking shape to lend the International Monetary Fund $400 billion so it could help bail out Spain (or Italy) is unlikely to be a game changer for skeptical markets.

LONDON (Reuters) – It may be cold comfort for countries on the euro zone’s southern periphery mired in recession, but they are making clear strides by some measures towards putting their economies on a sounder long-term footing.

After years of excessive debt-fuelled consumption at home, Spain and Portugal are seeing a big increase in exports, while Italy’s budget deficit is now comfortably below Europe’s mandated ceiling of 3 percent of national output.