Power Lunch Power Lunch Europe

More than a quarter of the work force in Spain or Greece is without jobs, but there is a city on the Danube north of Munich that has the opposite problem: not enough workers, the New York Times reports.

It may be the age of austerity for many in Britain. For a former doctor, Geoffrey Lipman, it is anything but.  Dr. Geoffrey Lipman, who is retired, gets about $78,000 a year in his government pension.

Spain's economic crisis has prompted a movement within Spain dubbed it “rurbanismo,” a term invented to describe the reverse migration from city to country that has stemmed a generations-old trend that has long been the usual pattern in most advanced industrial economies, the New York Times reports.

Lawyers within the Treasury Department have recommended a preliminary settlement with Standard Chartered, clearing the path for the British bank to pay a penalty to state and federal prosecutors and to move beyond claims that it flouted laws governing international money transfers. The NYT reports.

In September 1992, the Federal Reserve culminated a long-running effort to stimulate the sluggish economy by cutting its benchmark interest rate to 3 percent, the lowest level it had reached in almost three decades.

When fear gripped the European markets in April, the money manager Robert Tipp decided to buy more Portuguese government bonds. He figured that European officials wouldn’t let the country turn into another Greece.

Anastasia Kastaniotou, a struggling mother of three, stood near the Greek Parliament building on Wednesday and threw up her hands as she contemplated an €11.5 billion austerity package that her country’s government was trying to tie up this week to keep Greece in the euro, the New York Times reports.

A top German official at the European Central Bank on Monday defended the bank’s plans to intervene in bond markets to push down borrowing costs for businesses and encourage economic growth. The position puts him at odds with the president of Germany's central bank and highlights a growing split in the country’s policy-making elite.

Greece's official lenders are signaling a growing reluctance to keep paying the bills of the nearly bankrupt nation, even as the government seeks leniency on its bailout terms.

Signs that cracks in the euro zone are widening sent markets on the Continent down sharply on Monday, as doubts grew about Greece’s ability to make good on its debt payments and Spain’s economy — the region’s fourth largest — was straining under the pressure of the government’s austerity measures, the NYT reports.

As regulators ramp up their global investigation into the manipulation of interest rates, the Justice Department has identified potential criminal wrongdoing by big banks and individuals at the center of the scandal. The New York Times reports.

For years, law enforcement officers and smugglers have played cat and mouse in Europe, where contraband cigarettes are stashed in everything from furniture shipments to loads of Christmas trees, the New York Times reports.

As big banks face the fallout from a global investigation into interest rate manipulation, American and British lawmakers are scrutinizing regulators who failed to take action that might have prevented years of illegal activity, the New York Times reports.

While it was big news when the Barclays chairman, Marcus Agius, resigned Monday over his bank’s role in the Libor rate-fixing scandal. Less noticed was his other resignation that same day, the New York Times reports.

The French President is determined to show the French that he is willing to stand up to Berlin, to push the German Chancellor to contribute even more than before toward a lasting solution of the euro mess. The New York Times reports.

The head of the European Central Bank and other euro zone leaders worked on Saturday on a grand vision for the euro zone meant to reassure investors and allies that flaws in the currency union will be addressed quickly.

As Europe works to prop up Spain’s wobbling banks, its leaders still face a problem that plagues the Continent’s increasingly vulnerable financial institutions — a longstanding addiction to the borrowed money that provides the day-to-day financing they need to survive.