The euro zone has agreed a multi-billion euro bailout for heavily indebted Greece as part of a package to support the euro, the Guardian newspaper reported on Saturday.

The 16 euro zone members have agreed on "coordinated bilateral contributions" in the form of loans or loan guarantees to Greece if Athens is unable to refinance its debts and asks the European Union for help, the Guardian quoted a senior European Commission official as saying.

The agreement was reached despite strong resistance by Germany, and Berlin has played the pivotal role in organizing the deal, the paper quoted other sources as saying.

The aid to be made available by the bailout could reach 25 billion euros, the paper quoted its sources as saying. [Read the full article]

As the Senate contemplates creation of a consumer financial protection agency within the Federal Reserve, opposition to the idea has emerged from an unexpected quarter: the Fed’s Consumer Advisory Council.

On Friday, 18 former or current members of the council, which was created in 1976 to give the central bank input on consumer credit protection issues, sent a letter to the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Christopher J. Dodd. They urged Mr. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, to push for an independent consumer agency that is not housed within another governmental entity.

We think it would be imprudent to give the Federal Reserve or any other existing agency primary consumer protection responsibilities,” they wrote. [Read the full article]

They were considered the dregs of Lehman Brothers — “bottom of the barrel, as one banker put it.

But as Lehman executives tried to keep the floundering bank afloat in 2008, they used these troubled investments to raise quick cash that helped mask the extent of the firm’s troubles. And they did it with the help of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The newly released report on the collapse of Lehman Brothers — which lays out what it characterizes as “materially misleading” accounting at the bank — also sheds surprising new light on Lehman’s dealings with the New York Fed.

Lehman engaged in a series of transactions with the New York Fed that were similar to the ones that drew criticism from the bankruptcy court examiner who investigated its collapse. The examiner, Anton R. [Read the full article]