EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - As EU leaders ready themselves to gather in Brussels amid perhaps the EU's worst existential crisis, fresh details of frustration at the new Greek finance minister have emerged.

The summit was originally to focus on the issue of migration amid unrest in north Africa and the Middle East, but all eyes are on Greece and the wider eurozone crisis even though the Athens drama is not officially on the schedule.

Heads of the 27 European Union states meet in Brussels on Thursday and Friday, with plans for a second emergency loan package for Greece at the top of the agenda.

Before the meeting, German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the Greek parliament's vote of confidence in Prime Minister George Papandreou, but said budget pruning is "an important precondition" for the aid.

In an address to a parliamentary committee, the chancellor said eurozone nations offering help to Greece wanted the Mediterranean country's conservative opposition to rally behind Papandreou and support the budget cuts.

"But that is looking harder to achieve than in Portugal's case," she said, referring to bipartisan support for budget cuts in Lisbon.

Some five weeks ago, it looked as if Saab might make it. The Dutch-owned company Swedish Automobile that owns Saab, and formerly operated under the name Spyker, had secured funding from China's largest publicly traded car distributor, Pang Da.

Pang Da said it would provide 45 million euros ($63 million) to Saab so it could resume manufacturing for export to China, and pay another 65 million euros for a 24 percent equity stake in Saab. Saab resumed production which had been idle since the beginning of April.

European lawmakers on Thursday endorsed Italian central bank governor Mario Draghi as the next president of the European Central Bank, hours before the start of a two-day European Union summit at which he was to receive final approval for the job.

The 63-year-old banker, who last year fought against the 110-billion-euro ($157 billion) emergency loan package for Greece, is expected to take over the ECB post from Jean-Claude Trichet on November 1.

Draghi and his supporters had to convince skeptics in the bloc that he was fit for the job, despite coming from a country now seen as one of the financial problem children of the EU.

The Paris International Airshow was dominated this week by the Airbus A320neo, the upgraded, more fuel-efficient medium-haul workhorse which appeared to get the better of Boeing's venerable 737 series, the world's biggest-selling plane.

The medium-haul market is the most important segment of the aircraft industry, and Boeing estimates it will likely account for nearly half of all commercial airplane sales over the next 20 years.

But it is Airbus that is currently infringing on Boeing's home market.

The European planemaker celebrated the best week of sales in aviation history on Thursday, boasting of 730 orders for jets worth 50 billion euros ($ 72 billion) at the Paris International Airshow.

AFP - French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde on Wednesday took her campaign to lead the International Monetary Fund directly to the IMF officials who will choose between her and her Mexican rival.

Lagarde is up against Mexican central bank chief Agustin Carstens, who has been billed as the candidate of the world's developing economies, which have never before been represented in the position of IMF managing director.

(Reuters) - Investors have been critical of a proposal by the deputy prime minister to give every voter shares in the country's state-owned banks, saying the plan could be counter-productive and impractical.

Members of the public also gave a mixed reaction to the proposal while the British Bankers Association only said that the idea of giving the public the opportunity to get some shares when the banks are re-privatised had "real merit."

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who heads the coalition government's junior Liberal Democrat party, said he wanted to create a "people's banking system."

He said he had written to Chancellor George Osborne and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, asking them to look into introducing a "mass share-ownership scheme" as part of the privatisation of bailed out lenders Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds.

However, fund managers were sceptical that Clegg's idea would work in practice.

World stock markets suffered another bout of heavy losses on Thursday, driven down by fears over the eurozone debt crisis and fresh evidence that global economic growth is faltering.

A flood of poor economic news from the US, China, the UK and the eurozone helped to push shares down sharply, and send the euro to record lows. The oil price also slumped, wiping more than $8 off the cost of a barrel of Brent crude at one point, as extra supplies were released in an effort to prevent the world economy stagnating.

NHK has learned that the International Energy Agency is finalizing talks to release emergency oil reserves of its oil-consuming member nations to help stabilize crude oil prices.

The autonomous organization of 28 major oil consuming countries, including Japan and the United States, is said to be close to securing agreement for the coordinated operation.

The release operation, the first of its kind since 2005, is being planned ahead of an expected rise in gasoline use in the northern hemisphere during the summer holiday season.

We are not all in this together. The UK economy is flat, the US is weak and the Greek debt crisis, according to some commentators, is threatening another Lehman Brothers-style meltdown. But a new report shows the world's wealthiest people are getting more prosperous - and more numerous - by the day.

The globe's richest have now recouped the losses they suffered after the 2008 banking crisis. They are richer than ever, and there are more of them - nearly 11 million - than before the recession struck.

In the world of the well-heeled, the rich are referred to as "high net worth individuals" (HNWIs) and defined as people who have more than $1m (£620,000) of free cash.

According to the annual world wealth report by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini, the wealth of HNWIs around the world reached $42.7tn (£26.5tn) in 2010, rising nearly 10% in a year and surpassing the peak of $40.7tn reached in 2007, even as austerity budgets were implemented by many governments in the developed world.

The surplus recycling problem has been a permanent feature of the eurozone from its very inception. Its nature is simple: In every currency union there will always co-exist regions (or member-states) that are permanently in surplus with the rest and others that will be deficit regions. Given that the deficit regions cannot devalue as a means of keeping their deficits in check, some mechanism must exist by which the surpluses are recycled from the surplus regions and into the deficit regions not as fiscal transfers but as productive investments that lessen the divergence and help with cohesion. The eurozone has always lacked such a surplus recycling mechanism (click here for a paper that explains this argument fully).