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European Union leaders are working around the clock to create a new measure to defend the euro before financial markets reopen on Monday. EU finance ministers will meet on Sunday to discuss the plan.

Analysts and investors have begun to focus on the risks to European banks if severe budget cuts by debt-ridden countries freeze credit markets and cause a double-dip recession.

What really went on at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen? Secret recordings reveal how China and India prevented an agreement on tackling climate change at the crucial meeting. The powerless Europeans were forced to look on as the agreement failed.

The growing crisis in the eurozone threatened to undermine the global economic recovery as markets plunged across the world on fears that European leaders may not be able to contain the debt contagion spreading from Greece.

Emergency moves by the European Central Bank on Monday and the €110bn ($145bn) international rescue package agreed over the weekend have failed to quell investor fears about the future of the eurozone as concerns have risen about other member countries' stability.

The euro has been rescued for the moment, but European politicians have thrown the foundations of Europe's common currency overboard with their unprecedented bailout package. In the longer term, the dangers of the crisis can only increase, and the flood of billions of euros could also lead to inflation

The International Monetary Fund and the European Union are coming to Greece's aid with a financial commitment worth billions. But is it already too late to rescue the cash-strapped country?

Like the giant financial bailout announced by the United States in 2008, the sweeping rescue package announced by Europe eased fears of a market collapse but left a big question: will it work long term? And as details crystallized of the package's main component - a promise by the European Union's member states to back 440 billion euros, or $560 billion, in new loans to bail out European economies - the wisdom of solving a debt crisis by taking on more debt was challenged by some analysts.

The pain of the European debt crisis is spreading, with the plummeting euro making Chinese companies less competitive in Europe, their largest market, and complicating any move to break the Chinese currency's peg to the dollar.

After a nearly $1 trillion rescue package meant to end Europe's debt crisis once and for all, financial markets took a second look Friday and began to worry about how the plan would actually work and the implications of the drastic austerity measures for the fragile European economies.

The 750 billion euro package the European Union passed last week to prop up the common currency has been heavily criticized in Germany. Former Bundesbank head Karl Otto Pöhl told SPIEGEL that Greece may ultimately have to opt out, and that the foundation of the euro has been fundamentally weakened.

Markets in the United States and Europe fell and the euro hit another low for the year on Thursday after the European Central Bank disappointed investors hoping for decisive action to contain the euro zone's increasingly virulent debt crisis.

At a defining moment for the European Union, its largest country, Germany, appeared divided and its leader absent, raising significant concerns about what kind of leadership Chancellor Angela Merkel can offer as the region tries to stabilize financial markets and shore up its common currency.

Europe has put up 750 billion euros in an effort to stop speculation against the European common currency. Still, it remains to be seen if financial markets will learn their lesson. After all, speculators aren't even being punished for the damage they have caused. But they should be.

First the financial crisis, then the Greek debt crisis and now speculative attacks on the euro. As European leaders desperately struggle to stabilize their common currency, concerns over inflation are growing.

The future of the U.S. economic recovery is in the hands of politicians in an assortment of European capitals. If one or more fail to make the expected progress on cutting budgets, restructuring economies or boosting growth, it could drain confidence in a broad and unsettling way. Credit markets worldwide could lock up and throw the global economy back into recession.

The European debt turmoil is not a cyclical liquidity crisis. Rather, it is a structural solvency crisis that requires immediate solutions. Dan Steinbock explains why the euro area crisis is only beginning - and explores how this challenge can be overcome.

The most dangerous myth, and one repeated daily in much of the major media, is that these troubles on both sides of the Atlantic are a result of a "debt crisis", and can only be resolved through fiscal tightening. The United States is not facing any public debt crisis at all, with interest payments on the debt at just 1.4% of GDP. Some eurozone countries do have a "debt crisis" - for example, Greece. But this is only because the European authorities have failed to take the necessary steps to resolve it, and have, instead, made it worse by shrinking the economy. In other words, there is no legitimate economic reason for a sovereign debt burden - even an unsustainable one - to result in years of economic stagnation and high unemployment. If the debt needs to be restructured because it is not payable, as in Greece, then that should be done as quickly as possible and with enough debt cancellation to make the resulting debt burden sustainable - as Argentina did with its successful default in 2001.

United States and the European Union "are using the same recipe that the IMF applied on Argentina" to address the current global financial crisis and this only leads to "stagnation" said Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz attending a gathering of Nobel Prize recipients and young economists in Lindau, Germany.

Financial turmoil in Europe is no longer a problem of small, peripheral economies like Greece. What's under way right now is a full-scale market run on the much larger economies of Spain and Italy. At this point countries in crisis account for about a third of the euro area's G.D.P., so the common European currency itself is under existential threat.