Talks on funding EU banks fail

EU finance ministers broke off negotiations early in Brussels having failed to find common ground on how to fund banks that could be exposed as needing billions of new money to survive next year.

While officials and politicians said they believed they can reach agreement in December on the Single Resolution Mechanism after a new German government is in place, the distance between countries remained wide.

The EU needs to put in place an agreement about where banks can find the money to break the link between sovereign and the banking sector, but they appear to be as far from this as they were at the beginning of the crisis five years ago.