Guardian | Papacy used offshore tax havens to create £500m international portfolio, featuring real estate in UK, France and Switzerland. Behind Pope Benedict XVI is a porfolio of property that includes commercial premises on London's New Bond Street. Few passing London tourists would ever guess that the premises of Bulgari, the upmarket jewellers in New Bond Street, had anything to do with the pope. Nor indeed the nearby headquarters of the wealthy investment bank Altium Capital, on the corner of St James's Square and Pall Mall.

Daily Mail | Egypt has imposed a limit on the amount of money people can take out of the country, amid fears of an impending run on the banks. The move to ban leaving with more than £6,000 came as thousands of Egyptians withdrew savings from banks to hoard cash at home.

Forbes | “It’s time to broaden the war to other fronts,” enthuses an unsigned editorial at Bloomberg View. The editors are speaking of the U.S. sanctions against Iran, and they’re not using the word “war” metaphorically. “A hidden and heavy war on a planetary scale,” is how Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described the sanctions when he spoke to the United Nations last month.  “I can see the global conspiracy clearly.”

Reuters | Greece handed 18 billion euros ($22.6 billion) to its four biggest banks on Monday, an official said, allowing the stricken lenders to regain access to European Central Bank funding. The long-awaited injection — via bonds from the European Financial Stability Facility rescue fund — will boost the nearly depleted capital base of National Bank, Alpha, Eurobank and Piraeus Bank.

Telegraph | The chief executive of the multi-billion pound Lloyd's of London has publicly admitted that the world's leading insurance market is prepared for a collapse in the single currency and has reduced its exposure "as much as possible" to the crisis-ridden continent. Richard Ward said the London market had put in place a contingency plan to switch euro underwriting to multi-currency settlement if Greece abandoned the euro.

WSJ | Giant banks owned by the Chinese government are coming to the U.S. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday approved plans by three state-backed Chinese banks to expand in the U.S., including the first acquisition of a U.S. retail-banking network by a state-owned Chinese lender. The approval is a landmark step for U.S. banking regulators. Chinese banks long have sought access to the U.S. banking system in order to provide financing to Chinese companies operating overseas and to do business with foreign investors looking for exposure to the Chinese currency, the yuan. But they have been stymied in previous attempts by assorted delays and rejections.

Market Watch | There is a rumor circulated on Wall St. that JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM) will takeover Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) within the week. The government will support the deal with a $100 billion investment in preferred shares issued by the combined entity. Alternatively, the government may guarantee the value of a large pool of Bank of America assets. The word is that Treasury Secretary Geithner has discussed the transaction with JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon.The "merger" would completely destroy the value of BAC's common shares.

AP | Global stocks slid further Monday due to renewed concerns about the eurozone's debt crisis and after a dismal jobs report in the U.S. last week rekindled concerns about the recovery in the world's largest economy.

Bloomberg | Credit Suisse Group AG (CS), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) each borrowed at least $30 billion in 2008 from a Federal Reserve emergency lending program whose details weren’t revealed to shareholders, members of Congress or the public.

Reuters/AP | Representatives from 22 countries and six international organizations meeting in Rome have agreed to set up a special fund to help finance Libyan rebels. The cash-strapped rebels had requested financial support.

CNN | An increasingly bitter dispute between the United Kingdom and Iceland over billions of dollars lost when banks collapsed is likely to end up in court, a top British government minister said Sunday. The British government has "an obligation to get that money back, and we will continue to pursue that until we do," said Danny Alexander, the chief secretary of the Treasury. He was speaking Sunday after Iceland's people voted to repeal a law aimed at solving the dispute. Six out of 10 voters in the referendum on Saturday opposed the law, the government said in a statement Sunday, saying turnout was high.

Bloomberg | Arab Banking Corp., the lender part- owned by the Central Bank of Libya, used a New York branch to get 73 loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve in the 18 months after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed. The bank, then 29 percent-owned by the Libyan state, had aggregate borrowings in that period of $35 billion -- while the largest single loan amount outstanding was $1.2 billion in July 2009, according to Fed data released yesterday. In October 2008, when lending to financial institutions by the central bank’s so- called discount window peaked at $111 billion, Arab Banking took repeated loans totaling more than $2 billion.

Reuters | The United States is on a fiscal path towards insolvency and policymakers are at a "tipping point," a Federal Reserve official said on Tuesday. "If we continue down on the path on which the fiscal authorities put us, we will become insolvent, the question is when," Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said in a question and answer session after delivering a speech at the University of Frankfurt. "The short-term negotiations are very important, I look at this as a tipping point."

WSJ | Even as governments freeze assets tied to regimes in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia, U.S. banks are resisting efforts to tighten international rules to prevent the flow of money from corrupt politicians.