Good morning from The Financial Times.
Today is Wednesday, March 18th, and this is your FT News Briefing.
The EU wants to see more deals get done,
and a monster loan offering is going to test the market's appetite.
Plus, the war in the Middle East is disrupting Saudi Arabia's push for economic reform.
In order to attract foreign investors and tourists for all these projects
that the country has spent billions to develop and build,
they need stability and peace in the region.
I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.
The European Union wants to make it easier for companies to merge.
And so, Brussels is weighing whether to overhaul its merger rules.
The changes are meant to limit countries from blocking corporate takeovers.
There's been a bunch of that lately.
Germany has opposed a takeover of Commerce Bank by Italy's Unicredit.
And similarly, Spain wouldn't support a merger between BBVA and Banco Sabadell.
A European Commission paper seen by the FT said that there are certain cases
where intervention...
EU officials worry that these kinds of interventions risk fragmenting the bloc's single market,
and that they're undermining efforts to build pan-European companies that can compete
on a global level.