Eurozone agrees on Greek bailout; Arcelor Mittal no longer welcome in France; How secret offshore funds buy up London; Big business corrupting economics; UN condemns female genital mutilation

1 Eurozone agrees on Greek bailout (BBC) Eurozone finance ministers and the IMF have reached a deal on an urgently needed bailout for debt-laden Greece. They have agreed to cut debts by 40bn euros ($51bn) and have paved the way for releasing the next tranche of bailout loans - some 44bn euros. Welcoming the move, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi said it would "strengthen confidence in Europe and in Greece". The breakthrough came after 10 hours of talks in Brussels.

The deal should open the way for support for Greece's teetering banks and allow the government to pay wages and pensions in December. Greece has been waiting since June for the next tranche of bailout cash to help its heavily indebted economy stay afloat. The leader of the eurozone finance ministers' group, Jean-Claude Juncker, said the bailout did not just have financial implications. "This is not just about money. It is the promise of a better future for the Greek people and for the Euro area as a whole."

Greece's international lenders have agreed to take steps to reduce the country's debts, from an estimated 144%, to 124% of its gross domestic product by 2020. These include cutting the interest rate on loans to Greece, and returning 11bn euros to Athens in profits from ECB purchases of Greek government bonds.

2 Arcelor Mittal no longer welcome in France (BBC)  Arcelor Mittal is no longer welcome in France, its minister for industrial recovery, has said, accusing the steelmaker of "lying" and "disrespecting" the country. The multinational angered workers and the government when it announced a plan in October to close two furnaces at its steel plant in Florange. It gave the government a grace period of 60 days to look for a new owner. The Mittal family said they were "extremely shocked" by the comments.

"We no longer want Arcelor Mittal in France because they didn't respect France," Arnaud Montebourg told French business daily Les Echos. The minister, who previously opposed the closure of a Peugeot factory, accused the company of "overwhelming lies" and said the Florange closure breaks a promise made by chief executive Lakshmi Mittal during Mittal Steel's 26.9bn-euro (£21.8bn) takeover of Arcelor in 2006, which was strongly opposed by French ministers. The problem "isn't the furnaces in Florange, it's Mittal", said Mr Montebourg.

The government says it has received two offers for the Florange unit, but only for the entire site. Mr Mittal has refused to sell the full operation, which employs a total of 20,000 workers. As a result, Mr Montebourg has said he is exploring how to seize the entire Florange site should Mr Mittal refuse his demands.

3 How secret offshore funds buy up London (David Leigh, Harold Frayman & James Ball in The Guardian) The UK is increasingly turning into a property speculators' haven, thanks to tax loopholes and the offshore secrecy offered by the British Virgin Islands (BVI) that hides many property transactions.

The Guardian's investigation with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), covering nearly 60 sample premises, shows how anonymous buyers are taking over more and more blocks of luxury housing. Some purchasers live abroad; other buyers live in the UK itself while they build up property empires using these artificial structures.

In 2011 alone, more than £7bn of offshore money flooded into potentially tax-exempt purchases of UK houses, flats and office blocks. Most buyers snapped up property in central London. These offshore buyers are a driving force of the capital's spiralling property prices versus the rest of the UK: since March 2009, property prices in prime central London have increased by 49% – five times more than the rest of the UK, according to estate agents Knight Frank.

Reckless bank loans to offshore entities have fuelled much of the historic property boom, handed over by lenders who subsequently had to be bailed out. British banks had £14.1bn outstanding in loans to BVI and associated offshore entities at the end of 2009, according to UK Treasury figures.

4 Hidden risk of ‘shadow finance’ in China (Lingling Wei & Dinny McMahon in The Wall Street Journal) There are hidden risks to banks from their links to China's fast-growing "shadow-finance" industry, a term for all types of credit outside formal lending channels. Shadow finance in China totals about 20 trillion yuan, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., or about a third the current size of the country's bank-lending market. In 2008, such informal lending represented only 5% of total bank lending.

The sector is lightly regulated and opaque, raising concerns about massive loan defaults amid a softening economy, with ancillary effects on the country's banks. Banks often work with private lenders by selling loans to them or marketing investments on their behalf for a fee. "Regular banking and shadow banking are not isolated from each other. Many activities in the two systems feed into each other, and could influence each other if things start to deteriorate," wrote Xiao Gang, chairman of Bank of China Ltd., in an editorial in the China Daily newspaper.

Although China Credit has the legal responsibility to repay investors, according to Chinese law, "for reputation's sake and potential social stability reasons, a portion of these loans can be banks' contingent liabilities," said David Cui, China strategist with Bank of America Corp.'s Merrill Lynch unit. 

5 Big business corrupting economics (Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian) In their new book, Economists and the Powerful, Norbert Häring and Niall Douglas trace how the most powerful of all the social sciences became a doctrine for helping the rich – with the aid of huge sums from business. The history unearthed by Häring and Douglas is very disturbing – because they argue that vested interests have slanted some of economics' most fundamental ideas.

Take the Rand corporation, an American cold-war institution that the book describes as closely linked to the Ford Foundation, which in turn was closely linked to the CIA. "It is hard to overestimate Rand's impact on the modern economic mainstream, let alone modern society," write the authors. Yet the economics it promoted assumed a society that was highly individualistic and rational. In other words, nothing like society as most of us know it, with its organisations and institutions and cultures. But the Rand researchers got round that problem by producing heavily theoretical and maths-based work, and ignoring empirical reality. From there it was a short step to the neoliberal politics everyone knows today: the kind that argues there is no such thing as society.

By focusing on the economics of economics, the authors describe an evolution of the discipline that barely anyone talks about. It is a kind of corruptonomics: "An effort that was generously funded by businessmen and the military in the name of cementing the power and legitimacy of their selves and their beliefs." Häring started off as a "true believer" in economics. It took him years of delving into the archives to arrive, reluctantly at first, at the conclusion that the subject he had spent years studying and practising was rotten. And while the influence of money on the discipline is largely a US phenomenon, the lopsided subject it produced is now taught at all the leading universities and practised at the major institutions.

The IMF and the World Bank employ economists from all over the world, but it is striking how many of them come from so few universities. Mainstream economics now preaches a dogma that is particularly agreeable to the elite and has chased most dissenters out of its faculties. Meanwhile the other social sciences lack the confidence or the resources to take on economics.

6 First UN resolution on female mutilation (Straits Times) The UN General Assembly has passed its first resolution condemning female genital mutilation, which opponents say more than 140 million women worldwide have had to endure. Though outlawed in most nations, the measure represents the first time the traditional practice in African and Middle East nations has been denounced at such a high level in the United Nations.

More than 110 countries, including more than 50 African nations, co-sponsored the resolution in the General Assembly's rights committee, which called on states to "complement punitive measures with awareness-raising and educational activities" to eliminate female genital mutilation. About 140 million women worldwide are believed to have been subjected to the practice in which a young girl's clitoris and labia are removed, in the belief that this will reduce libido and keep a woman chaste. About three million women and girls each year are said to be forced to undergo the procedure.