Holland one of the few show cases of Europe with all economic indicators the envy of its fellow EU members has stalled in a political controversy while at the other end Greece sees no end to suffering in its fifth year of recession.
Europe was pressed by other world powers to take strong measures to fix its debt-heavy economy and restore growth to a level that would lift the cloud hanging over the fragile global recovery.
Major emerging powers stood ready on Friday to pledge money to bolster the International Monetary Fund's crisis-fighting war chest, though Brazil was holding out for promises that their voting power at the global lender would increase.
European governments called for a bigger global financial emergency fund after engineering a firewall to fight the region’s debt crisis that tops the symbolic 1 trillion dollars mark.
Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti expressed concern about Spain's public finances and said it would not take much to reignite the Euro zone debt crisis and revive the risk of it spreading to Italy.
Chinese manufacturing slumped for a fifth month in March and the Euro zone economy is showing new signs of wilting, according to surveys revealed this week that pointed to weakening global demand.
The European Central Bank downed its Euro zone growth forecast after holding interest rates at record lows on Thursday, and said things would have been much worse without its dramatic action to pump a trillion Euros into the banking system.
Testifying Wednesday before the US House Committee on Financial Services, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that 'critical fiscal and financial challenges remain for the Euro zone.'
Greece approved bitter new austerity measures on Tuesday, slashing the minimum wage and chopping pensions as Athens began implementing measures demanded by international lenders in return for a 130 billion Euro rescue package.
The world's leading economies worked to line up a deal in April on a second global rescue package worth nearly 2 trillion dollars to stop the Euro-zone sovereign debt crisis from spreading and putting at risk the tentative recovery.