France looks to organize emergency EU summit

By Crispian Balmer

PARIS (Reuters) - Spain asked France on Friday to organize an emergency meeting of European leaders to discuss concerted action over the financial crisis that has sent markets into a tailspin and could unleash a global recession.

EU heads of state and government are due to hold a regular summit in Brussels next week, but the speed and ferocity of the market meltdown has piled pressure on leaders to react faster.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said that EU leaders would meet in Paris on Sunday, adding that it might be followed shortly afterwards by a summit of Group of Eight industrialized nations.

Underscoring the deep sense of crisis, Berlusconi said there was an idea to suspend temporarily trade on the markets, with major European bourses deep in the red for a fifth day running.

"There is talk of suspending markets for the time needed to rewrite (international finance) rules," he told reporters. He later said the idea was a "hypothesis" that had never been mooted by any leader.

Europe's response to the month-long mayhem has been patchy and largely improvised, with various governments rushing to put out fires in their own backyards rather than work on a trans-national plan for their interconnected economies.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country holds the rotating six-month EU presidency, called together the heads of Germany, Italy and Britain last weekend, but their talks failed to produce any concrete results or halt the market slump.

Spain was unhappy not to have been invited last Sunday and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told Sarkozy on Friday it was time for a new meeting, this time of the 15 countries that have adopted the euro currency.