U.S. banking giant JPMorgan Chase plans to eliminate 19,000 jobs by the end of 2014 as it seeks to rein in costs, the company said Tuesday in an investor presentation.

JPMorgan Chase intends the majority of the cuts, 15,000 to come from the mortgage banking division, said spokeswoman Kristin Lemkau.

European stocks slumped and the euro hit a near two-month low versus the dollar Tuesday as markets assessed the fallout of Italy's political impasse after elections in the indebted eurozone country.

Milan's FTSE MIB index shed 3.84 percent to 15,724.60 points in late morning deals, with a stalemate in Italy's parliament after a critical vote in which the real winner may be a protest party calling for a referendum on the euro.

The Asian Development Bank said Tuesday it had approved a $150-million loan for a giant hydropower plant to ease Nepal's chronic electricity shortages which lead to power cuts of up to 14 hours a day.

Electricity demand is growing at 10 percent a year but a lack of investment has resulted in short supply, with loadshedding forcing homes and businesses across the impoverished nation to use costly and polluting diesel generators.

Japan's parliament on Tuesday passed a $142 billion extra budget that forms a key part of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's efforts to tackle the deflation that has dogged the economy for years.

The 13.1 trillion yen ($142 billion) package squeaked by the opposition-controlled upper house of parliament less than two weeks after the lower house approved the spending.

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Credit card giant MasterCard announced Monday the launch of a new digital payment system that lets people use a wide variety of devices including smartphones to spend their money.

The system, known as MasterPass, stores customers' banking and personal information in a "secure cloud" online where it is available for the moment of payment whether in a store on when browsing the Internet, the group said.

France and Germany urged the new government in Cyprus on Monday to negotiate a bailout quickly and welcomed the election of rightwinger Nicos Anastasiades as the president of the financially crippled EU state.

The leader of the right-wing Disy party won 57.5 percent of the vote in a second round run-off against communist-backed Stavros Malas, who polled 42.5 percent, to replace the only communist president in the European Union.

It was billed as China's Dubai: a cluster of sail-shaped skyscrapers on a man made island surrounded by tropical sea, the epitome of an unprecedented property boom that transformed skylines across the country.

But prices on Phoenix Island, off the palm-tree lined streets of the resort city of Sanya, have plummeted in recent months, exposing the hidden fragility of China's growing but sometimes unbalanced economy.

An association of South Korea shopowners Monday urged millions of its members to boycott Japanese goods in protest at Japan's continued claim to a tiny set of islets at the heart of a decades-old dispute.

The Small Local Sales Alliance called on its members, including neighborhood mini-marts, restaurants, pubs, and other stores, to stop selling Japanese goods including cigarettes, liquor and beer, its spokesman told Agence France Presse.

China's manufacturing growth hit a four-month low in February but remained positive, British banking giant HSBC said Monday, noting that the world's second-biggest economy was still recovering slowly.

The bank's seasonally adjusted preliminary purchasing managers' index (PMI) stood at 50.4 for the month, down from a final 52.3 in January, it said in a statement.