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 for 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 Filipino, 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, Russell's is weighing whether to overhaul its merger rules.

The changes are meant to limit countries from blocking corporate turnovers.

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 is needed,

but in other cases it may have, quote, unnecessarily hindered scaling up.

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.

The commission declined to comment on the document.

It's game on for a huge pile of debt tied to video game maker electronic arts.

Wall Street banks have started offloading $18 billion of debt

related to the leverage buyout of EA. It was the biggest leverage buyout financing since the

global financial crisis. The sales are going to be a test of investor appetite at a time when

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