The ESMA said in a statement that the four countries “have today announced or will shortly announce new bans on short-selling or on short positions” as of Friday.

The French market regulator, the AMF, announced late Thursday that it is banning for 15 days net short-selling on 11 stocks, including those of banks Societe Generale, BNP Paribas and Credit Agricole and leading insurers.

Belgium’s market authority said it would ban short-selling on financial shares such as leading banks and insurers as of Friday. Belgium had already banned naked short selling, basically a bet on a decline in the price of a share without borrowing the share, since August 2008.

Several countries banned short selling amid the financial crisis of 2008 to try to tame volatility. But some experts said the bans actually contributed to a feeling of uncertainty.

French bankers and officials scrambled to soothe investors’ nerves after days of suggestions that France could be the next major economy to lose its coveted triple-A credit rating. By late in the day, those efforts appeared to have an effect, but economists said the rebound remained very fragile.

The European Union’s markets supervisor said Thursday that regulators were increasing surveillance of financial markets following the days of steep selloffs.

Bank of France head Christian Noyer blamed “unfounded rumors” for plunges in the shares of top banks, including Societe Generale and BNP Paribas, and said the country’s financial institutions were sound. The country’s market regulator warned of sanctions against anyone who fuels or profits from rumors that fed the sell-off.

Noyer said that French banks’ first-half earnings “confirmed their solidity in a difficult economic environment” and that the banks’ capital cushions were healthy.

French bank stocks fell Thursday until strong U.S. jobs data helped propel solid gains on Wall Street late in the European trading day. BNP Paribas closed up 0.3 percent and Societe Generale rose 3.7 percent.

France is taking pains to assure markets that it won’t be the next to see its credit rating downgraded.

Attention will be on France’s release of second-quarter GDP figures on Friday. Some have warned that France could suffer if it has to spend significant new money to bail out more struggling eurozone states.

The leaders of the eurozone’s biggest economies, Germany and France, announced they will meet Tuesday to discuss solutions to Europe’s financial difficulties.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office said that the two will come up with “joint proposals” on the governance of the eurozone before the end of the summer. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman said the meeting would focus on suggestions for how to improve the zone’s economic policy and crisis management.

All three leading credit rating agencies reaffirmed their triple-A assessment of France, and analysts said they could not identify a trigger for the market turmoil.

“There’s nothing behind it, it’s a market of malintentioned speculators trading on pure rumors,” said Marc Touati, an economist at French trading firm Assya Compagnie Financiere.

After Societe Generale, France’s second-biggest bank, saw its share price drop nearly 15 percent Wednesday, the bank asked the French market regulator to investigate the rumors that it was on the ropes because of its heavy exposure to debt from troubled eurozone economies.

Societe Generale CEO Frederic Oudea called the rumors “totally unfounded” and “irrational.” Speaking on France-Info radio, he urged calm and insisted that the bank’s fundamentals are sound.

Oudea said Societe Generale had already accounted for its exposure to Greece’s debts in its second quarter earnings.

France’s growth prospects are considerably better than those of Italy and Spain’s, but its economic expansion is slowing and it’s failed for years to reduce a deficit that stood at 7.1 percent last year. No other eurozone economy with a triple-A rating has a higher debt than France’s — around 85 percent of national income.

Adding to market worries, French presidential elections scheduled for the spring of 2012 may make it difficult for the government to implement further austerity measures at a time when the economy is slowing.

Elsewhere in Europe, Greece announced a rise in unemployment after a series of unpopular austerity measures aimed at dragging it out of debt that sparked troubles across the eurozone.

And Italy’s finance minister, Giulio Tremonti, told lawmakers Thursday that tough and speedy measures are needed over the next two years to balance the budget in 2013. The market turbulence has seen Italy’s borrowing costs in the markets spike up to uncomfortably high levels.

Gabriele Steinhauser in Brussels and Melissa Eddy in Berlin contributed to this report.

This week the Irish get to have their say. While the other countries simply need parliamentary approval, in Ireland the decision is being made via a referendum. In February the Attorney General advised the government that a public vote was needed, as any significant changes to the constititution in Ireland require a referendum.

Unlike the votes on the Lisbon and Nice Treaties, both of which the Irish rejected on the first go, there is no veto this time. The Fiscal Treaty comes into force when 12 of the 17 euro zone members ratify it.

The latest polls indicate that the Irish are going to vote in favor of austerity, bucking the recent voting trend in Greece, France and even Germany. But that doesn’t mean that the Irish are enthusiastic adherents of Merkel’s belt-tightening fixation.

As much as anything, the Irish referendum could be described as a battle between fear and anger.

“It depends which motivates us more,” says Ben Tonra, professor of international relations at University College Dublin.

Only countries that ratify the Fiscal Treaty will have access to the euro zone’s new permanent bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which comes into force on July 1. Many Irish voters realize that, even if they hate austerity, they may well need access to the ESM.

In November 2010, Ireland obtained 85 billion euros from the troika of creditors — the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

While the government has professed that it will again seek funding directly from the bond markets at some stage in 2013, that is looking increasingly unlikely. With the current level of uncertainty in the euro zone, Dublin could well be forced to look for a second bailout.

As for the referendum, the “yes” campaign argues that without access to the ESM, future austerity could be even harsher. And they say that many of the requirements of the Fiscal Treaty are already being met as part of Ireland’s bailout program.

They also warn that a “no” vote could undermine the country’s credibility, since Ireland is hugely reliant on foreign direct investment. Those advocating in favor of what they call the “Stability Treaty” argue that Ireland’s recovery would be threatened if foreign investors were spooked by a rejection of the treaty and any implications that it could have for Ireland’s position in the euro zone.

On Sunday night in a televised speech, Prime Minister Enda Kenny warned that rejecting the treaty would bring “uncertainty at a time Ireland definitely doesn’t need it.”

That sense of uncertainty could persuade many to vote yes, even if they disagree with the wisdom of the treaty itself.

“I think this is a lousy treaty,” says Tonra. “It’s bad economics, it’s bad politics and it’s badly written. But what it does do is it gives us access to cash.”

On the flipside of these fears about the future is a profound anger in Ireland over the country’s current predicament.

Many Irish people are furious at their political elite for getting them into this mess, and at the European Union for forcing them to effectively take on the gambling debts of speculators, bankers and property developers.

The bailout became necessary as a result of the previous government’s ill-fated decision to guarantee all of the country’s banking debts in 2008. Those debts turned out to be astronomical, as a result of reckless lending to property developers, and Ireland bailed out the banks at enormous cost.

As the state took on these liabilities, the markets pushed up its borrowing costs, leaving Dublin with little choice but to turn to the troika.

Making matters worse, the state has been overly reliant on real estate transaction taxes. Once the property market crashed, that left a massive hole in public finances. At the same time, there is more demand on the public purse due to soaring unemployment. For 2012, the funding gap is an estimated 13 billion euros.

That deficit comes despite a succession of harsh budgets that have been imposed at the behest of the troika, including billions of euros worth of expenditure cuts and new taxes.

At the same time, the bondholders — who had loaned to the reckless Irish banks — have been paid back billions of euros from the state coffers.

The Irish government’s attempts to persuade the ECB of the need to write down this albatross of bank debt have been to no avail so far. As a result, the public anger is directed not just at their own politicians but at Brussels and Frankfurt, too.

“The ECB has been utterly dogmatic in terms of protecting not only senior bondholders but junior bondholders,” explains Tonra. “And has basically said all these speculators have to be paid back and they have to be paid back on the shoulders of Irish taxpayers.”

Commentators often point to Ireland as Europe’s austerity success story. Unlike in Spain and Greece, on the surface, Ireland’s economy appears to have returned to growth, albeit modestly, with the EU predicting a rate of just 0.5 percent for 2012. Moreover, official figures show a trade surplus, although this may not be a reliable indicator since it is distorted by the many multinationals based in Ireland who repatriate their profits.

Yet most Irish people don’t feel that things are getting better. The number of those struggling to pay back often-massive mortgages is growing. On Friday the Central Bank announced that one in 10 mortgages are in arrears of more than 90 days. Unemployment remains around 14 percent, up from 4.5 percent just five years ago, and it would be even higher if not for high levels of emigration and the return home of many immigrants who contributed to Ireland’s boom.

The party seen to have caused the mess, Fianna Fáil, was booted from office last year. However, members of the current government, particularly the center-left Labour Party, have seen their support decline, with backers angry at them for continuing the same austerity agenda.

Left-wing nationalist party Sinn Féin, the biggest critic of the Fiscal Treaty — which it dubs the “Austerity Treaty” — has seen its support soar, particularly among working-class voters.

Other opponents include businessman Declan Ganley, who helped defeat the Lisbon Treaty first time around, and smaller left-wing groups, including the Socialist Party.

They warn that the treaty institutionalizes an austerity policy that is not working and will not fix Ireland or Europe’s problems, despite promises to tack on some kind of growth element. “Austerity contradicts growth, austerity kills growth,” says Paul Murphy, a member of the European Parliament for the Socialist Party. He argues that by voting yes, the Irish people would be signing up for even harsher austerity.

The no campaign is calling on voters to not let themselves be persuaded by the warnings of the government about the ESM, arguing that the EU would never allow a member state to be in a position where it had no access to funding.

“The yes side has been overwhelmingly dominated by fear, by really scaremongering people,” says Murphy. “They are painting a bleak Armageddon picture of what will happen if people vote no.”

He and the other opponents claim that Ireland has a veto over the ESM, which has yet to be anchored into EU law, something that requires unanimity among all 27 member states. They argue that the government could say that unless the link between the ESM and the Fiscal Treaty is removed, they will block the bailout fund. However, the government says it has already agreed to the ESM.

Murphy says that if the Irish were to vote no, it would undermine the treaty across the bloc. “If you had a no vote in the only country that has a popular vote on it, it would have ramifications across Europe” and send “a clear message to Merkel and her friends across Europe.”

Yet critics say the no campaign has failed to be convincing on the crucial issue of future funding.

“When it comes to this vital question of: Where is the money going to come from? How do we fund our services? How do we bridge the gap between what goes in and what goes out? I think even fair-minded, objective people would say that they fail rather dismally,” says John O’Brennan, director of the Centre for the Study of Wider Europe at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, outside of Dublin.

O’Brennan himself is uneasy about the Fiscal Treaty, particularly as it is another sign of a move away from the community model that was a mark of the way the EU operated for so long, whereby institutions such as the European Parliament, Commission and Court of Justice acted as a counterbalance to national interests.

Within the euro zone, the trend has increasingly been for intergovernmental decisions. This allows the bigger countries such as France and Germany to steamroll the smaller peripheral ones. And this, he argues, is leading to an increasing democratic deficit in the EU.

Yet for all that unease and rage, it looks like the great anxiety about how Ireland will pay its way could have the upper hand on Thursday. A number of polls released over the weekend showed that the yes vote was in the lead. However, the large number of people who are still undecided means that there could be a late swing to the no side.

And turnout could be crucial. While polls ahead of the first Lisbon and Nice referendums showed that those treaties would be approved, the anti-Treaty voters turned out in greater numbers.

O’Brennan predicts that on Thursday fear is still likely to trump anger. “Undoubtedly there is an element there that wants to punish the government,” he says. “But that is tempered by the risks.”

“We are very angry, but we are not angry enough that we can vote no.”

Here is the dreadful scenario that growing numbers of analysts fear: Long lines of Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese pound on bank doors demanding to pull their money out before it is replaced by devalued drachmas, pesetas, escudos. Long-suffering Greek voters fail on June 17 to elect political parties that can form a governing coalition, and Greece takes a messy exit from the Euro. Europe’s already faltering financial system then collapses, sending the entire world into a long-lasting global depression for the new President Romney to tackle.

As one European insider put, the damage could be somewhere “between catastrophic and Armageddon,” while Mexico’s former central banker, Guillermo Ortiz, who was a leading candidate to head the International Monetary Fund (IMF), warned that a Greek exit from the Euro could have “an even bigger impact” globally than the Lehman bankruptcy. “If Greece leaves the eurozone, it could detonate a global financial crisis even worse than the 2008 credit crunch, dry up global trade financing and spur another U.S. recession.”

Seeing all this before the Camp David summit, President Obama joined with France’s mildly socialist president François Hollande in calling for new measures to stimulate European growth, against German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s insistence on austerity über alles. Obama went even further after the NATO summit in Chicago and urged European leaders to recapitalize their notoriously weak banks — and quickly. But his foresight will mean little if they do not come up with a hard-hitting and fast-moving plan of action, which their Wednesday night summit in Brussels failed to do.

Except for minor concessions toward growth, Merkel is standing firm on growth-destroying budget cuts. The “growth agenda” that Hollande and his Italian and Spanish allies put on the table looks like far too little and much too late to stop a global train wreck. And the bleary-eyed announcement early Thursday morning that European Council president Herman von Rompuy would draft a new plan for greater economic unification to back up the Euro looks like a belated step in the right direction that Europe should have taken years ago, preferably before creating the single currency, as American economists warned at the time.

In the meantime, the Euro is falling, investors are dumping Euro assets, and all eyes are on the June 17 do-over of Greek legislative elections, in which European leaders are playing a double game that will come back to haunt them. Publicly, they reaffirm their commitment to “do everything” to keep Greece from leaving the eurozone while framing the elections as “a referendum” for the Greeks to decide whether or not they wish to remain on the Euro. The major media echo the referendum line, and the once-great Le Monde even ran a front-page editorial by its director boldly proclaiming: “The Euro or the Drachma? It’s up to the Greeks to choose.”

In fact, all this poses a premeditated and not at all disguised threat to Greek voters: Back the conservative New Democracy and the Greek Socialist Party (PASOK), who conspired with Northern European banks and exporters to create the Greek mess and then agreed to the no-hope bailout deal forced on them by the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Back the corrupt old guard who will do our bidding, the European leaders threaten, or we’ll push you even harder. And stay away from the left-wing SYRIZA coalition and its surprisingly effective leader Alexis Tsipras, a 37-year-old former student protest leader and Euro-communist.

Why threaten the Greeks? In their first election on May 6, SYRIZA came in second, and the latest polls now show them winning, but still without sufficient votes to form a government. They would, however, have the votes to make it impossible once again for the old guard to form a governing coalition. The party’s growing strength terrifies investors and poses a problem for European leaders, especially those from nominally socialist or social democratic parties that face similar challenges from a more radical Left.

Contrary to the pretense that Tsipras and SYRIZA want to leave the Euro, they have said again and again that they want to keep the Euro. They know that as many as 75 to 80 percent of the Greeks favor both the common currency and the European Union, and they might well refuse to leave even if the rest of Europe wants them out. Nothing in existing treaties permits expelling any country from the eurozone, and this gives Tsipras and SYRIZA a powerful threat of their own in rejecting the bailout deal, which has destroyed the Greek economy and squeezed ordinary Greeks beyond all endurance.

“We want to force European leaders to face reality,” Tsipras said Monday in Paris in the company of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France’s Left Front, which is challenging Hollande’s party in legislative elections on June 10 and 17. “We want to raise awareness that we cannot drive any people in Europe into voluntary suicide.” If not stopped in Greece, Tsipras warned, the same treatment “will be exported to other European countries.”

In refusing even to renegotiate the “hellish” bailout deal, Tsipras is demanding that Europe and the IMF back down, an alternative that European leaders and their friends in the media portray as completely beyond reason. “It is not acceptable for a small country, by its refusal to play by the rules of the game, to continue to put the whole continent in danger,” concluded the front-page editorial in the pro-Hollande Le Monde. “It’s up to the Greeks to choose.” But if they make the wrong choice, the consequences will follow. And “without any qualms.”

That, in all its imperial splendor, is the threat Greek voters now appear to be ignoring. As Tsipras insists, Europe and the IMF will back down, and elements of their retreat are already visible. Hollande, who refuses even to meet with Tsipras, has suggested a willingness to give the Greeks additional time to cut their public spending, while a senior adviser to the German finance ministry suggests that Merkel will blink and make concessions to both Hollande and the Greeks after the elections. But nothing we’ve seen is anywhere near enough to put the Greeks – or the rest of Europe – back on the path to growth and away from leaving the Euro. That would take more than anything now on the table, and the smart money is betting Greece will leave the Euro by New Years Day 2013, with all the damage that will bring.

Hollande knows however that there is little chance the German chancellor will warm to the idea, even faced with the mounting concern that, without drastic action, the euro zone is headed toward a disastrous breakup.

“We spoke about it and both sides confirmed their well-known positions,” said France’s Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, after meeting with his German counterpart on Monday to prepare the summit.

“Francois Hollande plans to put everything on the table … even those proposals that cannot be agreed immediately,” Moscovici added.

As the euro zone’s strongest economy, Germany knows that euro bonds will mean its taxpayers end up taking on debts incurred by Greece, Spain, Italy and other troubled economies.

That would ease the immediate pain in the southern Europe and the risk of the euro’s early demise. But, critics argue, euro bonds would reward financial sloppiness and relax pressure on the southerners to purse the painful reforms and fiscal discipline needed to get their economies back in shape.

And if the euro bonds didn’t work, paying out for the south could undermine Germany’s financial stability.

“That’s a prescription that comes at the wrong time and carries the wrong side effects,” Germany’s Deputy Finance Minister Steffen Kampeter told Deutschlandfunk radio over the weekend.

He contended that common financing was unlikely to be in place for a decade or more, and certainly would not be decided when Hollande holds his first meeting with other euro zone leaders at Wednesday dinnertime summit in Brussels.

Hollande is expected to get support for euro bonds from the leaders of Spain, Italy and many smaller members of the 17-nation currency bloc, as well as the European Union’s head office which put forward a plan for jointly issued debt last year.

“It would make economic sense to create a deep, liquid and stable market for government bonds with the joint issuance of common debt — euro bonds — at least, once we have reinforced our economic governance further to ensure fiscal prudence,” EU Economics Commissioner Olli Rehn said at a speech in Oxford last week.

Even were the Germans to agree, the legal complexities involved in introducing jointly-issued debt would mean that euro bonds are years away. However, supporters say an agreement to work on their creation could help calm jittery markets and convince voters in Greece and Ireland to support European debt-fighting plans when they go to the polls in the coming weeks.

A “no” vote in Ireland’s May 31 referendum on the new EU fiscal discipline treaty could leave the country cut off from further European rescue funding. However polls show a significant number of voters, disgruntled with the austerity that came as a condition for a 67 billion euro bailout in 2010, are considering rejection.

Greece is holding a fresh election on June 17, six weeks after a nationwide vote produced political stalemate after a surge in support for parties on the far left and far right who oppose austerity measures attached to a 130 billion euro rescue plan.

Polls show most Greeks want to keep the euro, but they are deeply dissatisfied with mainstream politicians and what they view as foreign-imposed hardship.

Although other European leaders have lined up to say they want Greece to stay in the euro zone, the Greeks have been warned that could be impossible if they vote for parties that refuse to implement the bailout conditions.

“There is a choice: you can either vote to stay in the euro, with all the commitments you’ve made, or if you vote another way you’re effectively voting to leave,” British Prime Minister David Cameron told the Greeks Sunday on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Chicago.

Britain is outside the euro zone, but like other world leaders, Cameron is acutely aware of the potentially catastrophic impact a Greek exit could have on the global economy – through the risk it could also force out larger economies such as Spain and Italy, causing the collapse of the euro.

With that in mind, Wednesday’s meeting of euro zone presidents and prime ministers is expected to place new emphasis on pro-growth policies.

Merkel, Hollande and other leaders are working to find common ground on ideas such as frontloading EU funding lines to support job-creation projects in Greece and other hard hit nations, or leveraging up to 60 billion euros in funding from the EU’s investment bank.

Hollande wants a “growth pact” to complement the EU’s new fiscal discipline treaty, and there’s talk of easing austerity by giving countries like Spain, France and Italy more time to cut budget deficits.

The hope is that a more growth-friendly agenda and some signs of compromise from Merkel will produce an “Hollande-effect” on Greek voters, boosting mainstream parties who support the bailout and euro membership.