This year’s annual August doldrums was one for the record books.

U.S. M&A for the month totalled $13 billion, its lowest since February 1994, while global M&A stood at $72 billion, the lowest since February 2003, according to data from Thomson Reuters.

The largest U.S. deal was Warner Chilcott’s $3.1 billion purchase of Procter & Gamble’s prescription drug business.

Year-to-date, however, European M&A has suffered even more, with total deal value halving to $378.4 billion. U.S. mergers, at $441.5 billion, have fallen 40 percent from a year ago. Fees for completed in August sank to $694 million, the lowest since records started in 1998, according to Thomson Reuters.

Global financial sponsor deals reached $2.4 billion, the lowest level of activity in 8 years. Privaty equity and other financial sponsor activity accounted for only 3.2 percent of total M&A activity in August. So far this year, global buyouts totaled $32.1 billion, down 80 percent from a year ago, the data showed.

Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross says he plans to invest further in banks, but new capital requirements for private equity investment in the sector are still too tight. Meanwhile, a senior German government official says Opel has the liquidity to operate until next year, as a rift appears to develop in the ruling party over whether the General Motors Co unit should be sold to Canada’s Magna International (MGa.TO).

For more on these stories, and the rest of the latest deals news from Reuters, click here.

Here’s what else we found in the papers (some external links may require subscriptions):

* Main shareholders in the British bus and rail operator National Express (NEX.L) have indicated that they will continue to back a rights issue plan instead of a revised takeover offer, the Financial Times says.

* Two Chinese industry groups will kick off IPOs worth more than $2.5 billion in Hong Kong soon after they received a green light from the city’s stock exchange, racing to beat a possible market downtrend, the South China Morning Post says.

Investing in a company in trouble is rarely for the faint-hearted, as the funds lending to Eggborough power station know.

Earlier today France’s EDF, Eggborough’s current owner, confirmed lenders to the coal-fired power station planned to exercise their option to buy the Yorkshire plant for about 190 million pounds.

The lenders, which include Bluebay Value Recovery Fund, took on the debt following an earlier restructuring of the company. Reports suggest that despite the low acquisition price, Eggborough may be worth as much as a billion pounds.

Other unusual results of distressed investing recently include Octavian Advisors ending up on the board of sporting goods firm Head NV, mezzanine lenders landing up in a big London restructuring court case, and Vinci buying up bits of British builder Haymills via a prepack deal.

Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross said on Thursday he would consider buying banks under a newly revised proposal on private equity investment in troubled banks, but the rules should be eased further.

U.S. banking regulators on Wednesday partially retreated from a much-criticized proposal to impose new rules on private equity investment in troubled banks, aiming to encourage responsible investment in distressed banks.

The regulators lowered capital requirements and dropped or modified measures that could have required investors to kick in more capital after their initial investment. The rules will be further reviewed in six months.

In an interview with Reuters Television, Ross said the capital requirements should be lowered even further.

Under the current proposal, Ross said he still would be “in the game” and look at banks that have good local deposits. He said many of his potential targets are in Sunbelt States such as Florida, Arizona, Texas and Nevada.

Ross said the private equity industry has about $450 billion of unused capital and roughly $100 billion of that could be used to invest in banks.

Separately, Ross called the commercial real estate market the next “time bomb” that the market under-appreciates. Ross said he would be an investor in distressed commercial properties.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Rebecca Cook

U.S. banking regulators partially retreat from a much-criticized proposal to impose new rules on private equity investment in troubled banks, aiming to encourage responsible investment in distressed banks. And General Electric Co (GE.N) puts its security business up for sale in an auction that could fetch about $2 billion.

For more on these stories, and the rest of the latest deals news from Reuters, click here.

Elsewhere, there’s lots of buzz this morning about comments from Adair Turner, of Britain’s Financial Services Authority, on how much of what the City does is “socially useless” and how so-called Tobin taxes on transactions may be considered — prompting big pieces in the Guardian and the FT.

Here’s what else we found in the papers (some external links may require subscriptions):

* The $10.5 million pay package for insurer American International Group Inc’s new chief executive Robert Benmosche will likely be approved formally by the U.S. government’s compensation czar Kenneth Feinberg next week, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

* Apple Inc is getting closer to clearing hurdles to allow it to start selling iPhones in China, the Wall Street Journal said.

* China’s sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corporation (CIC) will increase new overseas investment this year by around 10 times from the previous year on signs the global economy has bottomed out, one of the organisation’s top managers said in an interview with Japan’s Asahi newspaper.