Morning Market Roundup: Microsoft and Apple Whine, Oracle and Google Stuck in the Mud

Here’s what’s important in the financial world this morning:

EU: Spain is in a no-win situation as it undergoes a budget overhaul to combat its finance problems. In an interview on Monday with the The Wall Street Journal.

“We have no margin for error. From a budget perspective, the government is facing a lose-lose situation. If you don’t make enough adjustments, markets will penalize you. But if you go too far, markets could also penalize you” due to concerns about economic growth,” Spain Finance Minister Luis de Guindos said.

Eurozone antitrust regulators have launched two investigations into Motorola Mobility after Microsoft and Apple, Inc. accused the company of applying “unfair” fees for patent use in their products, according to Reuters.

“The Commission will investigate, in particular, whether by seeking and enforcing injunctions against Apple’s and Microsoft’s flagship products such as iPhone, iPad, Windows and Xbox on the basis of patents it had declared essential to produce standard-compliant products, Motorola has failed to honour its irrevocable commitments made to standard setting organizations,” the commission said in a statement.

Tech: On Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal ruled that Oracle  and Google hit an “irreconcilable impasse” in settlement talks in their intellectual property lawsuit. He noted there won’t be any additional settlement conferences for the suit that involves the programming language Java. A trial date of April 16 has been set.

Asia: According to Moody’s Analytics, China’s state-owned companies are performing better than country’s private sector. In a report noting a performance gap, Moody’s said that China is a “two speed economy,” where state firms have greater access to credit while pushing out other portions of the economy.

It added, “The divergence between private and state-owned firms is clearly of concern, as state-owned firms are less productive.”

[Editor’s note: the above is a cross post that originally appeared on Wall St. Cheat Sheet.]