U.K. shoppers turned away from retail outlets last month, after highs in May, amid election jitters and poor weather, the Wall Street Journal reported. Retail sales volumes declined 1.2% on month in June, undoing some of the 2.9% rise in May, according to the Office for National Statistics. The data comes after consumer-confidence figures showed only a marginal improvement on month in July, as British people showed caution about how the new U.K. government would affect the economy and their finances.

ION Group completed the acquisition of Italian asset manager Prelios SpA for €1.35 billion ($1.5 billion), following months of back-and-forth with Italian authorities on the deal, Bloomberg News reported. The acquisition, done through a unit called X3 Group, was financed by a group of banks led by UniCredit SpA, Intesa Sanpaolo SpA and BNP Paribas SA, ION said in a statement Friday. “The deal is part of a broader strategy to improve asset management and efficient decision-making processes through the use of data,” Prelios Chairman Fabrizio Palenzona said in the statement.

Britain added 11 new shipping sanctions under its Russia sanctions regime related to the war in Ukraine, an official notice showed on Thursday, SwissInfo.ch reported. The government said the sanctions on ships including Zaliv Amurskiy and SCF Pechora relate to the carrying of oil or oil products from Russia to a third country. The ships are believed to have the flags of Panama, Gabon and the Cook Islands, the government notice said.

The European Central Bank left interest rates unchanged after last month’s landmark cut — giving away little on its plans as investors and economists bet on another move in September, Bloomberg News reported. The deposit rate was kept at 3.75% on Thursday — as all 55 economists in a Bloomberg survey predicted. The ECB reiterated that borrowing costs will remain “sufficiently restrictive for as long as necessary” to ensure inflation returns to 2%.

President Christine Lagarde said the European Central Bank’s next interest-rate meeting is “wide open” — hinting that another cut is possible as officials will have significantly more information on inflation by then, Bloomberg News reported. “The question of September and what we do in September is wide open and will be determined on the basis of all the data that we will be receiving,” Lagarde said Thursday after the ECB kept its deposit rate at 3.75%.

Wage rises in the U.K. cooled in the three months to May, after months of stubbornly high growth, keeping an August interest-rate cut in play at the Bank of England, the Wall Street Journal reported. Average earnings, excluding bonuses, between March and May were 5.7% higher than a year earlier, down from 6.0% in the three months to April, according to data from the Office for National Statistics published Thursday.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves warned “difficult decisions” lie ahead as she tries to fix Britain’s public finances, raising the prospect of tax hikes or spending cuts in her first Budget in the autumn, Bloomberg News reported. Reeves, who is the UK’s first female finance minister, said she will update Parliament this month on her fiscal inheritance from the Conservatives and will also set a date for a Budget that will define Labour’s opening period in office.

Ukraine and its international bondholders started a new round of official talks on restructuring more than $20 billion of debt as Kyiv is running out of time to reach an agreement or face the risk of a potential default, Bloomberg News reported. The east European nation, fighting against Russian aggression, is under pressure to agree a debt overhaul with its creditors as a freeze on payments — agreed two years ago after Moscow’s full-scale invasion — is set to expire on Aug. 1.

British inflation defied forecasts for a slight fall and held at 2% in June while strong underlying price pressures prompted investors to reduce bets that the Bank of England will cut interest rates in two weeks' time for the first time since 2020, Reuters reported. Increases in hotel prices - in a month when U.S. pop star Taylor Swift and other performers toured the UK - were partly to blame for the higher-than-expected inflation number, underscoring the BoE's concern about services prices.

The last time a freshly minted Labour government unabashedly campaigned on an ambitious national industrial policy to revive the British economy was 50 years ago, and the results were generally viewed as disastrous, the New York Times reported. The 1974 program of subsidies, state ownership and power sharing among business, unions and government resulted in strikes that paralyzed the nation. And the government’s goal of picking industrial winners turned into a policy of backing losers like the automaker British Leyland and British Steel Corporation.