The Bank of England held interest rates on Thursday at their highest level since 2008 even as inflation in Britain slowed to 2 percent in May, an important milestone, the New York Times reported. Policymakers kept rates at 5.25 percent, where they have been for 10 months. The officials said that high rates were working and cooling the labor market, reducing price pressures, but they added that monetary policy would need to stay restrictive until they were sure the risk of inflation overshooting their target had dissipated.

The Swiss National Bank lowered borrowing costs at a second straight meeting, keeping it at the forefront of global interest-rate cuts as it battles low inflation and a strengthening franc, Bloomberg News reported. Officials in Zurich reduced their benchmark by 25 basis points to 1.25% on Thursday after a decision that observers found hard to predict. Some investors bet on a cut, while a small majority of the economists surveyed by Bloomberg anticipated no change. Policymakers also lowered their inflation projections, seeing it at 1% in 2026.

Germany has fined Citigroup nearly 13 million euros ($13.94 million) for lapses in its trading system controls, the nation's bank regulator said on Thursday, as its consumer protection division imposed its largest penalty ever, Reuters reported. It is related to a mishap in 2022 involving $1.4 billion in mistaken sell orders in equities, an event that riled markets and for which Citigroup was already fined 61.6 million pounds ($78.24 million) by British authorities in May.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling coalition ditched a plan to buy the entire German unit of Tennet Holding BV’s power grid, after the cost proved too much for the government’s stretched finances, Bloomberg News reported. Discussions on a full sale by the Dutch state-owned grid operator to German development bank KfW have ended after more than a year of negotiations, Tennet said Thursday in a statement.

Fewer companies went bust in May than the previous month, amid a pick-up in business activity across England and Wales, according to official data, PA Media reported. U.K. company insolvencies fell 6% month-on-month to 2,006, which is 21% lower than in May 2023, the Insolvency Service said. The number of firms going out of business rose steadily during 2021 and 2022, with 2023 seeing the highest annual number of company insolvencies since 1993.

British inflation fell back to the Bank of England’s 2% target for the first time in almost three years, a milestone that likely comes too late to improve the political fortunes of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak before the looming election, Bloomberg News reported. Consumer price increases eased in May from 2.3% the month before, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday.

The European Central Bank can ease monetary policy further so long as inflation continues to moderate, according to Governing Council member Mario Centeno, Bloomberg News reported. “The cycle of interest rates will continue to evolve,” the Portuguese official told lawmakers Wednesday in Lisbon. “Rates will fall if inflation helps us, which it’s doing.” The ECB, though, is in no rush to follow up this month’s reduction in borrowing costs with another, concerned that rapid wage growth may delay inflation’s return to its 2% target.

The cost of hedging the franc overnight jumped early Wednesday by the most since the Swiss National Bank unexpectedly removed a floor for the currency in 2015, Bloomberg News reported. The sharp move came ahead of the SNB’s next decision on Thursday, given market uncertainty over whether policy makers could opt to cut interest rates and signal support for the currency through intervention. That made hedging the Swiss franc the day before a SNB meeting the most expensive since 2022.

UniCredit SpA is working on three significant risk transfer deals linked to as much as €8.5 billion ($9 billion) of loans to Italian and German companies, Bloomberg News reported. The Milan-based bank is selling two so-called SRTs linked to €3.5 billion of leasing contracts with Italian companies and €2 billion euros of Italian small and medium-sized businesses, said the people, who asked not to be named because the deal is private. UniCredit also plans to issue SRTs linked to as much as €3 billion of loans to German SMEs by the summer.

The first formal talks on restructuring more than $20 billion of Ukraine’s international bonds ended without a deal as the creditors pushed back against Kyiv’s proposal for debt relief, Bloomberg News reported. With bond payments set to resume this summer, Ukraine is asking debt holders to accept bigger losses that would allow it to finance its defense efforts against Russian aggression and prepare financial resources for economic reconstruction once the war ends.