European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said officials are being “attentive” to financial market-developments, shortly after her colleague Philip Lane said he’s not worried about French turbulence, Bloomberg News reported. The policymakers responded to questions that followed a week of turmoil that wiped $258 billion from the market capitalization of the country’s stocks and caused the yield on France’s bonds to widen compared with German equivalents.

Germany's biggest industrial union said Monday it will seek a 7% pay increase for millions of workers in negotiations starting later this year, arguing that companies including automakers and machinery manufacturers are in a position to afford it, the Associated Press reported.

In the first three months of the year 5,209 companies filed for bankruptcy in Germany, the Federal Statistical Office on Friday, continuing an upward trend, DPA International reported. This year's first quarter figure was 26.5% higher than in the same quarter last year. It was also 11.2% higher than in same quarter in 2020, before the coronavirus forced closures across the country. In May 2024, 25.9% more regular insolvencies were filed than a year earlier. Since June 2023, double-digit year-on-year growth rates have been recorded, according to the government statisticians.

The French government has offered to buy some of Atos SE’s operations in its big data and security unit for an enterprise value of €700 million ($751 million) as part of discussions to restructure the embattled IT company, Bloomberg News reported. The non-binding bid, part of talks previously disclosed in April, is for the company’s supercomputers, “mission-critical” systems and cybersecurity activities in the Atos unit known as BDS, the company said in a statement on Friday. No final deal has been reached and discussions are continuing.

U.K. fashion retailer Superdry has managed to avoid insolvency after shareholders backed a £10mn lifeline on Friday, the Financial Times reported. The results of the meeting with investors come after the company warned in April that it could go bust unless it launched a sweeping restructuring of the business, including negotiating rent reductions with landlords, and said it would delist from the London stock market.

The Regional Court in Ostrava has opened insolvency proceedings with the Liberty Ostrava Steelworks, the largest steel producer in Czechia, Radio Prague International reported. The insolvency petition was filed by the company itself which said it was unable to meet overdue liabilities exceeding CZK 5 billion. Liberty has been struggling with severe financial problems since last autumn. Most of its operations have been closed since December of last year.

The euro zone’s underlying consumer price growth is proving stubborn, according to European Central Bank Governing Council member Joachim Nagel, Bloomberg News reported. Speaking at the International Economic Forum of the Americas, the Bundesbank president reiterated that he and his colleagues won’t simply lower borrowing costs automatically, but rather judge conditions at each meeting as it comes. “It’s true that core inflation is still very sticky,” Nagel said Wednesday in Montreal, Canada, while acknowledging that it was right to ease policy last week.

Atos shares lost more of their value in early trading, adding to losses already reported this week as the French IT firm works on implementing its financial rescue, the Wall Street Journal reported. At 0743 GMT shares traded 5% lower at EUR0.73. The shares have lost around 37% of their value this week alone and are now down around 95% from a year ago.

Struggling Swedish landlord SBB is preparing to lay the groundwork for an initial public offering of its entire residential portfolio by shifting bond debt from the parent level down into Sveafastigheter AB, Bloomberg News reported. Samhallsbyggnadsbolaget i Norden AB — as the company is formally known — is inviting existing bondholders to exchange their notes for a new issue sold by the residential unit totaling no more than 2.5 billion Swedish kronor ($240 million), according to a statement on Thursday.

Wages in the U.K. continued to grow rapidly in the three months to April, a concern for the Bank of England as it prepares for a policy meeting next week, the Wall Street Journal reported. Average earnings, excluding bonuses, between February and April were 6.0% higher than a year earlier, the same as in the first quarter of this year, according to data from the Office for National Statistics published Tuesday. While the U.K.’s annual inflation rate slowed to 2.3% in April, closing in on the BOE’s 2% target, prices in the labor-intensive services sector were up 5.9%.