Swiss inflation held at its fastest pace this year, eroding the case for a Swiss National Bank interest-rate cut when officials meet later this month, Bloomberg News reported. Consumer prices rose 1.4% in May from a year earlier, Switzerland’s statistics office said on Tuesday. That advance — which is in line with economists’ estimates — matches April’s reading. Rent, package holidays, fresh vegetables and petrol supported upward pressures, offset by heating oil, the statisticians said. Rent increases had been expected after previous central bank moves had raised a key reference rate.
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Resources Per Country
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- Austria
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- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Bulgaria
- Croatia
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Estonia
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Gibraltar
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- Iceland
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- Isle of Man
- Italy
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- Kosovo
- Latvia
- Liechtenstein
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Macedonia
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- Moldova
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- Romania
- Russia
- San Marino
- Serbia
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Ukraine
- United Kingdom
- Vatican City
German tour operator FTI said Monday that it is filing for insolvency protection from creditors, and trips that haven't yet started will be canceled or scaled back, the Associated Press reported. FTI Group, which describes itself as Europe's third-biggest tour operator, said parent company FTI Touristik GmbH, was filing an application for the opening of insolvency proceedings at a Munich court. Since an announcement in April that a consortium of investors would come on board, “booking figures have fallen well short of expectations despite the positive news,” the company said in a statement.
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Swedish manufacturing activity rose to its highest level in two years as the largest Nordic country is emerging from an economic slump, Bloomberg News reported. A purchasing managers index for the industrial sector rose to 54 in May, from 51.9 in April, which is the highest level since May 2022. The uptick was mainly driven by an increase in new orders, according to Swedbank/Silf, which conducts the survey. “The May outcome strengthens the picture of a brighter manufacturing outlook,” Swedbank analyst Jorgen Kennemar said in a statement.
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European natural gas prices settled at the highest level this year after flows from Norway slumped, highlighting the risk of relying too much on one major supplier, Bloomberg News reported. Benchmark Dutch gas futures closed 5.2% higher at €36.01 per megawatt-hour. The contract earlier surged as much as 13%, the biggest intraday jump since December. It isn’t clear how long an unplanned outage will last at Norway’s massive Nyhamna gas processing plant. At the same time, Norwegian flows into the UK’s Easington terminal, an entry point for a third of Britain’s total supply, halted.
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One in fifteen European companies are facing significant pressure to restructure this year after being hit by higher financing costs and weakening consumer demand, with Germany, Austria and the Nordics particularly under strain, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group, Bloomberg News reported. Around a third of businesses in Germany and Austria also face what BCG dubs “transformation pressure” or early signs of weakening performance and financial stability which require improvement, the consulting firm said in a presentation Monday.
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Britain’s councils are preparing a record £1.4bn record fire sale in assets and cancelled investments as they scramble to plug a debt black hole ahead of the election, The Telegraph reported. The Government has given 18 councils the green light to sell-off assets and mothball projects to release cash in a bid to avoid another wave of council bankruptcies before the nation heads to the polls on July 4.
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Scandinavian airline SAS posted a second-quarter pretax loss that more than doubled from a year earlier on Thursday, while pledging to complete its restructuring this summer, Reuters reported. The company's chapter 11 plan of reorganisation was approved in March. It filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection in 2022 after years of struggle with high costs coupled with low customer demand, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. "We look forward to emerging as a competitive and financially stronger airline with a stable equity structure," CEO Anko van der Werff said in a statement.
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Switzerland’s approach to winding down a globally systemic bank such as UBS Group AG has features that could worsen the turmoil in a hypothetical future crisis, according to a key architect of global financial rules, Bloomberg reported. The country’s “Too-Big-to-Fail” regime is too focused on preserving local activities in the event of a break-up, said Paul Tucker, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and a current research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The eurozone’s unemployment rate fell to a record low in April, a sign that the job market is stronger than the European Central Bank had anticipated as it prepares to cut its key rate next week, The Wall Street Journal reported. The unemployment rate across the 20-nation bloc ticked down to 6.4% from the 6.5%, where it had been since November last year, the European Union’s statistics agency said Thursday. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal expected the rate to hold steady. The number of unemployed workers fell by around 100,000 from March, Eurostat said.
Scandinavian airline SAS posted a second-quarter pretax loss that more than doubled from a year earlier on Thursday, while pledging to complete its restructuring this summer, Reuters reported. The company's chapter 11 plan of reorganization was approved in March. It filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection in 2022 after years of struggle with high costs coupled with low customer demand, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. "We look forward to emerging as a competitive and financially stronger airline with a stable equity structure," CEO Anko van der Werff said in a statement.