British home prices fell further last month as borrowing costs held back demand, one of the largest mortgage lenders said, although the rate of decline showed a chance that the market could yet avoid a hard landing, Bloomberg News reported. The Nationwide Building Society said prices fell 3.8% in its July survey from a year ago, quicker than a 3.5% drop in the previous month. While economists expected a slightly larger decline of 4%, it was the third straight month that prices had fallen at their fastest pace since the global financial crisis in 2009.

The Czech economy is struggling to recover from a short recession as high interest rates and shrinking real wages curb consumption, spurring a debate about when monetary easing should start, Bloomberg News reported. Gross domestic product grew 0.1% in the second quarter from the previous three months, less than policy makers expected, according to a flash estimate published by the Czech Statistics Office on Monday. The economy shrank 0.6% from a year earlier.

The role of Ukraine’s banking system is one of the less told stories of the nation’s resilience. It survived the loss of assets to occupation, power outages and a 30% collapse in GDP without bank runs, service interruption or any significant closures, Bloomberg News reported. State-controlled lenders have played a part. Before the war, the state-run lenders that control about half the system’s assets were seen as part of the country’s problem. They were notorious for poor governance and backroom deals with their government owners.

Rising borrowing costs and stagnating Chinese demand for European goods could pave the way for another miserable economic winter for the eurozone this year, the Wall Street Journal reported. These headwinds, which also include the continuing war in Ukraine and stubbornly high inflation, mean the region is likely to keep underperforming the U.S. for now, according to fresh data and recent sentiment surveys.

Britain's banks and building societies have until the end of August to justify to regulators why some of their savings rates are low or face sanctions, the markets watchdog said on Monday, as Bank of England rates look set to rise to their highest since 2008, Reuters reported. While the sector has been passing on higher interest rates rapidly to mortgage customers, lawmakers have criticised lenders for not upping rates on savings worth around 1.5 trillion pounds ($1.9 trillion) at a similar speed, amid a cost-of-living crisis.

A German data watchdog has been investigating OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's Worldcoin project since late last year due to concerns over its large-scale processing of sensitive biometric data, the regulator's president told Reuters. Worldcoin, which launched last week, requires users to give their iris scans in exchange for a digital ID and, in some countries, free cryptocurrency as part of plans to create a new "identity and financial network".

Australia and Luxembourg-registered Kleos Space, which uses small satellites to detect and locate radio frequency signals to uncover illegal activity on land and sea, has filed for bankruptcy in Luxembourg, Advanced-Television.com reported. Trading in its shares in Australia had already been suspended on May 3. It already has 16 satellites in orbit (although there are problems with two) and numerous contracts in place. The business was formed in 2017 but suffered launch delays and problems with satellites. Kleos made a statement on July 26th that it had been unable to source fresh financing.

Most European banks emerged stronger from a stress test on how they would weather a sharp economic downturn, giving them a sound footing to continue paying dividends and buying back shares, Bloomberg News reported. On aggregate, the 70 lenders in the test saw their key capital-ratio slide by 4.59 percentage points to 10.4% under an adverse scenario, the European Banking Authority said in a statement on Friday. That’s less than the 4.85 percentage-point hit in the last exam two years ago, which covered fewer banks.

The number of company insolvencies in Switzerland rose 22% in the first six months of the year compared to the same period in 2021, SwissInfo.com. Some 581 construction firms went bankrupt between January and the end of June, out of 2,822 companies in all sectors, according to research group Dunn & Bradstreet. The financial and service sector industries saw one of the largest percentage rises in bankruptcies with a 31% increase in businesses going bust. Some 30% more hotels and restaurants also went out of business.

The European Central Bank raised interest rates for the ninth consecutive time on Thursday but dialled up the possibility of a pause next month as stubbornly high inflation and recession worries pull policymakers in opposing directions, Reuters reported. Fighting off a historic surge in prices, the ECB has now lifted borrowing costs by a combined 425 basis points since last July, worried that price growth could be perpetuated by both rising costs and wages in an exceptionally tight jobs market.