German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Wednesday he wants to join employers and labor unions in a “concerted action” to find ways of cushioning the effects of rising prices while preventing a spiral of inflation in Europe’s biggest economy, the Associated Press reported. Germany, like other countries in Europe and beyond, already has seen inflation accelerate sharply since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed up fuel and food prices. An official estimate this week showed the country’s annual inflation rate jumping to 7.9% in May, the highest rate since the winter of 1973-1974.

Russia cut off gas supplies to more European buyers, stepping up its use of energy as a weapon and sowing further division in the continent, Bloomberg News reported. Gazprom PJSC halted pipeline shipments to the Netherlands and Denmark this week, and then surprised markets by also cutting off a small contract supplying Germany. Shell Plc and wind giant Orsted A/S refused to comply with President Vladimir Putin’s demand for payments to be made in rubles, and Gazprom responded by halting flows.

Stablecoins that are meant to be an alternative to traditional currencies aren’t steady enough for widespread use by consumers, a Bank of England official said, Bloomberg News reported. Andrew Hauser, executive director for markets at the UK central bank, said the digital currencies such as TerraUSD and Tether lack real-time information about their value and details about how they maintain convertibility. “Stable they are not,” Hauser said Wednesday in a text of remarks prepared for a panel hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

British sporting goods billionaire Mike Ashley swooped on another failing retailer, snapping up online brand Missguided after it entered UK insolvency proceedings, BusinessofFashion.com reported. Ashley’s Frasers Group Plc agreed to pay £20 million ($25 million) for the intellectual property of Missguided and related companies, according to a statement Wednesday. Missguided was founded in 2009 and sells clothes online to young women, targeting them via its 9.2 million Instagram followers.

Drugmaker Mallinckrodt PLC has obtained support among unsecured bondholders to fund its exit from chapter 11 after a chilly reception from the leveraged credit market, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The Ireland-based company had been struggling to complete a financing deal needed to emerge from bankruptcy and has been working with Morgan Stanley to find investors.

Euro-zone inflation accelerated to an all-time high, intensifying the debate at the European Central Bank about how rapidly to raise interest rates from record lows, Bloomberg News reported. Consumer prices jumped 8.1% from a year earlier in May, exceeding the 7.8% median estimate in a Bloomberg survey. The acceleration was driven by food and energy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent commodity prices soaring. A gauge that excludes volatile items like those rose 3.8%.

Britain set out sweeping reforms of big company audits on Tuesday after high-profile collapses at builder Carillion and retailer BHS in recent years hit thousands of jobs and raised questions about accounting quality, Reuters reported. The business ministry detailed changes to auditing and corporate governance that will be put into law, though the measures are unlikely to come into force until 2024 or later and smaller firms will be shielded from the new rules.

Russia's National Settlement Depository (NSD) on Friday successfully paid coupons in foreign currency on two Eurobonds, an NSD representative told Reuters, a move that could mean Russia may have again averted a default, Reuters reported. Russia is on the cusp of a unique kind of debt crisis which investors say would be a first time a major emerging market economy is pushed into a bond default by geopolitics, rather than empty coffers. The NSD said that it paid foreign currency in coupon payouts on Eurobonds maturing in 2026 and 2036, both of which were due on May 27.

Russia needs huge financial resources for its military operation in Ukraine, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Friday, putting the amount of budget stimulus for the economy at 8 trillion roubles ($120 billion), Reuters reported. Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, which prompted the West to impose sanctions against Moscow that have already fanned inflation to near 18% and pushed the country to the brink of recession. "Money, huge resources are needed for the special operation," Siluanov said in a lecture at a Moscow financial university.

Bulgaria's government on Friday approved a plan to join the euro zone as of Jan. 1, 2024, amid concerns within the ruling coalition over the lack of detailed analysis on the impact of the move, Reuters reported. Political uncertainty and three elections last year delayed the plan, drafted after Bulgaria was admitted together with Croatia to the ERM-2 mechanism, a mandatory stage for joining the euro in 2020. The European Union's poorest member, which already pegs its lev currency to the euro, has pledged to adopt the single currency at its current fixed rate in 2024.