Euro zone inflation pressures have begun to ease, including for all-important core prices, but the European Central Bank will not end rate hikes until it is confident price growth is heading back towards 2%, ECB Chief Economist Philip Lane said, Reuters reported. The ECB has raised rates by 3 percentage points since July and promised another half a percentage increase in March, in the hope that more expensive funding will curtail demand enough to get price growth down from levels still above 8%.

Britain and the European Union have reached a new agreement on post-Brexit trading arrangements for Northern Ireland, raising hopes that more than six years of wrangling over the U.K.’s departure from the bloc may finally come to an end, the Associated Press reported. The deal, announced Monday by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, is designed to replace existing rules that have been criticized for effectively creating a customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, weakening the region’s links to Britain.

Banks are becoming the leading buyers of some euro zone governments' bond sales, taking advantage of surging interest rates as the European Central Bank looks to reduce its presence in the market, Reuters reported. Euro zone governments need private buyers to pick up some 400 billion euros ($422 billion) of additional debt this year.

UK taxpayers will be on the hook for as much as £200 billion ($240 billion) of potential losses from the Bank of England’s quantitative easing program after the Treasury lodged plans to cover any future shortfall with parliament last week, Bloomberg News reported.

A new deal agreed between Britain and the European Union to amend the Northern Ireland Protocol will allow the Stormont assembly to stop EU laws applying in the province, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Monday, Reuters reported. "Many had called for Stormont to have a say over these laws. But the 'Stormont break' goes further and means that Stormont can in fact stop them from applying in Northern Ireland," Sunak told a news conference.

Switzerland's financial regulator has investigated 12 banks and launched enforcement proceedings against two of them in relation to corruption charges against longtime central banker Riad Salameh, it said on Monday, Reuters reported. Lebanese authorities charged Salameh, his brother Raja and one of his assistants on Thursday with money laundering, embezzlement and illicit enrichment after months of delay in the high-profile case. The Salameh brothers have denied wrongdoing throughout the process.

The World Bank on Friday announced $2.5 billion in additional grant financing from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID )to support Ukraine's budget and maintain essential services, Reuters reported. The latest financing under the World Bank's Public Expenditures for Administrative Capacity Endurance in Ukraine(PEACE) project lifts the total to $20.6 billion and will support salaries in core government functions and sectors such as healthcare and education while allowing Kyiv to pay pensions and support internally displaced people.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Union leader Ursula von der Leyen are set to hold face-to-face talks, with expectations high they will seal a deal to resolve a thorny post-Brexit trade dispute, the Associated Press reported. That would mark a breakthrough after months of bitter wrangling that has soured U.K.-EU relations, sparked the collapse of the Belfast-based regional government and and threatened to set back Northern Ireland's decades-old peace process. In a joint statement on Sunday the U.K.

The German economy shrank by 0.4% in last year’s fourth quarter, the national statistics office said Friday, a sharp downward revision from its initial report that gross domestic product declined by 0.2%, the Associated Press reported. The quarter-on-quarter contraction in the October-December period was the first since the first quarter of 2021. Consumer spending, which propped up growth in the first nine months of last year, dropped by 1% in the final three months of 2022. Investment in construction and machinery showed bigger drops in the final quarter, the Federal Statistical Office said.

Within months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, there was near panic in Europe over energy supplies. Mainstay flows of natural gas through pipelines from Russia were dwindling to a relative trickle, pushing wholesale prices up more than 10 times the level of a year earlier. Oil prices were high. Lawmakers warned of fuel rationing and rolling blackouts, and winter loomed. Now Europe has plenty of gas, much of it from Norway, the shale fields of Texas, and Qatar.