The City of London may be better off staying out of the EU’s financial services market as it would have to sacrifice autonomy over setting rules to win full access, a report by Britain’s upper house of parliament said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The European Union has yet to grant Britain direct financial market access after it left the bloc on Dec. 31 and large amounts of trading in stocks and derivatives denominated in euros has shifted to Amsterdam from London.

British tourists should go ahead and book foreign holidays despite government warnings not to, Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary said on Wednesday, as the low-cost carrier announced plans to run 80% of its peak summer capacity, Reuters reported. Vaccine rollouts will tame COVID-19 and reopen travel in time for beach holidays, O’Leary predicted during a news conference in which he also dismissed recent advice from UK ministers that foreign travel is likely to remain off-limits.

Japanese insurer Tokio Marine Holdings Inc said on Tuesday it currently expects no material impact on its results for the fiscal year starting next month as a result of its exposure to the fallout of Greensill Capital’s collapse, Reuters reported. Tokio Marine made the forecast in a statement the day after its shares fell 5.6% following a Bloomberg report that the Japanese insurer faced a larger-than-expected exposure to the insolvent British finance firm.

Britain’s jobless rate unexpectedly fell in the three months to January, a change that partly reflected people giving up their job hunt as lockdown measures tightened at the start of the year, official figures showed on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The main jobless rate dropped to 5.0% in the three months to January from 5.1% in the final quarter of 2020, in contrast to forecasts in a Reuters poll for a small rise to 5.2%. None of the economists polled had expected a fall.

Germany has extended its lockdown measures by another month and imposed several new restrictions, including largely shutting down public life over Easter, in an effort to drive down the rate of coronavirus infections, the Associated Press reported. Speaking early Tuesday after a lengthy video call with the country’s 16 state governors, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that restrictions previously set to run through March 28 will now remain in place until April 18.

The Central Bank has raised further concerns about the Government’s new shared equity loan scheme for struggling home-buyers, suggesting it is unlikely to elicit more supply, the Irish Times reported. The regulator’s director of economics and statistics, Mark Cassidy, said “the main effect” of the proposed scheme was likely to be on demand as there seems to be “some sluggishness” around how supply reacts to changes in the market. The implication being that the initiative could trigger further price inflation.

Germany aims to borrow 240.2 billion euros ($286 billion) this year, taking on just over 60 billion euros more debt than initially planned to help mitigate the impact of the coronavirus crisis, Bloomberg News reported. Heavy government spending is set to continue as the country grapples with a fresh wave of the pandemic.

The European Central Bank finally delivered on its promise to boost the pace of emergency bond-buying to combat the economic threat from higher yields, Bloomberg News reported. Net purchases settled last week climbed by 21.1 billion euros ($25.2 billion), the most since the start of December. That figure is reduced by redemptions -- the gross value of purchases will be disclosed on Tuesday. German bonds held marginally higher on the day, with 10-year yields dropping one basis point to minus 0.31%.

Mark Branson, the head of Switzerland’s financial markets regulator, is to become president of Germany’s finance watchdog BaFin, the finance ministry said on Monday, as part of a shake-up at the regulator after the Wirecard fraud, Reuters reported. Current BaFin president Felix Hufeld is leaving at the end of the month after coming under pressure for failing to spot wrongdoing ahead of the collapse of the payments company. The implosion of a former blue-chip hailed as a German success story and once worth $28 billion has embarrassed the government and damaged the country’s reputation.

Germany is mulling around 70 billion euros ($83 billion) in extra debt spending this year to fight the fallout from the coronavirus crisis, Bloomberg News reported. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz needs those additional funds because the country’s lockdown is dragging on much longer than expected, the person said, cautioning that the exact number is still under discussion. Germany’s total new debt for this year will rise to 250 billion euros, Der Spiegel said, which reported the new spending plans earlier.