A new week opens in Europe with yet another warning sign over the health of the German economy, with new data showing imports and exports fell in February amid a fraught global trading environment, the Financial Times reported. Exports fell 1.3 per cent month on month to €108.8bn, according to the Federal Statistics Office, while imports dropped 1.6 per cent to €90.9bn. The declines were sharper than expected: a Reuters poll of economists had forecast falls of 0.5 per cent and 0.7 per cent.

Debenhams Plc rejected billionaire Mike Ashley’s latest rescue offer, increasing the odds that he and fellow shareholders will get wiped out as lenders take control of the troubled retailer, Bloomberg News reported. Ashley’s Sports Direct International Plc said Debenhams turned down its proposal to underwrite a 150 million-pound ($196 million) equity raising on the same day that restructuring talks with creditors are due to reach a conclusion. Ashley disclosed the last-ditch offer earlier on Monday, a move to prevent losing much of his equity investment in the department-store chain.

A British court has shut down UK Renewable Investments (UKRI) after it failed to pay back millions of pounds of investor funds, the government said on Monday. The Business and Property Courts in Manchester, northwest England, wound the firm up last week and has appointed a liquidator, Reuters reported. Between July 2015 and September 2016, Darlington, northeast England-based UKRI sold corporate bonds, raising 2.5 million pounds ($3.3 million). Investors were told the funds would go to developing plants which generate renewable energy.

Indebted German wind turbine manufacturer Senvion said on Monday it was continuing talks aimed at shoring up its finances and would not rule out any options, Reuters reported. The Hamburg-based company, previously known as REpower, has faced delays and penalties related to big projects. It needs at least 100 million euros ($112 million) in the short term to keep operating, two financial sources told Reuters. Senvion, which has more than a billion euros of debt, was not immediately available to comment.

Eurozone governments approved the release of €1 billion ($1.1 billion) of funds for Greece, after a monthslong spat over whether the country is reneging on the economic overhauls that it promised when its bailout ended, The Wall Street Journal reported. Eurozone finance ministers meeting in Romania on Friday decided that Greece has enacted enough overhauls to receive the money, which come from the profits that eurozone central banks made on Greek government bonds during the country’s debt crisis.

Mergers in Europe's fragmented banking sector are necessary to make the sector more resilient as the euro zone seeks to protect itself from future crises, France's finance minister told Reuters in an interview, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Bruno Le Maire, who joined President Emmanuel Macron's centrist government in 2017 despite coming from the ranks of France's conservative Republicans party, said banking sector consolidation was needed alongside a single regulatory supervisor and more integrated capital markets.

The global synchronized economy recovery has turned into a global synchronized economic downturn, a Bloomberg View reported. The outlook seems to be getting bleaker by the day, and major central banks are hinting that they may need to keep monetary policies loose. The European Central Bank has even suggested that it could start buying corporate bonds again. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that because it’s becoming evident that central bankers make for bad capitalists.

Investors who were bold or lucky enough to buy a little-known, opaque and illiquid vestige of one of Europe’s most dramatic bank failures may make a killing. Their good fortune is another odd twist in the wild history of Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank International AG, the Austrian lender that nearly collapsed under bad loans piled up in a state-sponsored buying spree in the former Yugoslavia, Bloomberg News reported.

Debenhams Plc is edging closer to giving lenders control in a move that would thwart efforts by its largest shareholder Mike Ashley to take the reins, Bloomberg News reported. The struggling U.K. retailer is preparing a so-called prepackaged administration because billionaire Ashley’s Sports Direct International Plc hasn’t yet agreed to the lenders’ terms, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as talks are private. Sports Direct has until Monday to meet their requirements or risk losing its entire stake of about 30 percent.

The Italian government and the European Commission have reached a provisional agreement to reimburse some investors who bought shares in failed banks, an Italian official said, in an unprecedented move that would soften EU rules on bank rescues, Reuters reported. The bail-in rules devised after the last decade’s financial crisis were designed to make any given bank and its creditors - instead of taxpayers - financially responsible if it went bust, with shareholders first in line to pay up.