The UK financial watchdog has issued a warning to customers over the risk of peer-to-peer loans held within an individual savings account. The Financial Conduct Authority said it had seen evidence that Innovative Finance Isas — used to shelter peer-to-peer loans from income and capital gains tax — were being marketed alongside cash Isas despite the fact they offer far less protection to consumers, the Financial Times reported. It follows the high-profile collapse of London Capital & Finance, a company selling unregulated minibonds, in January.

The European Commission’s president urged Rome to do more to spur growth in Italy’s anaemic economy as a slowdown raises the risk that the government will breach spending limits agreed with Brussels, the Financial Times reported. Jean-Claude Juncker said during a visit to Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s prime minister, that the budget deficit target agreed between the coalition government and the commission last year had been based on economic growth forecasts that now seemed optimistic.

Debenhams is set to burn through tens millions of pounds in fees after securing its latest rescue deal, ratcheting up the pressure on the struggling retailer as it battles to stem falling sales, cut costs and fight off the attentions of its biggest shareholder, the Financial Times reported. Last week, the department store group agreed a refinancing package with its lenders and bondholders, designed to give it more time to rationalise its store estate, reduce its operating costs by £80m and improve its product offering.

The Bank of England has been meeting with direct lenders to gauge the industry’s resilience to slowing growth, according to two people familiar with the matter. At least two of the biggest U.K. private credit funds met separately with members of the central bank’s financial stability unit in the past month, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks were private, Bloomberg News reported. The meetings were part of the BOE’s efforts to gauge potential sources of stress in an economic downturn, they said.

For investors trying to make sense of recent extreme moves in the global credit market, bad news: The roller coaster may go on. The long-feared liquidity menace is well and truly here, and it’s overshadowing more prosaic factors like low default rates and corporate earnings when turbulence in the $13 trillion market erupts, according to new research from UBS Group AG, Bloomberg News reported. “Dizzying” moves of late have been driven by rapidly rising and falling liquidity, strategists at the bank argued this week.

The Bank of Greece warned Monday that the country is likely to miss its 2019 growth target due to mounting international uncertainty and doubts over the government's commitment to reforms, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. Central bank governor Yannis Stournaras, presenting the bank's annual report, said the Greek economy was likely to grow by 1.9 percent this year. That's below the European Commission's forecast of 2.2 percent and Greece's official budget estimate of 2.5 percent.

AIB said on Monday that it has agreed to sell a €1 billion portfolio of non-performing loans, consisting of mostly buy-to-let properties, to US private equity group Cerberus. The portfolio, which consists of 2,200 customer loans, is being sold to Everyday Finance as part of a consortium arrangement with Everyday and affiliates of Cerberus Capital Management, The Irish Times reported. The portfolio is predominantly made up of investment properties, with limited agriculture exposure, with an average balance of €500,000 across 5,000 assets.

Core inflation in the eurozone has hit its lowest level for two years, amid mounting signs that the single currency area’s economy is losing momentum, the Financial Times reported. Eurostat, the bloc’s statistics agency, said the core measure, which strips out more volatile price changes for energy and food products and is seen as a better measure of underlying price pressures, fell from 1 per cent to 0.8 per cent in the year to March. The headline measure also fell slightly, from 1.5 per cent in the year to February to 1.4 per cent last month.

Germany’s factory sector shrunk at an even quicker clip than initially reported in March, according to a closely watched survey of industry executives. The IHS Markit purchasing managers’ index was revised to 44.1 in March — the lowest since the eurozone debt crisis in February 2012 — from a ‘flash’ estimate of 44.7, the Financial Times reported. It had registered 47.6 the previous month, slipping at that time just below the 50 line that separates expansion from contraction.

The OECD forecast Italy’s public finances to worsen as fiscal measures are not boosting economic growth. In its latest economic survey, the OECD projects that Italy’s deficit will rise to 2.5 per cent this year and to 3 per cent in 2020, both higher than government forecasts. Italy’s public debt will reverse its declining trend and it is expected to start to rise again, the Financial Times reported. This is in contrast with the government’s expectations of a downward trend in public debt despite higher spending because of projected stronger growth.