The European Central Bank cut interest rates as expected on Thursday and said it believed it was now well-positioned to cope with global economic uncertainty, as market bets grew on a summer pause in its year-long easing cycle, Reuters reported. The ECB has now lowered borrowing costs eight times, or by 2 percentage points since last June, seeking to prop up a euro zone economy that was struggling even before erratic U.S. economic and trade policies dealt it further blows.

Few British businesses now expect to be directly affected by recent changes in U.S. trade policy, with only 12% naming it as one of their top three sources of uncertainty, down from 22% a month earlier, a Bank of England survey showed on Thursday, Reuters reported. U.S. President Donald Trump announced wide-ranging tariffs on imports to the United States in early April. Britain secured a partial exemption from the tariffs in early May, although the details are still to be finalised. The BoE said 70% of businesses surveyed in May as part of its monthly Decision Maker Panel expected that U.S.

German manufacturing orders unexpectedly rose in April, confounding fears that the Trump administration’s ratcheting up of tariffs would hit demand for German goods, the Wall Street Journal reported. Factory orders climbed 0.6% on month, Germany’s statistics agency Destatis said Thursday. Nevertheless, the first hard industrial data after President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement showed a slowdown from the 3.4% increase in March, which came as U.S. firms stockpiled goods from abroad in an effort to get ahead of proposed levies.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is expected to cut interest rates by a further quarter point (0.25 per cent) on Thursday as inflation continues to cool and amid a slowdown in global trade from US tariffs, the Irish Times reported. ECB chief Christine Lagarde is also expected to face questions about her tenure as head of the bloc’s central bank amid speculation she may cut her term short.

The European Commission has reprimanded Austria and Romania for breaking European Union limits on government spending — as Austria deals with the financial fall-out of months of political deadlock and Romania's long-running fiscal problems drag on, Politico reported. Under EU fiscal rules, a country's deficit — the difference between a government’s revenues and expenditures — cannot exceed 3 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Both countries went through a long period of political crisis this year. But their situations are very different.

Thames Water suffered a major setback in its fight to avoid nationalisation on Tuesday as it said U.S. private equity firm KKR had pulled out of a multi-billion pound rescue plan, Reuters reported. Britain's biggest water supplier has been pushed to the edge by its 18 billion pound ($24.35 billion) debt pile, and was banking on KKR investing about 4 billion pounds in new equity to effectively buy the company. The government has said that it is on standby in case Thames Water fails to recapitalise and needs to be temporarily nationalised in order to keep services running.

Helaba and other German lenders have paid millions of euros in recent weeks to settle claims by the administrator of former real estate tycoon René Benko’s Signa Prime Selection AG, the Luxembourg Times reported. Helaba paid €26 million at the end of May as part of an out-of court settlement, Signa Prime’s insolvency administrator said in a report to creditors dated Monday. Other payments include €3 million received from Deutsche Pfandbriefbank AG and €2.1 million from Bayerische Landesbank.

An escalation of the US trade war would pose a “substantial risk” of losses for Danish banks, which are heavily exposed to export-driven industries, the Nordic country’s central bank warned, Bloomberg News reported. Danish lenders are particularly vulnerable to further trade tensions through their exposure to manufacturing firms as a large share of industrial exports goes to the US either directly or indirectly, Nationalbanken said in a financial stability report released Tuesday.

Euro zone inflation eased below the European Central Bank's target last month on surprisingly benign services costs, underpinning expectations for further policy easing even as global trade tensions fuel longer-term price pressures, Reuters reported. Consumer price inflation in the 20 countries sharing the euro slowed to 1.9% in May from 2.2% a month earlier, below expectations for 2.0% on a fall in energy prices and a sharp decline in services inflation.