Germany’s financial regulator plans to ask the country’s insurers if they grasp the risk of investments they have made in direct loans and private credit funds after a search for yield in the previous decade, Bloomberg News reported. Insurers’ management of risks from private debt and other alternative assets will be a special focus of BaFin’s assessment this year of their investment behavior, Mark Branson, who leads the watchdog, told reporters in Frankfurt on Jan. 28.

The Irish economy recorded a surprise contraction as 2024 drew to a close, a blow to the eurozone economy, of which it is one of smallest but most changeable members, the Wall Street Journal reported. But while the country’s central bank expects to see a return to growth this year and next, it has also warned that the Irish economy is particularly vulnerable to changes in tax and tariff policies under President Trump’s second administration.

Spain’s unemployment rate fell again in the fourth quarter of 2024, likely reflecting a buoyant economy last year that was boosted by tourism, investment and immigration, the Wall Street Journal reported. Joblessness fell to 10.6% in the October-December period, down from 11.2% in the three months to September, and 11.8% in the fourth quarter of 2023, Spain’s statistics body INE said Tuesday. The number of unemployed people declined by 158,600 to 2.60 million in the quarter, the agency said.

Angell, a French smart electric bike startup, has announced in an email to customers that the company is declaring insolvency and approaching a court to ask for judicial liquidation, TechCrunch.com reported. “It’s over for Angell,” said company co-founder and CEO Marc Simoncini on Instagram.

The hearing to present the current status of the insolvency proceedings around KTM and its subsidiaries revealed that the companies have nearly €2.4 billion of collective debt, MotoMatters.com reported. But that Pierer Mobility is in talks with 23 investors to save the company. The hearing established that there are grounds to believe that KTM will be saved as a going concern, and will be able to repay the statutory minimum 30% of debts owed to creditors within the 2 year time period required by Austrian law. But the scale of KTM's financial problems are huge.

Austrian property tycoon Rene Benko can remain in custody for a further 14 days, a Vienna court ruled on Friday, after the founder of collapsed property group Signa was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of trying to hide assets from creditors, Reuters reported. Prosecutors said on Thursday that, in the context of his personal insolvency, 47-year-old Benko was suspected of secretly using a trust meant for his immediate family to keep those assets from being recovered.

German carmakers and their suppliers have announced tens of thousands of job cuts. Germany’s manufacturing industry, the world’s third largest, has shrunk steadily for seven years. And Germany’s economy as a whole has contracted for the past two years, marking only the second back-to-back annual contraction in records dating back to 1951, according to Germany’s federal statistics agency, the Wall Street Journal reported. Gross domestic product has roughly flatlined since 2019, before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic—the longest period of stagnation since the end of World War II.