In a related story, Reuters reported that talks with potential strategic and private equity investors to rescue Thomas Cook’s German tour business going well and many investors have expressed interest in the company as a whole or in its branches, the insolvent company’s liquidator said. “The investor talks are in full swing, running well and giving hope,” Julia Kappel-Gnirs, a liquidator of Thomas Cook Germany’s Bucher Reisen and Oeger Tours units, said in a statement on Wednesday. The travel firm on Wednesday said it was cancelling all travel operations until Dec.

German industrial production rose 0.3 per cent in August, surpassing economists’ forecasts and providing a glimmer of hope that the sharp contraction in the engine room of the eurozone’s biggest economy may be less severe than feared, the Financial Times reported. Excluding the typically volatile energy and construction sectors, production increased by a healthy 0.7 per cent from the previous month, as an increase in intermediate and capital goods more than offset a decline in consumer goods.

German industrial orders have continued their decline, dropping by 0.6 per cent in August from the previous month and adding to the gloom hanging over the eurozone’s biggest economy, the Financial Times reported. Data from Germany’s economy ministry on Monday showed that the country’s larger than expected drop in industrial orders was caused by a sharp fall in domestic demand, which shrank 2.6 per cent. It was only partly offset by a 0.9 per cent rise in foreign orders.

The heated auction between buyout firm Bain Capital and Austria’s AMS AG for the German LED-maker Osram Licht AG has ended in no deal, a Bloomberg View reported. The prospect of a transaction being rekindled in the near term looks bleak — though not impossible over the longer run. It beggars belief that a tense round of bidding can culminate in no more than a tangled mess. But this is regrettably often the way with German M&A.

Business activity in Germany’s services industry worsened more than expected last month, as the woes in the manufacturing sector bled into the greater economy, magnifying fears of a looming recession, the Financial Times reported. The composite purchasing managers’ index for the eurozone’s biggest economy showed a contraction for the first time in six years. The index, a weighted average of manufacturing and services figures, fell below the 50-point level for the first time since April 2013, according to a closely watched poll, and at the swiftest pace of contraction in seven years.

Germany’s leading economic research institutes have urged the government to abandon its commitment to balanced budgets, also known as the “black zero” policy, as they slashed their growth forecasts and warned that the country’s crucial industrial sector was already in recession, the Financial Times reported. “Sticking with the black zero as an end in itself would be fundamentally wrong.

In the darkest days of the 2009 recession, Germany’s industrial output was collapsing at an annual rate of more than 20%, a Bloomberg View reported. An unfathomable implosion but one that thankfully ended almost as quickly as it started. Some 10 years on, a crisis is brewing once again in the country’s industrial heartlands. The pain could prove more enduring this time. So far the problems aren’t nearly as acute as in 2009; industrial production fell by a comparatively modest 4.2% in July.

Germany’s Condor, which is owned by British travel operator Thomas Cook, said on Thursday that a Frankfurt court had begun investor protection proceedings that should allow the airline to be restructured, Reuters reported. Thomas Cook, the world’s oldest travel firm, collapsed this week, sparking a scramble for survival among many of its subsidiaries. Germany said on Tuesday it would guarantee a 380 million euro ($419 million) bridging loan for Condor to enable it to continue flying and save jobs.

Tensions between the European Central Bank and Germany have again exploded into public view after the resignation of Sabine Lautenschläger, who represented the eurozone’s biggest economy on the central bank’s executive board, the Financial Times reported. Ms Lautenschläger — who is leaving weeks after publicly opposing further easing of super-loose monetary policy by the ECB — is the latest of a string of German representatives to quit the central bank after failing to stop the flow of cheap money.

Deutsche Bank AG is reviving a business it shut down in 2014, even as it pushes on with a company-wide strategic overhaul that’s seen it shed staff and sell off assets, Bloomberg News reported. The German lender has resumed trading credit-default swaps -- derivatives used by traders to insure debt against the risk of default -- for investment-grade European companies, according to a spokeswoman. The bank also plans to extend the activity to cover high yield as well as banks and insurers, she said.