Germany

Deutsche Bank AG’s head of emerging-market debt trading has become the latest top executive to exit as high turnover roils Europe’s biggest investment bank. Sean Bates, who held senior roles at the firm since before the 2008 financial crisis, will be succeeded by James Davies, Deutsche Bank spokesman Charlie Olivier said Monday. Bates declined to comment, Bloomberg News reported. A string of top managers have departed since Christian Sewing took over as chief executive officer last month and signaled a restructuring of the struggling lender after years of losses.

Managers of insolvent P&R Group are being investigated after it was discovered the investment firm sold nearly one million more shipping containers than it owned, the Munich prosecutors’ office said on Thursday. Once the world’s biggest lessor of shipping containers, P&R sells containers to investors and its sister company in Switzerland rents them out to shipping companies, Reuters reported. P&R later buys back the containers from investors.

Europe’s largest economy cooled sharply in the first quarter amid a drop in government spending and weak exports—a sign that a stronger euro and global tensions are beginning to leave a mark on the German economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. Germany’s annualized growth rate slowed to 1.2% from 2.5% in the fourth quarter of last year, the Federal Statistical Office said Tuesday. This means that the German economy was growing more slowly than the U.S., which registered growth of 2.3% in the same period.

Deutsche Bank's sudden change in chief executive could prolong the lender's restructuring, ratings agency Standard & Poor's (S&P) said as it placed the bank on "credit watch negative" late on Thursday. Last weekend retail banking specialist Christian Sewing replaced John Cryan as Deutsche's CEO, raising the prospect of radical change at Germany's flagship lender, which has been slower than rivals to reform after the financial crisis, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Deutsche Bank AG may be downgraded by S&P Global Ratings, which said the German bank’s leadership change may signal a “prolonged, deepened or more costly restructuring” that could weigh on the bank’s credit rating, Bloomberg News reported. The lender’s A- long-term rating is under review, S&P said in a statement late Thursday, while affirming its BBB- rating on the bank’s senior subordinated debt.

German industrial production dropped in February by the widest margin in two and a half years, according to data released on Friday that underscore the headwinds faced by the eurozone’s powerhouse economy in the first quarter, the Financial Times reported. The wide-ranging gauge of German industry slumped 1.6 per cent in February from the previous month, according to the Federal Statistics Office. It was the steepest fall since August 2015 and compared with economist expectations of a 0.3 per cent rise, according to FactSet data. Energy production was a standout, jumping 4 per cent.

A key gauge of financial professionals’ view of the German economy tumbled this month in the latest sign that the spectre of a ‘trade war’ is hitting confidence in the eurozone’s biggest economy, the Financial Times reported. The Centre for European Economic Research (Zew) economic sentiment index dropped 12.7 points in March from February to 5.1 points. The reading was far below the consensus estimate in a Reuters poll of 13. This month’s reading pulled the Zew indicator further away from the long-term average of 23.6 points.

As property prices in Germany’s big cities continue to climb, the country’s central bank last month added its voice to a chorus of concern about the prospect of a bubble. While it avoided using that word, the Bundesbank’s February report noted that housing in German towns and cities — Europe’s biggest residential market by value — was overpriced by 15-30 per cent, the Financial Times reported. The German property research group Empirica suggested last month that prices could fall by between a third and a quarter in Berlin, Munich and Stuttgart over the next five years.

Creditors of insolvent German airline Air Berlin are considering whether to sue its major shareholder Etihad for billions of euros in damages, a spokesperson for the airline's insolvency administrator, Lucas Floether, says. The creditors' committee is scheduled to meet on Monday to discuss putting the claim forward. German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that Floether expected the airline to demand either 1 billion or several billion euros in damages, depending on whether the claim came from Holding Air Berlin or its subsidiary, Air Berlin Luftverkehrs KG.

Deutsche Bank AG plans to return to a corner of the credit derivatives market that it largely exited about three years ago, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The German lender told clients that it plans to start making markets in some credit-default swaps tied to individual companies, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public, Bloomberg News reported. The bank will buy and sell contracts that settle through a clearing house and plans to start as early as the second quarter, they said.