Deutsche Bank said Saturday that it is acting on its own to buy bonds of Noble Group Ltd, days before a crucial shareholder vote on a $3.5 billion restructuring of the Singapore-listed commodity trader, The Wall Street Journal reported. The confirmation comes a day after The Wall Street Journal reported the bank’s unexpected offer to buy the bonds. It wasn’t clear on Friday if Deutsche Bank was acting on behalf of another company or for itself, as banks typically handle bond tenders like this for clients.

Italian households suffered a much larger loss of income than their German counterparts due to the European Central Bank’s ultralow interest rates, according to an ECB report that appears to dispel some German concerns over the bank’s easy-money policies, The Wall Street Journal reported. German officials have frequently criticized the ECB for hurting the nation’s savers and subsidizing highly-indebted households in southern Europe by introducing low interest rates.

A sharp fall in German manufacturing output in June has fuelled concern that a global trade war has deepened an export-led slowdown in the eurozone. Official figures published on Monday showed that the value of new orders placed with German manufacturers fell by 4 per cent between May and June, as overseas demand plunged, the Financial Times reported. The biggest monthly fall since the beginning of 2017 led the country’s economy ministry to state that trade tensions were hitting exports.

Deutsche Bank AG had the credit rating of one type of debt cut by Moody’s Investors Service after a change in German law last month paved the way for a more senior kind of borrowing, Bloomberg News reported. In a move that was widely anticipated, Moody’s downgraded the bank’s senior non-preferred debt to Baa3 -- the lowest investment grade -- from Baa2 and reclassified the bonds as “junior senior” debt. The government is now less likely to support what are currently senior notes, the ratings firm said in a statement Friday.

Deutsche Bank AG vowed to maintain its position in fixed-income trading after recording its weakest second quarter in that business since the global financial crisis, as Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing accelerates the lender’s turnaround effort, Bloomberg News reported. Income from buying and selling fixed-income securities slumped 17 percent from a year earlier to 1.37 billion euros ($1.6 billion), the lowest figure for the period since 2008, Germany’s largest bank said on Wednesday. The five largest U.S.

German business expectations declined for the eighth month in a row in July even as the current assessment brightened, amid persistent concerns over the Washington-led trade battle, according to new data released on Wednesday. The Ifo Institute’s gauge of business expectations in the eurozone’s largest economy slipped to 98.2 in July from 98.5 in the previous month, the Financial Times reported. It ended last year at 102.7. Germany has a large, open economy with a big factory sector, meaning headwinds to global trade have an outsize effect on the country.

Germany on Thursday held up the final bailout disbursement for Greece, a move indicative of how difficult it will be for the southern country to regain financial sovereignty even as it exits an eight-year bailout regime in August, The Wall Street Journal reported. Eurozone finance ministers approved the €15 billion ($17.5 billion) aid payment at a meeting in Brussels, but Germany declined to sign off on the deal.

People who work in high finance tend to develop the belief that they know a lot about business, that in fact they are better at business than regular businesspeople, a Bloomberg View reported. This is an understandable belief. The financial industry is a sort of meta-business. Successfully investing in or lending to companies requires you to understand their underlying business, and the deeper your understanding the more confident you will probably be in your investment.

When a beloved regional beer ramps up production, there’s always a question of whether it can gain new fans without losing what made it special. Something similar is happening with a German debt instrument known as Schuldschein, a hitherto hidden corner of the market where borrowing has tripled in recent years, Bloomberg News reported. Not quite a loan and not quite a bond, the traditional Schuldschein was hammered out by local lenders for solid local manufacturers. Now companies like Volkswagen AG, ArcelorMittal and U.S. paintmaker Sherwin-Williams Co.

German exports declined in May from the same month last year, according to data released on Monday that highlight the lingering effect of last year’s rise in the euro, the Financial Times reported. Exports from the eurozone’s biggest economy fell 1.3 per cent in May on a year on year basis, according to data from the Federal Statistics Office. Imports, meanwhile, were up 0.8 per cent on the same basis. The trade surplus clocked in at €19.7bn, down from the €21.8bn recorded in the same month in 2017.