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.

The German government says its 2019 budget will comply with eurozone debt limits for the first time in 17 years, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. The draft budget also raises defense spending — a contentious issue between Germany and U.S. President Donald Trump. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz told a news conference that debt would fall to 58.25 percent of yearly economic output. That would put it below the 60 percent limit established by rules to ensure fiscal responsibility and price stability in the 19 countries that use the euro.

The property boom in Germany’s capital is breaking record after record, but the city’s elders are looking to pump the brakes, The Wall Street Journal reported. Berlin’s left-leaning local government, an alliance of Social Democrats, Greens and Socialists, is moving to rein in the residential real-estate market with a barrage of measures that critics say would have put East Germany’s Communist former rulers to shame.

Deutsche Bank AG, which is in the throes of a global restructuring involving thousands of job cuts, is zeroing in on an Asian market where an unprecedented bad-loan clean-up offers the potential for a credit bonanza, Bloomberg News reported. In India, where bankruptcy law changes have injected urgency into efforts to restructure $210 billion of stressed assets, Deutsche Bank sees an opportunity to generate outsized returns by refinancing and trading debt, according to Amit Khattar, Asia-Pacific co-head of global credit trading. Khattar is considering adding to his team.

Prosecutors in Cologne are preparing their first indictments in a tax-evasion probe involving some of the biggest names in finance that cost the German treasury billions of euros, according to people familiar with the matter. Investigators are looking at the role of dozens of banks, brokerages, accounting companies, and law firms in the deals, and the cases involve hundreds of individuals, said the people, who declined to be identified because they’re not authorized to discuss the probe, Bloomberg News reported.

Deutsche Bank AG had the outlook for its credit rating lowered to negative from stable by Fitch Ratings, which cited risks tied to the German lender’s turnaround plan, Bloomberg News reported. The move “reflects the substantial execution risk Deutsche Bank faces in implementing its restructuring and Fitch’s view that failure to strengthen its business model would result in the bank’s downgrade,” the rating company said in a statement late Thursday. It confirmed the lender’s BBB+ long-term issuer default rating and all other debt ratings.

Germany’s dominant factory sector faced stronger headwinds this month, with a key gauge sinking to its lowest level in a year in a half, in the latest sign that the eurozone has failed to escape its rough patch in the second quarter, the Financial Times reported. IHS Markit’s manufacturing PMI slipped to 55.9 in June from 56.9 the previous month. The reading was worse than the 56.2 consensus estimate in a poll conducted by Reuters, albeit well above the 50 level that indicates expansion.