Headlines

The number of German business insolvencies registered in the first half of the year jumped 12.2% from a year earlier, the statistics office said on Thursday, highlighting the challenges for Chancellor Friedrich Merz's government in its efforts to revive economic growth, Reuters reported. Final results showed that local courts registered a total of 12,009 insolvencies in the first six months of 2025.

IDBI Bank has once again dragged Zee Entertainment Enterprises to the insolvency court. It has filed a fresh application before the Mumbai bench of the company law tribunal to initiate insolvency proceedings against Zee for a default of Rs 225 crore, the Times of India reported. Zee has disputed the bank's claim, terming it meritless and an abuse of the legal process.

Shropshire Council leaders have pledged to do "all that they can" to avoid running out of money by April, BBC.com reported. A report presented to the authority's cabinet on Wednesday showed it must make urgent savings to avoid going over budget by £35.2m this financial year - £889,000 of which can't be funded using its reserves or by other means. Members voted unanimously "with a heavy heart" to declare a "financial emergency" and outlined measures to be put into place to secure tighter control over all aspects of spending.

The European Central Bank is staying on hold as it waits for more clarity on how the Trump administration’s tariffs will affect growth and inflation, the Wall Street Journal reported. The central bank left its key deposit rate at 2% on Thursday for the second consecutive meeting. It brought rates down eight times starting in June 2024, an aggressive easing campaign that contrasts with the Federal Reserve. The Fed’s reluctance to cut rates attracted criticism from President Trump, which has evolved into moves that would undermine the central bank’s independence.

Turkey’s central bank lowered borrowing costs for a second meeting in a row, noting that inflation continued to trend lower, the Wall Street Journal reported. The central bank said Thursday that it would lower its benchmark rate to 40.5% from 43%. It had previously cut its key rate to 43% from 46% in late July. “The underlying trend of inflation slowed down in August,” the central bank said.

Amid rising tariffs, import cargo volume at U.S. container ports is anticipated to decline steadily through the end of this year following a near-record summer peak, according to the nation’s biggest retailers, Freight Waves reported. Major U.S. container ports handled 2.36 million twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs) in July, according to the National Retail Federation’s Global Port Tracker. That was a gain of 20.1% from June as retailers brought in merchandise ahead of tariffs set to take effect in August.

Indonesia’s newly minted finance minister has hit the ground running, promising to inject about $12 billion into the economy to support growth, the Wall Street Journal reported. His comments helped calm stock markets after recent volatility, with the benchmark Jakarta Composite Index up as much as 1.6% on Thursday as investors welcomed the efforts to increase liquidity and revive growth.

In the span of 24 hours last week, President Trump managed to roil both South Korea and Japan, two longtime allies that less than two months earlier had said they would invest a combined nearly $1 trillion in the United States in exchange for lower tariffs, the New York Times reported. Last Thursday, U.S. immigration officials raided the construction site of a major Hyundai-LG plant in Georgia, a flagship project by two of South Korea’s most prominent companies.

The U.K. housing market continued to experience a slowdown in sales in August, according to a report from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the Wall Street Journal reported. Most parts of the U.K. experienced a decline in new buyer inquiries, with the slowdown expected to continue in the coming months, according to a RICS survey of property professionals. This suggests that the fall in buyer demand gathered momentum over the month, with most parts of the country seeing a negative trend emerge, RICS said. Agreed sales also faced a quickening slowdown in August.

As neighbouring countries like Paraguay and Venezuela deal with the impact of illegal crypto mining, a man has been arrested in the state of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil on charges of siphoning off-grid electricity to mine cryptocurrencies, Decrypt.com reported. The incident occurred in the Freguesia area, on Governador Island, an island in the north of the state. According to communications from local police, officers found several high-performance machines used for digital mining and that the house had electricity but no meter, indicating illegal theft.