Confidence among U.K. consumers rose a little in May, with easing inflation and the expectation of falling Bank of England interest rates set to boost Britons’ spending power, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Research group GfK’s consumer-confidence barometer climbed for a second-straight month to minus 17 in May, from minus 19 in April, in line with economists’ expectations in a Wall Street Journal poll.

A woman accused of converting bitcoin into cash and property to help hide the proceeds of a 5 billion pound ($6.4 billion) fraud was jailed for nearly seven years on Friday for money laundering after a trial in a London court, Reuters reported. Prosecutors said Wen Jian helped hide the source of money allegedly stolen from nearly 130,000 Chinese investors in fraudulent wealth schemes between 2014 and 2017. She was not alleged to have been involved in the underlying fraud, which prosecutors said was masterminded by another woman who Wen believed was independently wealthy.

A director of Indian tech firm Think & Learn Pvt faces financial penalties for defying a US judge’s order to find out where the troubled company stashed $533 million that jilted lenders say should go to them, Bloomberg News reported. Riju Ravindran, the brother of company founder Byju Raveendran, not only failed to make a serious effort to find out what happened to the cash, but deceived the court, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey said during a hearing yesterday in Wilmington, Del. “I conclude Mr. Ravindran’s testimony is not truthful,” Dorsey said.

Britain’s inflation rate slowed last month to its lowest level in about three years, further cementing the case for the Bank of England to cut interest rates later this year, the New York Times reported. Consumer prices rose 2.3 percent in April from a year earlier, down from 3.2 percent in March, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday. The rate, which declined slightly less than economists expected, was the lowest since July 2021 and is approaching the Bank of England’s 2 percent target.

Call it the $78 million typo. That is how much Citigroup agreed to pay U.K. regulators for a trader’s fat finger when typing in an order to sell shares, an episode that caused a brief “flash crash” in European stocks, the Wall Street Journal reported. In May 2022, the unnamed trader in Citigroup’s global markets unit was working from home in London on a public holiday.

The parent company of Thames Water is exploring all options with a group of creditors after a series of board resignations, Bloomberg News reported. Two directors resigned from Thames Water (Kemble) Finance and several quit from Kemble Water Finance Limited, two of the units that make up the firm’s complex holding structure. Paul O’Donnell and Nick Pike, both restructuring experts, have been appointed to help engage with creditors and assess options for the company, according to company statements on Monday.

The International Monetary Fund warned that the UK Treasury needs to find £30 billion ($38.2 billion) of savings to stabilize its debt burden, undercutting Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s ambition to reduce taxes before the next election, Bloomberg News reported. The estimate released with the institution’s annual health check into the economy also upgraded the outlook for growth and predicted a “soft landing.” Even so, advice on the scale of the UK’s budget gap highlighted the strain on the public finances already struggling to cope with demands on health, defense and social care.

Artificial intelligence could be fundamentally disruptive but help boost productivity in Britain's economy, posing a challenge to regulators who should be open to new rule-making approaches, a Bank of England (BoE) policymaker said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Britain has so far taken a cautious approach to formulating bespoke rules for AI, unlike the European Union, whose members on Tuesday formally backed landmark new rules that will likely set a benchmark for other countries.

The value of loans made by pawnbrokers in the UK topped £250 million last year after a 13% rise, new data shows, the Evening Standard reported. Data from audit and tax firm Mazars shows that the value of pawnbroker loans increased from £224 million in 2022 to £252 million in 2023, as the cost of living crisis put stress on household finances. Amid interest rate uncertainty, many traditional lenders also tightened borrowing criteria, which helped to fuel the rise as well.

The Bank of England will be able to cut interest rates “some time over the summer” if second round inflation pressures drop away as expected, Deputy Governor Ben Broadbent said, Bloomberg News reported. In his last speech after 13 years at the UK central bank, Broadbent signaled that the decision to cut rates from the current 16-year high of 5.25% would hinge on the stickiness of wage growth and whether businesses pass higher payroll costs through to prices.