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The European Central Bank (ECB) has fined JPMorgan’s European unit €12.18m ($14.32m) for misreporting capital requirements after incorrectly calculating risk-weighted assets. The ECB said that “between 2019 and 2024” the bank reported risk-weighted assets that were too low because it misclassified corporate exposures for 15 consecutive quarters and applied a lower credit-risk weight than banking rules require. The ECB also said some transactions were improperly excluded from calculations. JPMorgan said it acknowledged the fine, self-reported the issues, and has fully remediated them.  

 

Reuters

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The weakest UK firms now produce less per worker than they did 30 years ago after adjusting for inflation, according to analysis by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) which says policymakers should encourage "creative destruction" of companies that are barely surviving and help workers to move to higher-growth areas. The UK's industrial strategy should be focused on successful areas, and have "hard edges and be relentlessly focused, rather than trying to lift growth for all sectors," the analysis says. Raoul Ruparel, chief UK economist at BCG, said more companies with low productivity were “dragging down overall productivity growth and absolute levels of productivity.”

 

Financial Times

Reuters

European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde has told the Wall Street Journal that she expects to complete her term in the role. The Financial Times had earlier reported that Lagarde planned to leave her job before the end of her contract in October 2027. “When I look back at all these years, I think that we have accomplished a lot, that I have accomplished a lot,” she told the Journal. “We need to consolidate and make sure that this is really solid and reliable. So my baseline is that it will take until the end of my term.” Lagarde said her mission is price and financial stability, as well as “protecting the euro, making sure that it is solid and strong and fit for the future of Europe.”

 

Wall Street Journal

The International Monetary Fund has called on China to halve state support for its industries, warning that Beijing’s export-heavy growth model is distorting global trade. In its annual review, the fund estimated that Beijing spends roughly 4% of gross domestic product subsidising companies in critical sectors, and said it should scale that back by about 2 percentage points. China’s industrial policies “are giving rise to international spillovers and pressures” and had combined with weak domestic demand to make China “more reliant on manufacturing exports as a source of growth,” the fund said.

 

Australian Financial Review

Financial Times

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a new 10% "global tariff" hours after the Supreme Court struck down his sweeping "reciprocal" import duties. The new Section 122 tariffs will come on top of the existing levies that remain intact following the court's decision, the president said. It comes after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Trump's worldwide tariffs are illegal, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stating that Congress, not the president, has the power to impose taxes and tariffs. The court rejected Trump’s argument that a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, implicitly authorised the tariffs.

 

BBC News

CNBC

Los Angeles Times

Wall Street Journal

The Italian business of Spanish food delivery service Glovo, which is currently under court administration, has been ordered by a judge in Milan to "regularise" 40,000 delivery workers. Milan prosecutors earlier this month placed Glovo's Italian arm, Foodinho, under judicial supervision and its chief executive under investigation for alleged exploitation of workers. "It's important that the Milan prosecutors and the court have delivered a clear message: workers' rights are not an optional . . . you can't put people on the road without safeguards," said Giulia Druetta, a Turin-based lawyer who has represented the delivery workers. Glovo is controlled by Germany's Delivery Hero.

 

Reuters

Deutsche Bahn, Germany's national rail operator, has announced plans to cut around 6,000 jobs at its cargo subsidiary, DB Cargo, to enhance profitability and lessen reliance on government support. The restructuring aims to implement these cuts "in a socially responsible manner." The job reductions, which represent about half of the unit's workforce, are intended to help the division become self-sufficient and align with European growth markets.

 

Reuters

Danone has forecast like-for-like sales growth of 3% to 5% in 2026, saying the impact from recent infant-formula recalls will be limited and short-lived. The French food group, which owns brands including Aptamil, Activia, and Evian, estimates the recalls will reduce first-quarter net sales by 0.5% to 1%. The company said recall processes are under way in coordination with regulators and currently expects the overall effect on full-year performance to be immaterial.

 

Bloomberg

Wall Street Journal

NASA has said the botched 2024 Starliner mission, which left two astronauts stranded in space for nine months, was a "Type A" mishap - at the same level assigned to the fatal 2003 Columbia and 1986 Challenger space shuttle disasters. The category is reserved for incidents causing more than $2m in damage, the loss of a vehicle or its control, or deaths. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sharply criticised Boeing and NASA leadership for their handling of the mission during a news conference timed with the release of a 300-page report that detailed communication breakdowns and "unprofessional behaviour" as the agency and its longtime contractor struggled to agree on how to safely return the crew to Earth. "We returned the crew safely, but the path we took did not reflect NASA at our best," Isaacman said. 

 

Reuters

The Register

BBC News

The Financial Times has reported that Amazon’s cloud division suffered at least two outages in December linked to issues involving its own AI tools. One disruption in mid-December lasted around 13 hours after engineers allowed AWS’s Kiro AI coding tool to implement changes, with the agent reportedly deleting and recreating part of the environment. Amazon, however, said the incident was brief and caused by user error due to misconfigured access controls, not AI, and stressed that only a single service in one mainland China region was affected, with no impact on core compute, storage or AI services. The report follows a separate major AWS outage in October that disrupted Amazon’s own platforms and third-party apps including Reddit, Roblox, and Snapchat.

 

Financial Times

Reuters

Reuters reports that the US State Department is planning an online portal be hosted at "freedom.gov" that will allow people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda. Officials are said to have discussed including a virtual private network function to make a user's traffic appear to originate in the US. “Digital freedom is a priority for the State Department . . . and that includes the proliferation of privacy and censorship-circumvention technologies like VPNs," the department told Reuters.

 

Reuters

A ransomware attack on Asahi Group Holdings last September resulted in the confirmed leak of 115,513 sets of personal data, the Japanese food and beverage giant said. The breach included 110,396 records containing names and phone numbers of executives and employees at client companies, as well as 5,117 records involving names and addresses of current and former Asahi employees. The company had previously estimated that up to 1.9m records may have been affected, though only 18 leaks were initially confirmed.

 

The Mainichi

Nippon.com