Germany is willing to support a pan-European bank deposit protection scheme as long as individual countries remain chiefly responsible for shielding savers of a troubled bank, its Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said on Wednesday in an eight-page document entitled "Position Paper on the Target Image of the Banking Union", submitted to German magazine Der Spiegel.

Euro zone economic growth halved in the April-June period and inflation slowed sharply in July even though the unemployment rate fell to its lowest in 11 years, data from the European Union’s statistics office showed on Wednesday.

On Friday, 14 June the European Council adopted two important priority files under the Security Union which are aimed at strengthening EU rules on explosives precursors and facilitating law-enforcement access to financial information.

Assets worth nearly £800bn are in the process of shifting from Britain to new financial hubs in the European Union due to upcoming Brexit, consultancy EY announced on Monday. EY has been tracking the Brexit plans of 222 financial firms since the UK voted in June 2016 to leave the bloc. In its latest update to the end of November 2018, it said that 80 firms are considering or have confirmed relocating assets and staff. This means that more than £800bn in assets would move, a fraction of Britain’s 8 trillion pound banking sector.

EU finance ministers battled Saturday in Vienna over a controversial proposal to slap a European tax on US tech giants amid rising worries that it is ineffective and protectionist. Under the proposal from the European Commission in March, EU states would charge a 3 percent levy on digital revenues of large firms like Google and Facebook that are accused of routing their profits to the bloc's low-tax states.