{"id":41068,"date":"2025-04-22T12:31:14","date_gmt":"2025-04-22T12:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/41068\/"},"modified":"2025-04-22T12:31:14","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T12:31:14","slug":"euro-zone-firms-were-seeing-improved-business-momentum-before-tariffs-ecb-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/41068\/","title":{"rendered":"Euro zone firms were seeing improved business momentum before tariffs, ECB says"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">FRANKFURT (Reuters) -Euro zone firms were reporting improved business momentum in the weeks leading up to the Trump administration&#8217;s early April tariff announcement, mainly reflecting an incipient recovery in the industrial sector, an ECB survey showed on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">Businesses said that while uncertainty remained high, there were signs of recovering demand for machinery and equipment, and also signals that construction activity was turning a corner, a survey of 79 leading non-financial companies showed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">The outlook has likely darkened since then as firms were asked between March 26 and April 2, before the financial market turmoil set off by the U.S. tariff announcements.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">Last week the European Central Bank warned that downside risks to economic growth have increased significantly and that the trade war will lower economic growth.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">Still, in the weeks before the turmoil, firms said even the employment outlook was improving slightly, even if most of their focus was on efficiency and not hiring more workers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">Until the end of March, firms also said they were taking a wait-and-see stance about tariffs and were not yet reassessing major investments, the ECB added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"yf-1090901\">(Reporting by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Jan Harvey)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FRANKFURT (Reuters) -Euro zone firms were reporting improved business momentum in the weeks leading up to the Trump&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3090],"tags":[51,1700,23330,23329,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-41068","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-euro-zone","11":"tag-industrial-sector","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114381631236064018","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}