Britain’s Workforce, Swedish Rates, U.S.-China Feud: Eco Day

(Bloomberg) -- Welcome to Monday, Europe. Here’s the latest news and analysis from Bloomberg Economics to help you start the day:

• The coronavirus pandemic is transforming workplaces across the world, with offices and factory floors adjusting to social-distancing rules. For metal pressing company Bruderer U.K., it’s underscored a weakness in the British economy that management has been grappling with for years
• Half a year since the Riksbank became the world’s only central bank to engineer an escape from the shackles of sub-zero monetary policy, its officials are in no mood to return there
• French central bank head Francois Villeroy de Galhau played down the prospect that the ECB would buy junk bonds as part of its pandemic emergency program
• If any European country is likely to see a V-shaped recovery, it’s Germany. Getting the virus under control caused less disruption than elsewhere, fiscal support is substantial and activity is picking up again, Jamie Rush writes
• The U.S. and China are moving beyond bellicose trade threats to exchanging regulatory punches that threaten a wide range of industries including technology, energy and air travel
• Jerome Powell likes to point out how the Fed’s run-it-hot policy to prolong growth helped low-income Americans get jobs and pay raises. But it’s reversing now
• A disconnect is growing in emerging markets, which have rarely faced such dire economic conditions and yet whose assets are about to round out their best quarter in a decade
• South Korean Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki sees a third extra budget pending approval in parliament as the last for this year and said the economic shock from the coronavirus pandemic may have bottomed. Meanwhile, the Bank of Korea said unemployment and other economic fallout from the pandemic will accelerate already existing declines in South Korea’s potential growth rate
• Japan’s retail sales edged up in May, gaining from the prior month for the first time since February and adding to signs the worst of the pandemic’s economic impact may have passed

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