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The watchdog accused the company of “failing to respect the choice of Internet users who refused cookies on its main website and for not allowing users of its e-mail client to freely withdraw their consent to cookies”. Yahoo EMEA Ltd., the Ireland-based European subsidiary formally subject to the fine, is reviewing the decision to decide on “appropriate next steps”, it said when contacted by Reuters. The French regulator said its investigation found around 20 cookies, small amounts of data used for advertising purposes, were left on an user’s device when visiting yahoo.com, despite the absence of any expressed consent. Concerning Yahoo!’s e-mail client, the CNIL found users could not withdraw their consent for cookies without giving up their access to the company’s messaging service. ($1 = 0.9206 euros) More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.European Central Bank policymakers were concerned that investor bets on rate cuts as early as March had loosened financial conditions so much that they “could derail the disinflationary process”, minutes from their last meeting show.Members of the ECB’s governing council decided to push back against market expectations of early interest rate cuts and agreed that June was likely to be the earliest they could know if inflation had been tamed, according to minutes of the December 15 meeting released on Thursday.“Against this background, it was widely regarded as important not to accommodate market expectations in the post-meeting communication,” the ECB said. “It was stressed that there was no room for complacency.”In the past week, several senior ECB officials have put this plan into action. Comments by ECB president Christine Lagarde suggesting that borrowing costs would not come down until the summer triggered a global sell-off in bond and equity markets on Wednesday. The tension between the ECB and markets underlines how investors expect inflation to fall faster than the central bank is forecasting, which would allow policymakers to start slashing their benchmark deposit rate from its record-high level of 4 per cent this spring.You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.The ECB minutes show that policymakers in the eurozone were concerned that market expectations could derail disinflation long before a top official warned about the same issue this week. Gita Gopinath, first deputy managing director of the IMF, told the Financial Times that central banks should move cautiously on cutting rates for that reason. Annual price growth in the eurozone slowed from a peak of 10.6 per cent in October 2022 to a two-year low of 2.4 per cent in November, before picking up to 2.9 per cent last month after the phasing out of government energy subsidies.Policymakers debated at last month’s meeting how sticky inflation was likely to be in the “last mile” of its decline to their 2 per cent target. Most agreed wage growth would be a crucial factor and they expected it to start slowing in response to the recent fall of inflation.But ECB policymakers also listed several upside risks to inflation, including geopolitical tensions that could raise energy prices, extreme weather events that could push up food costs and higher than expected growth in wages or profit margins.“The remaining distance of inflation from the ECB’s target, the waning of disinflationary supply-side tailwinds and, overall, still-high levels of domestic inflation continued to call for maintaining a sufficiently restrictive stance,” the ECB said.Carsten Brzeski, an economist at Dutch bank ING, said the minutes showed the ECB was “still far away from discussing rate cuts” at last month’s meeting and this was “unlikely to change” when council members meet again in Frankfurt next week.The sharp increase in borrowing costs since mid-2022 has hit Europe’s building sector particularly hard, as shown by data the EU’s statistics office released on Thursday revealing EU construction production was down 2 per cent in November from a year earlier.Construction activity fell in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Austria and the Nordic region, contributing to a 1 per cent month-on-month decline in the EU overall, as high interest rates and weak economic growth weighed on the sector.Separate data published by Germany’s federal statistical office showed the number of building permits for apartments continued to decline in November, falling 16.9 per cent from a year earlier, squeezing the supply of new housing.There were 238,500 building permits granted in the first 11 months of last year, down more than a quarter from a year earlier and leaving the sector likely to fall well short of the German government’s 400,000 target.German house prices have fallen 10 per cent from a peak in 2022. But Jochen Möbert, economist at Deutsche Bank, predicted the housing market would recover this year “given the shortages of houses, the relatively high wage growth and the low long-term Bund yields which fell substantially towards end-2023”. More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The writer is founder of Sifted, an FT-backed site about European start-upsIn both a metaphorical and a literal sense, Germany is running low on energy. The country was the most sluggish of the world’s major economies last year with output shrinking 0.3 per cent. This was partly because Europe’s biggest economy has an acute energy challenge having renounced the use of coal, nuclear power and Russian gas. Once again The Economist asks: is Germany the sick man of Europe?Yet the country is seen as a “sleeping giant” when it comes to one promising future source of energy: nuclear fusion. Germany’s formidable research base and engineering prowess give it a good shot at developing the technology. There is a strong argument that the country should go all in on fusion, which promises to deliver safe, clean, carbon-free energy with none of the dangers of nuclear fission reactors. Not only would this approach solve Germany’s energy security needs, it could also create a highly lucrative new industry.For decades, fusion energy has been regarded as the technology of the future that will forever remain that way. Although fusion is the most abundant source of energy in the universe, the challenges of harnessing the power of the sun on Earth are dazzling. Although the theory is well understood, the practice of fusing hydrogen atoms to release energy is a diabolical engineering puzzle.But some striking recent progress has triggered a surge of investment. One milestone was reached in December 2022, when the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US achieved “net energy gain” for the first time by firing the world’s biggest laser at a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma (even though the overall facility consumed far more energy than it generated).The Fusion Industry Association says a “technology explosion” is now occurring in the field. Last year, 13 new fusion companies were launched taking the global total to 43. Overall, they have attracted $6.2bn of investment. Nineteen of those companies have forecast they will deliver fusion power to the grid by 2035. Helion Energy, a US fusion company, has already signed a deal with Microsoft to deliver electricity in 2028.The International Atomic Energy Agency had previously assumed that Iter, the mammoth, multinational fusion reactor being built in France, would only fully prove its worth from the 2050s. But recent advances elsewhere have led the agency to create a fusion working group to co-ordinate regulation. “I am telling them now that we should be focused on the mid-2030s. We need to be ready by 2040,” says Ryan Wagner, the IAEA’s tech lead for fusion energy.As in so many other technological fields, the US leads the world, with 25 private fusion companies. However, Germany, which has invested heavily in basic fusion research, also boasts impressive expertise and two of the most intriguing start-ups Marvel Fusion and Proxima Fusion, both based in Munich.Last September, the federal government said it would invest €1bn over the following five years to ensure that Germany developed a fusion power plant as quickly as possible. But some doubt this funding is enough to win such a capital-intensive race.Heike Freund, chief operating officer of Marvel, told me she welcomed the increasing political momentum in Germany behind the industry but questioned whether it could compete with the US, given Washington’s activist industrial policy and dynamic venture capital sector. “We’re facing a funding gap. There’s a missing zero,” she said on the sidelines of the Digital-Life-Design conference last week. “The Americans set a mission of 10 years and then do everything they can to reach it.”Similarly, Proxima, the first company to spin out of the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in 60 years, says it would need €500mn to finance the construction of a demonstration fusion plant using its stellarator magnetic confinement technology by 2031. “Stellarators are the clearest and most robust path to develop the technology,” says Francesco Sciortino, Proxima’s chief executive. But Germany’s regulatory regime is still uncertain and such sums are hard to raise given the lack of private European growth capital.In spite of the industry’s excitement, fusion is not going to help solve the climate crisis in time. Because of this uncertain timetable, critics say investment would be better directed at the more rapid deployment of renewable energy, such as solar and wind. But German manufacturers have lost their grip on both those markets to state-subsidised Chinese competitors. It would be galling if Germany lost out again with fusion.Video: Are small modular reactors the future for nuclear? | FT Energy Source More

The ECB left interest rates unchanged at the meeting and made clear that no further hikes were coming. But it also said it was way too early to discuss policy easing, even as markets were increasingly betting on the start of a reversal in early spring.”There was no room for complacency and that it was not the time for the Governing Council to lower its guard,” the ECB said in the accounts of the Dec 13-14 meeting. “A need was seen for continued vigilance and patience, and for the maintenance of a restrictive stance for some time.””It was still too early to be confident that the task had been accomplished,” the bank added after policymakers agreed unanimously to keep rates steady.Policymakers also concluded that they needed to push back against market expectations for rapid policy easing, even if there was unusual uncertainty around both the inflation and economic growth outlook.”It was widely regarded as important not to accommodate market expectations in the post-meeting communication,” the ECB said. “Some humility was advised with respect to judging market expectations given prevailing uncertainties.”Investors now expect 135 basis points of rate cuts this year, a big change compared with the start of the week when 150 basis points were priced in. The big move came after a host of policymakers said markets were getting ahead of themselves.Inflation rose to 2.9% last month, as the ECB had expected, and the bank forecast price growth in the 2.5% to 2.9% range all year, not coming down to its target of 2% until 2025, even as investors bet on a more benign rate path.Policymakers also concluded that all three of their criteria — the inflation outlook, underlying inflation and the strength of policy transmission — were moving in the right direction, raising confidence that policy was working as intended. With now just a week to go before the ECB’s next policy meeting, the debate has shifted somewhat as policymakers now clearly accept that the next move is a reduction in borrowing costs, but a wide gap between investor and policymaker expectations still remains.Investors think the ECB’s inflation outlook is wrong and rate cuts will have to start soon while policymakers argue that key data, including on wage developments, will not be available for months, so June is the first reasonable time to reconsider policy. More