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Recent Editions
Risk Channel
North America
The Commerce Department reported on Friday that U.S. retail sales fell by more than expected in July, marking their largest decline in over a year and suggesting consumer spending has cooled following a strong first half of 2026. The value of retail purchases decreased 0.6%, the sharpest fall since May 2025, while sales excluding autos and gasoline declined 0.2%. Five of the 13 tracked categories recorded lower sales. The weakness was led by nonstore retailers, including online businesses such as Amazon, where receipts fell 2.2% in their biggest decline since the start of 2025. Sales at motor vehicle and parts dealers dropped 1.8%. In contrast, spending at restaurants and bars — the report’s only service-sector category and an indicator of discretionary demand — increased 0.5%. The underlying figures also pointed to softer household spending. Control-group sales, which exclude food services, auto dealers, building materials stores, and gas stations, and feed into the government’s calculation of goods spending for GDP, fell 0.4%, their largest decline since the beginning of 2025.
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Risk Channel
UK/Europe
Reuters reports that extreme heat often falls outside traditional business interruption insurance, exposing a growing protection gap for companies across Europe. Last summer's European heatwaves cost €43bn in lost economic output while generating only about €500m of insured payouts, according to Moody's estimates. "Heat in itself is not a traditionally insured risk," observes Swenja Surminski, managing director for climate and sustainability at Marsh. "Extreme heat rarely causes catastrophic physical damage the way a flood or a storm does, but the financial operational disruption that it triggers can be just as severe."
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