Europe’s markets ended the week caught between resilience and reckoning.
In London, the FTSE 100 eked out gains as banks rallied on fresh hints that rate cuts could be on the horizon, even as tech-linked names stayed under pressure.
Across the continent, regulators sharpened their focus on Big Tech, with Brussels formally charging TikTok over addictive design features.
Meanwhile, corporate Europe absorbed a shock as Stellantis’ brutal sell-off underscored how quickly the electric-vehicle narrative is being reassessed when demand, not policy, sets the pace.
FTSE 100 ticks higher
The FTSE 100 edged higher on Friday, managed to scrape out a gain as Britain’s heavyweight lenders did the heavy lifting, offsetting a deepening rout in data giant RELX.
Shares in Barclays, NatWest, and Lloyds climbed between 1% and 1.6%, buoyed by fresh signals from the Bank of England that interest rate cuts could be on the table if inflation continues to cool.
It wasn’t all green on the screen, however.
RELX slid another 3.5%, capping a fourth straight week of losses as traders continue to price in existential risks from Anthropic’s new “Claude” AI tools, which threaten to upend its legal analytics business.
While the blue-chip index remains resilient, the divergence between old-school finance and AI-threatened software stocks is becoming the market’s defining battleground.
EU charges TikTok for exploiting user psychology
The European Commission has formally charged TikTok with breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA), alleging that the app’s design features, specifically infinite scrolling, autoplay, and aggressive push notification exploit user psychology to create addiction.
Regulators argue these “rabbit hole” mechanics pose serious mental health risks to minors, effectively trapping them in compulsive usage loops without adequate safeguards like effective age verification or screen-time limits.
For parent company ByteDance, the stakes are massive. If found guilty, TikTok faces fines up to 6% of its global annual turnover and a forced redesign of its core user interface in Europe.
While TikTok calls the claims “meritless,” this marks a critical escalation in Brussels’s war on Big Tech’s engagement models.
Stellantis stock plunges 25%
Stellantis is hitting the brakes on its electric ambitions, announcing a massive $26 billion charge to “reset” its strategy amid cooling EV demand.
The automaker, whose portfolio includes Jeep and Chrysler, will pivot back toward hybrids and internal combustion engines, admitting it “overestimated” the speed of the energy transition.
The writedown covers scrapped EV projects, supply chain restructuring, and a retreat from compliance-driven models that customers simply aren’t buying.
CEO Antonio Filosa was blunt: mandates don’t move metal, consumer demand does.
With shares plunging 25%, the message to Wall Street is clear: profitability now takes precedence over an electric future that hasn’t arrived yet.
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