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The European Central Bank has cut interest rates by a quarter-point to 3.25 per cent, amid signs that growth and inflation in the Eurozone are weakening.

Thursday’s move took Eurozone rates to their lowest point since May 2023 and followed a cut of the same size at the ECB’s meeting last month

While the cut was widely anticipated, the ECB said it was based on an “updated assessment of the inflation outlook”.

That suggested price pressures could now be weaker than the central bank forecast last month, when it predicted inflation would rise towards the end of the year but dip back under its 2 per cent target in 2025.

The euro was slightly weaker in early trading after the announcement, at $1.084.

Cutting rates just five weeks after the previous move and with little additional economic data indicated that “the ECB must have become much more concerned about the Eurozone’s growth outlook and the risk of inflation undershooting the target”, Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro at ING, wrote in a note to clients.

Eurozone inflation fell to 1.7 per cent in the year to September, sinking below 2 per cent for the first time in more than three years.

“The incoming information on inflation shows that the disinflationary process is well on track,” the ECB said. “The inflation outlook is also affected by recent downside surprises in indicators of economic activity.”

German officials have warned Europe’s biggest economy is set to shrink for the second consecutive year.

Traders in swaps markets price in another four or five quarter-point rate cuts by the middle of next year, including the near-certainty of a reduction in December. The euro has fallen by more than 2 per cent against the dollar over the past month as expectations grew of faster rate cuts.

The ECB itself gave little guidance over the future path of its monetary policy on Thursday. It reiterated it was taking “a data-dependent and meeting-by-meeting approach” and was “not pre-committing to a particular rate path”.

Deutsche Bank’s chief European economist Mark Wall said Thursday’s decision could represent a “pivot” towards a faster return to lower rates.

The US Federal Reserve reduced its benchmark interest rate in September for the first time in more than four years, lowering borrowing costs by a half-point and signalling more reductions on the way.

The Bank of England is also expected to lower rates again in November, after cuts earlier this year.

The ECB started to cut rates in June and has now lowered borrowing costs three times. Thursday’s decision was made in Ljubljana, at the Slovenian central bank.

SAINSBURY’S has provoked customer backlash after making a major change at one of its stores.

One of the UK’s biggest retailers has added more self-service checkouts at its branch in Chippenham, Wiltshire.

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A spokesperson for the supermarket chain said it had made the change to meet “customer demand”.

But some customers on Facebook have been left fuming, saying the move has made the manned tills backlogged.

Some have gone as far to say they won’t shop at the branch again.

One said: “It’s awful. I went there the other day for a big shop, the queues were down the aisles for the manned tills so we were forced to use the new trolley self scanner.”

Another added: “I went yesterday there is no room at the self scanners especially if everyone has trolleys, think they will lose a lot of customers.”

A third chimed in: “I get why they’re doing it – I was told people walked out with £4K of shopping a few weeks ago but it’s now a very annoying and poor experience going there

“I will not use the self-checkouts – I prefer dealing with people not machines.”

Meanwhile, a fourth commented: “I won’t use the self checkout, I expect human service when (I am) spending my hard earned money in their stores and if they won’t serve me I am happy to leave my trolley and go somewhere else.”

A Sainsbury’s spokesperson said: “We regularly review the services available in our stores to make sure we offer the most convenient experience for our customers.  

“We have slightly increased the number of self-service checkouts at our Chippenham store so that we can meet customer demand for this service.

“Our colleagues are on hand to help anyone who may need support using them and we continue to offer serviced checkouts for our customers who wish to use them.”

Sainsbury’s is not the first supermarket to have made a change to self-checkout rules in recent months to customer frustration.

Asda introduced “self-checkout only hours” at one of its branches earlier this year, restricting customers to automated tills only at certain times of the day.

Signs in the Bournemouth store showed customers that from 7am to 8am Monday to Saturday, customers can use just self-scan checkouts.

From 8pm to 11pm on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and from 7pm to 11pm on Wednesday, all manned tills are closed.

Asda told The Sun the move was a “temporary decision” made during quieter shopping hours and not a company-wide policy.

However, the supermarket chain, also said earlier this year that it will put more staff on tills in a bid to get more shoppers back in stores.

Over the past decade, supermarket bosses have invested in self-scanning tills, convinced customers prefer the speedier style of shopping.

But the move to automated tills has seen some shoppers left feeling left behind and dissatisfied.

Some supermarkets, like Asda, have rowed back on plans to increase the number of self-scan checkouts in stores though.

In August, Rami Baitiéh, the chief executive of Morrisons, announced the supermarket would scale back the number of self-checkouts in stores.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Baitiéh said the company was “reviewing the balance between self-checkouts and manned tills”.

High-end supermarket chain Booths, based in the North of England, abandoned the technology after discovering customers had a more enjoyable experience when interacting with a cashier.

This move aligns with data previously published by The Grocer which reveals service satisfaction has declined by as much as 8% due to the use of self-checkout machines.

If you want to avoid self-checkouts in your local supermarket or retailer branch, you could try scan-as-you-go tech.

They let you scan as you browse, either using their smartphone or a handheld device then checkout in a different area from other shoppers.

You often can bag your groceries as you wander around too, saving even more time.

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

In 2003 a diligent member of Opus Dei’s PR team spotted an item in Publisher’s Weekly about a forthcoming novel entitled The Da Vinci Code. After tracking down an advance copy, he discovered to his horror that it featured a self-flagellating albino assassin used by the Catholic organisation to murder its opponents.

The alarmed press man took the matter to his Opus Dei boss who, after some consideration, calmly reassured him that Dan Brown’s novel sounded “so silly that nobody will ever buy it”.

For many years the ultra-conservative Catholic organisation that emerged in Franco’s Spain was often regarded as a cartoonish sect, with insufficient mainstream attention paid to the testimony of ex-members and victims alleging decades of financial control, coercion and sexual abuse.

Gareth Gore’s vividly told and excellently researched book Opus is part of a more recent journalistic reconsideration of the accountability of a group that began as the dream of a young Spanish priest and grew into an international network able to mould not only the agenda of the Catholic Church, but exert influence over one of Spain’s largest banks and even the US Supreme Court.

Gore’s story begins with Josemaría Escrivá, who was born in 1902 in the small northern Spanish town of Barbastro. In his twenties, Escrivá claimed to have received a direct message from God and founded what is called “the Work”. Alarmed at the creep of secularism and communism during the Spanish civil war, this terrifyingly ambitious religious entrepreneur became intent on building his vision of an elite vanguard of Catholics. Returning to Madrid alongside “Caudillo” Franco’s troops, Escrivá started amassing followers on university campuses using cult-like recruitment techniques and systems of control.

The Opus Dei founder, who was invited by Franco to give him and his wife a private six-day spiritual retreat, steadily grew the cult of personality that came to define his organisation, demanding that his followers kneel in his presence and show him unquestioning loyalty. 

None were meant to openly discuss their membership, and the group’s rules had been kept secret for much of its existence — even from the Vatican. Gore writes that Opus residences in the early years were bugged and books and newspapers in them were censored. Compromising information on members was kept in hidden dossiers, while those who began to collapse under the stress of membership were dosed up on tranquillisers. Others who decided to leave Escrivá’s orbit were threatened with ruin and ordered to never tell the world about the organisation’s secrets.

Escrivá had big dreams of expanding across the world — “Madrid? Valencia? Paris? The world!” One of his early key insights is that he needed to grow its numbers beyond an inner core. He began to target wealthy and influential laypeople, allowing them to join as “supernumeraries”, members who can live regular lives and start families but must agree to hand over a chunk of their salaries to Opus each month. 

This burning ambition required significant amounts of cash. Money, and the constant pursuit of it, soon becomes a core competence of Escrivá’s organisation. 

Gore frames Opus around the rise and fall of Banco Popular, a Spanish bank that appeared to be a regular high street lender, but had for decades been under the influence of Opus Dei through its chairman, Luis Valls Taberner, who had been recruited into The Work in its early days by Escrivá. Using a convoluted network of ostensibly private companies and shareholders dubbed “the syndicate”, Opus-connected entities and businessmen received vast sums in dividends, favourable loans and donations from Popular to grow.

The students that Escrivá cultivates grow into influential figures in Franco’s dictatorship, and Opus members start to rise into positions as government ministers and captains of industry. Meanwhile many women recruited into Opus work as unpaid domestic servants at the group’s centres, barred from speaking to their families and trapped.

Opus Dei uses the vast sums coming in from Banco Popular and the group’s well-heeled members to build a global real estate empire. Escrivá buys up a palace in Rome called Villa Tevere replete with a luxury apartment for the founder, as well as 12 dining rooms and 14 chapels — an opulence defended by the founder with the justification: “It shows that we pray more than we eat.”

In its early years, Opus still operated in an uneasy and undefined relationship with the Vatican, but by the 1970s, Opus Dei and its founder were in the centre of the Catholic world. Escrivá would die in 1975, but the election of the conservative John Paul II that same year finally saw the group embraced by Rome, with Escrivá later canonised under the Polish pontiff.

It is the organisations’s growth in the US that left, for Gore, its most lasting legacy on the modern world. The second half of the book focuses on how Opus Dei through the 1990s and 2000s built alliances with American conservative Catholic elites, developing a powerful “dark money” funding machine and aiding figures such as the lawyer Leonard Leo to shape the US Supreme Court and wage a campaign against abortion rights and gay marriage.

Gore writes that “almost a century from its founding, Opus Dei appears to have come full circle, by fanning the culture wars and fuelling deep divisions that risk ripping our society apart”. Today, Opus Dei is faced with a liberal Pope, legal cases relating to horrific allegations of historical abuse, and a tarnished international reputation. As its centenary approaches, books such as Opus will ensure that — in the public arena at least — the organisation will be held accountable for its past.

Opus: Dark Money, a Secretive Cult, and Its Mission to Remake Our World by Gareth Gore Scribe £25/Simon & Schuster $30.99, 448 pages

Miles Johnson is an investigative reporter for the FT. His book ‘Chasing Shadows: A True Story of the Mafia, Drugs and Terrorism’ is now out in paperback

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