Italy’s new government is one of the most extraordinary democratic experiments tried in western Europe since the Second World War. The Five Star Movement and the League have put together a largely inexperienced ministerial team, which is promising a set of policies that seem impossible to deliver. They face formidable constraints, from Italy’s fragile public finances to EU rules that ...

It will take an Ant to move this Hong Kong stock mountain. Until recently, Hong Kong was an IPO desert. Issuance had been falling for four consecutive years as investors grew weary of deal after deal from state-owned Chinese firms. Then came ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.-backed China Literature Ltd., which both ignited interest with their ...

Like ‘gemutlich’ (a German adjective describing fireside coziness), the Japanese word ‘omotenashi’ is hard to define but easy to picture. It’s a cashier greeting you nicely rather than chatting with colleagues and tossing your purchase across the counter — an all-encompassing focus on service and caring professionalism. Long hailed as the epitome of Japanese quality, the concept is for the ...

Any instance of political turmoil in one of Europe’s bigger economics triggers predictions of the imminent collapse of the European Union or the euro area. The latest prophet of doom is George Soros, who recently proclaimed that “everything that could go wrong has gone wrong” for Europe. But at such moments, I’m with James Gorman, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive officer, ...

A decade ago, knowing where the oil market was going meant knowing China. Today, the same can be said for electric vehicles — which means it still applies to oil, too. That’s a big takeaway from the latest edition of Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s annual Electric Vehicle Outlook. China isn’t the whole ballgame, but its role in determining the feasibility ...

What is an autonomous car — and more to the point, has Uber Technologies Inc. been operating them at all? From its public statements, you’d certainly think that its vehicles can more or less drive themselves, with humans required only as a safety back-up while the system is in trial mode. The preliminary report released by the US National Transportation ...

Bloomberg US and European stocks advanced on Monday, tracking peers in Asia as optimism over the world’s largest economy helped investors put protectionist fears to one side. Treasuries were steady, the dollar fell, and the pound and euro rose. The Standard & Poor’s 500 and Nasdaq Composite Indexes opened higher after Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy coding site GitHub for ...

Bloomberg India’s two-year-old bankruptcy law, which gives creditors more power to restructure troubled companies, is luring more and more offshore investors from as far as Canada to buy the nation’s bad debt. Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, a Canadian pension fund manager, has made $600 million available to Edelweiss Group for investment in local distressed assets, according to ...

Bloomberg China’s banks, scrambling to adjust to the government’s deleveraging campaign, are likely to add to pressures on the corporate bond market as they shed more of their massive note holdings and de-risk their balance sheets. Further payment problems are likely in a market that has already seen at least 14 corporate bond defaults this year, according to Logan Wright, ...

Bloomberg Italian bank UniCredit SpA is considering a merger with France’s Societe Generale SA, a move that would combine two of Europe’s largest financial institutions, the Financial Times reported. UniCredit Chief Executive Officer Jean Pierre Mustier, who is French and once worked for SocGen, has been developing the idea for several months, the FT said, citing people close to the ...