Bloomberg Mariano Rajoy’s People’s Party is facing substantial losses in Thursday’s Catalan elections as pro-Spain voters punish the prime minister for his cautious response to the push for independence. The PP could lose as many as eight of its 11 seats in the Catalan assembly as voters opposed to secession shift their support to the more hawkish Ciudadanos, according to ...

Bloomberg Italian President Sergio Mattarella signalled he would soon pave the way for national elections early next year, telling political leaders that the parliamentary term was drawing to an end. “Our voice will be the stronger if we create the image of a country which is united, stable, determined, capable of respecting commitments,” the head of state said at a ...

Bloomberg Justin Trudeau swept to power in Canada as a fresh face pledging to tax the rich and help the masses. Now a rival has picked up his playbook. Halfway through his mandate, Trudeau’s two main challengers are in place for the 2019 election, each younger than he is. To the political right is Conservative Andrew Scheer, Trudeau’s closest competitor ...

Bloomberg Cyril Ramaphosa’s victory in a grueling battle to lead South Africa’s ruling party may have been the easy part. His narrow win and his allies’ failure to secure three other top posts is likely to delay his ascendancy to the nation’s presidency and plans to revive a stuttering economy. While Ramaphosa won 52 percent of the vote for the ...

Reviving manufacturing has become a prime policy objective for national leaders from Washington to Beijing to New Delhi. We can debate whether chasing factories is worth the effort in the 21st century, but not the difficulty of building and maintaining a robust industrial sector in the face of relentless global competition and technological change. At least one country seems to ...

The 75,900 people following Lloyd Blankfein on Twitter have come to expect a regular dose of snarky Brexit commentary from the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO. Like a Zagat guide to euro-zone financial hubs, he has doled out praise to Paris and Frankfurt for its ‘nice weather,’ of course. The UK gets nul points. Blankfein frets he won’t be able ...

Oil faces some new pressures and coal is on the outs. Those were two clear messages in the many energy investments and emissions strategies announced at the recent One Planet Summit in Paris: Consider, for example, these announcements. France’s AXA plans to divest 2.4 billion euros from coal and “completely divest from the oil sands industry and associated pipelines.” ING ...

It’s hard these days to muster much interest in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Locked for years in rounds of negotiations leading nowhere, the body seems to have outlived its usefulness. Another big gathering of trade ministers ended in deadlock in Buenos Aires last week. You might wonder: Why bother? The answer is that liberal trade, second only to capitalism, ...

In 2006 the Chinese government allowed Google to establish Google.cn for Chinese internet users. In return, Google agreed to scrub results of content that the government found objectionable. The deal held until 2010, when Google decided it could no longer agree to such terms. Within hours, the site was blocked and Google’s search business on the mainland was dead. The ...

Until now, the surge in cryptocurrency markets has been a sideshow to the financial markets or the real economy. Prices have gone up a lot for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and it’s fun to joke about things with names like Cardano and Monero going up a lot in value, but if it were to all go up in smoke tomorrow, ...