Bloomberg Support for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe fell in two polls released on Monday, three weeks before a general election where Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike’s new Party of Hope threatens to eat into his majority. The premier’s approval rate dropped below his disapproval rate in polls by Kyodo News and the Asahi newspaper. Almost 46 percent of respondents to ...

Bloomberg Spain’s government will consider using all means at its disposal to uphold the law in Catalonia, the justice minister said, praising the police for their “exemplary” action in defense of the constitution. “We have always said that we would use all the force of the law and all the mechanisms that the constitution and laws grant to the government,” ...

Bloomberg The minority government of Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa received a boost after his Socialist Party gained in national municipal elections. Two years before the next general election is due, the Socialists took 38 percent of the vote and 157 town halls with 99.8 percent of the country’s voting districts reporting, according to the government’s election website. Turnout was ...

Bloomberg As the Palestinian Authority attempts to reassert control over the Gaza Strip this week, Hamas’s refusal to give up its guns is feeding doubts that a unity deal can take root. The authority’s prime minister, Rami Hamdallah, led a parade of senior officials from the West Bank on Monday to take over ministries that have been operated by Hamas ...

Donald Trump isn’t draining the swamp. The president unveiled his long-awaited “tax reform” package last week, and although many crucial details were missing (for example, the income brackets), he was full of accolades. “This is a revolutionary change,” he said. Well, not yet. The federal income tax system—almost everyone seems to agree—is a mess. It features relatively high nominal rates ...

The new chief executive of Uber Technologies Inc. is on a crusade to repair a corporate reputation that’s been badly damaged by scandals over its treatment of women and broader corporate culture. Dara Khosrowshahi even apologized after London’s transport regulator revoked Uber’s local license because of failures to run proper background checks on drivers and report alleged crimes. Losses last ...

Warren Buffett may have won his decade-long bet against hedge funds, but can his advice to investors to use only low-cost index funds beat the red-hot record of wealth managers? Readers of the 2017 Capgemini World Wealth Report, released on Thursday, will be shaking their heads. High-net-worth individuals reported an average 24 percent return last year on assets managed by ...

With Puerto Rico sweltering in the dark, restoring electricity as soon as possible is vital to averting a humanitarian disaster. The island’s long-term recovery, however, will depend not only on repairing its battered grid but on reforming its feckless power company. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the biggest public utility in the US, is notorious for its mismanagement and ...

As she builds her new coalition government, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will be mindful of the need to counter nationalism at home and the imperative of finding a consensus on integration in the euro zone. But the election also exposed a demographic rift that could present an even bigger challenge to Germany’s leaders: between a graying population that backed the ...

Picking stocks is famously difficult. But just how difficult is one of the oldest arguments in finance. New York Times columnist Jeff Sommer reopened the debate last week with a piece describing a recent study by an Arizona State University business professor, Hendrik Bessembinder. Bessembinder looked at the performance of publicly traded stocks in the US from 1926 to 2016 ...