Opinion

Italy’s new populist leaders appear to be sticking to the program that brought them to power: In their budget plans, they’re charting a course that could ultimately put the entire European project at risk. One can only hope that they will see reason. Since forming a government last spring, the coalition of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and right-wing League ...

Even for Chinese authorities, who have long tried to limit the influence of foreign media and ideas, last week marked an escalation. In the span of a few days, authorities blocked access to Twitch, the video-game live-streaming platform owned by Amazon.com Inc.; ordered a purge of foreign content from school textbooks; and proposed restricting foreign programming — especially current-events shows ...

A boon for Hong Kong’s banks could turn into an opportunity for the city’s hard-pressed savers. HSBC Holdings Plc, the biggest of Hong Kong’s banks, and its subsidiary Hang Seng Bank Ltd., raised their prime rate – the best lending rate on which most loans, including mortgages are based – by 12 basis points. Standard Chartered Plc quickly followed suit, ...

It’s been a bad year for Facebook Inc. OK, a truly terrible year. It just got even worse. The founders of Instagram, the photo-and-video app that Facebook agreed to buy shortly before its 2012 IPO, are leaving the company. Bloomberg News reported that the founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, grew frustrated as Facebook impinged on their autonomy. It’s not ...

This year’s sell-off in emerging-markets assets has abated in recent weeks and valuations are tempting, but it’s too soon to say things have bottomed. The key to any rebound is China and India, two economies where the outlook has deteriorated in recent weeks. The relative size of their economies — together they accounted for more than 25 percent of global ...

Property bubbles have a habit of ignoring the fundamentals of having a roof over your head. The UK’s real-estate boom of the past decade was driven — especially in London — by government subsidies for buyers, cheap mortgages, and a fixation among investors that prices never go down. The less affordable homes became, the more they were sought after. It ...

Mark Zuckerberg is starting to suck Facebook Inc.’s eponymous product dry as far as rapid growth is concerned. Next target: Instagram. That might explain the departure of Instagram co-founders. Six years after Zuckerberg acquired their then 13-person startup for $715 million, the photo-sharing app has become Facebook’s most important source of growth. Zuckerberg has subsequently assumed a more hands-on role, ...

The potential costs of climate change, already the subject of heated debate, may actually be understated. It’s not just the potential disruptions to weather systems, agriculture and coastal cities; it’s that we may respond to those problems in stupid and destructive ways. As the philosopher and cartoon character Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Consider ...

Karl Marx defined the proletariat as labourers “unencumbered by any means of production” who were increasingly impoverished by the rise of machines. In that classic form, Marx’s favourite class doesn’t really exist in the rich world today, except in the so-called gig economy. Reports from the International Labour Organization and the JPMorgan Chase Institute describe the plight of different kinds ...

Better late than never. Tesco Plc has finally revealed Jack’s, its new store format to take on the might of the German discounters, Aldi and Lidl. Tesco should have made this move when the no-frills supermarkets started winning significant market share a few years ago. And cut-price chain B&M European Value Retail SA is expanding aggressively, and increasing its food ...