It’s easy to announce an initial public offering in Europe, but far harder to complete it. Don’t be distracted by the handful of decent-sized share issues launched in January. The recent evidence suggests that the target audience for European IPOs is smaller, fussier and harder to reach than it used to be. Some 17 offerings totaling 1.4 billion euros were ...

Germany made post-war history on February 5. In a total shock, one of the country’s 16 state parliaments elected a premier with votes that included members of a hard-right populist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Worse, one of the AfD leaders in that state, Thuringia, is Bjoern Hoecke, considered to be on the party’s extreme — indeed proto-Fascist — ...

Indian food, when done right, comes in a thali — a metal plate with half a dozen or more little bowls of vegetables, pickles, and so on. The word of the week in India is “thalinomics”: The government’s official survey of the Indian economy, published a few days ago, introduced the word to talk about how food was getting cheaper ...