After four successive days of increasing risk spreads, and after a prominent politician, Claudio Borghi, said there was an advantage to having your “own currency,” Italy is back squarely on both public and private radar screens as a potential source of systemic economic and financial disruptions. This has led to suggestions that the country could become “a new Greece.” While ...

We all agree, they said. Please make more rules for us, they said. Give more money to our regulators, they said. When an assemblage of savvy corporate lawyers converges on such improbable sentiments, skepticism is usually in order. Last week’s privacy hearing on Capitol Hill demanded a load of it. Representatives from numerous tech and telecom luminaries — including Amazon, ...

Christine Lagarde and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have answered the easy question but dodged the hard ones. Yes, of course an era of tit-for-tat tariffs dims the global economic outlook. So … what can the IMF do about it? Does it need more funding to protect the international economy, given the weakening scene? Director Christine Lagarde should say so ...