UBS Group AG has kicked off the European banks’ earnings season after a quarter hit by fears of a global trade war, rising market volatility and slower economic growth. For all the jitters, expectations may be set too low. The Swiss bank didn’t do too badly amid the gloom: net income rose 9 percent to 1.28 billion Swiss francs ($1.29 ...

With a trade war intensifying, industrial machinery giants are making investors anxious. It’s not all bad. After what looked like an incipient downturn, orders for Japanese machine tools — a keenly watched da-taset — rose 11 percent in June from a year earlier, figures showed last week. Demand from home and overseas totaled close to 160 billion yen ($1.4 billion), ...

That sound you heard was a sigh of relief from Google investors. Parent company Alphabet Inc. delivered a second-quarter financial report that showed both another impressive stretch of revenue growth and a moderation in the pace of spending that had been making stockholders panic. Google isn’t supernatural, but it has shown that recent investor pessimism about the company has been ...