It feels good again to be an investor in Italian government debt. Since the start of September, the yield on the benchmark 10-year bond has fallen from 3.24 percent to 2.79 percent, and the spread with German bunds has narrowed sharply. Bondholders seem confident that Italy’s finance minister Giovanni Tria will get his way in passing a prudent budget, despite ...

Now that everything has been said about the 10th anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, it’s worth asking how close we are to the next crisis. In the market for corporate loans, investors have fulfilled at least one prerequisite: They’re dropping their guard. The financial cycle has a lot to do with inattention. When something bad happens, people are careful ...

The West has turned hostile to open markets, but trade isn’t in retreat everywhere. In other parts of the world, it’s flourishing. The fashionable label “deglobalisation” misses the shift in import and export patterns that has seen emerging markets account for an increasing share of global trade in goods. Not the least of these is China’s expanding role as customer, ...