The latest escalation of the crisis in Catalonia is a grave threat to Spain and a serious test for the European Union. The immediate priority should be moving back from the brink of violent confrontation, and the EU can help by urging restraint on Madrid. This was an avoidable breakdown. The Catalan leadership is chiefly to blame — first, for ...

India has long been faced with a slow-motion bank crisis. In particular, the state-controlled institutions that dominate the sector have a bad-loan ratio that’s almost twice as bad as their private counterparts. At last count, non-performing assets made up more than 10% of banks’ advances, and were growing ever faster. Naturally, banks faced with this burden aren’t exactly eager to ...

It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged these days that an investor in want of a good fortune needs to be in possession of an index-tracking fund rather than an active manager. UBS AG, though, disagrees — at least in Europe. The Swiss bank’s analysts, led by Michael Werner, who covers the fund management industry from London, crunched the numbers ...