Bloomberg German Chancellor Angela Merkel heads into potentially laborious talks this week to form a national government weakened after her Christian Democratic Union suffered a defeat in Volkswagen AG’s home state. Three weeks after Merkel’s CDU won the federal ballot, her party posted its worst election result in Lower Saxony since 1959 and lost in the state to the Social …

At the center of the increasingly bitter dispute between the US and Turkey is a demand by an irate President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that American prosecutors free a Turkish-Iranian gold dealer who’s about to go on trial on money-laundering and fraud charges. The confrontation sharpened, as Erdogan protested in Ankara that the businessman, Reza Zarrab, was being squeezed as a …

If you are adding to your long-term holdings of stocks and other risk assets at current market valuations, you are likely to be betting — knowingly or not — on a combination of three drivers of future returns; or you are planning to sell your holdings to someone who is or will be making that bet. Understanding the importance of …