It was too quiet to last. A sustained and brutal destruction of capital in India’s telecom industry was only just starting to give way to a period of peace and calm. The three operators who survived out of the dozen on the scene in 2016 must have been grateful for the end to a debilitating price war. Stable market shares ...

  Worried about a recession? Let industrial distributor Fastenal Co offer some perspective. The Winona, Minnesota-based company specialises in supplying factory-floor odds and ends to manufacturers and construction companies, and its earnings can often be a harbinger of the results its customers will report later this month. Fastenal said that demand was generally healthy but that there were certain signs ...

  Vladimir Putin is sabotaging Europe’s energy supply, and the economic outlook looks grim. Isn’t that enough to get governments into emergency mode? And yet, the European finance ministers who bothered to show up in Brussels spouted their usual, calm one-liners: Europe is working on contingencies, an economic recession can still be avoided and it is impossible to predict whether ...