Bloomberg Catalonia’s separatist leadership said nothing will stop it setting up an independent republic, dismissing the condemnation of Spanish King Felipe VI as the breakaway region’s president prepared to deliver his own address on Wednesday evening. Regional government spokes- man Jordi Turull said the monarch’s criticism of Sunday’s illegal referendum, with no reference to the police violence that saw more ...

Bloomberg Iraqi authorities halted key financial transactions with the country’s Kurdish region, deepening its isolation after last week’s overwhelming vote in favor of independence. The central bank banned lenders with headquarters in the northern Kurdistan region from taking part in dollar auctions, according to a central bank official who asked not to be named. Banks based in Baghdad are also ...

Bloomberg Brazilians may be a year away from voting for their next president, but investors are already plenty worried. Measures of implied volatility for the currency show traders pricing in big swings around the October 2018 vote, even as calm pervades in the near term. The split has taken the ratio between one-year and six-month implied volatility to the highest ...

Donald Trump will always tell you that he is a “great builder.” “You can go ahead and speak to the guys who have 400-pound wives at home who are jealous of me,” he told me several years ago. “But the guys who know me know I’m a great builder.” A month before he announced his presidential candidacy in 2015, Trump ...

It’s telling that at the moment Jalal Talabani, the former Iraqi president and Kurdish revolutionary, drew his last breaths, Iranian tanks were amassing on the border of Iraqi Kurdistan. In the Kurdish civil war of the 1990s, Talabani’s faction, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, aligned with Iran. The Iranians tacitly supported Kurdish independence. After the liberation of Iraq in 2003, ...

Gee, thanks, boss! Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe just made life a lot harder for Haruhiko Kuroda or whoever succeeds him as Bank of Japan governor. Whether Abe gives Kuroda a second term or not, the premier’s planned consumption tax hike fights the central bank’s efforts to rev up the economy and get inflation at least within shouting distance of ...

What former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said about pornography is also true of gerrymandering: You may not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it. This week the justices will be presented with an opportunity to define and thereby limit gerrymandering, the practice of drawing election districts for partisan advantage. They should seize ...

Last week, Google complied with the European Commission ruling that hit it with a 2.42 billion euro ($2.85 billion) fine and ordered it to share real estate on its search pages with rival comparison shopping services. From a customer’s point of view, nothing has changed. The historic EU decision punished Google for abusing its search dominance to push its own ...

In grade school, a teacher made kids who got in trouble go to the blackboard and write multiple times: “I will not …. ” It was my introduction to chalk. Here’s a repeat reference to a lesson taught two decades ago by a Republican pollster, the late Bob Teeter: The party that owns health care is a loser. Today, it’s ...

As it heads into a major leadership transition, China is attempting a strange breed of corporate reform. Rather than privatizing state-owned enterprises outright, the government is testing whether selling minority stakes to private investors may improve their performance. Meanwhile, state companies are busy revising their governing laws to give the Communist Party more control over management. The goals of these ...