Italy is not hanging about. Hot on the heels of its successful 16-year syndicated bond sale in mid-January, it has announced a new 30-year placement. Given the “fill your boots” hunger for all types of debt at the moment – from Turkey to Uzbekistan – it will probably get away okay. It’s certainly priced that way. But with the political ...

In case you were worried, the advertising titans of the internet are doing just fine. Facebook Inc. showed that last week by reporting a 30 percent jump in fourth-quarter revenue from a year earlier. It was the lowest growth rate in the company’s short history, and the company has many challenges to keep growing, but it turns out that Facebook ...

America needs a Green New Deal. That’s easy to say. Spelling out what it means, or ought to mean, is harder. Democrats leading this campaign intend the allusion to the first New Deal — FDR’s multi-front assault on the Great Depression — to convey urgency, ambition, commitment to social justice, and breadth of policy, except this time with the need ...

For a capital-starved economy, India shows little urgency to extricate good money stuck in failed businesses. That was going to change after the adoption of a modern bankruptcy regime in May 2016. Alas, legal improvements notwithstanding, the culture of extending the life of bad loans to big businesses and pretending nothing is wrong with them is proving too hard to ...

Marking the 20th anniversary of zero interest rates in Japan ought to be an exercise in humility. Like the eldest child of a large family, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) was on its own for a while. Those that followed — the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank (ECB), to name but two — had it a bit easier. Some ...

In some theologies, purgatory is where the souls of the dead undergo purification of their sins before rising to heaven or descending into hell. As the deadline for Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU) approaches, UK assets face a similarly binary outcome — making investors justifiably unwilling to take big bets on the endgame. As things stand, it remains ...

Bloomberg US equity futures and European stocks edged up on Wednesday as investors digested the latest earnings from corporate heavyweights. The dollar stayed higher as delayed data showed America’s trade deficit narrowed, while Treasury yields ticked lower. Contracts on the Nasdaq index advanced and those on the Dow Jones and S&P 500 gauges eked out small gains after General Motors ...

Bloomberg India stocks gained on optimism that the nation’s central bank may abandon its hawkish view on interest rates, in a decision due on Thursday. The S&P BSE Sensex advanced for a fifth session, climbing 1 percent to 36,975.23 in Mumbai, its highest level since September. The NSE Nifty 50 Index also added 1.2 percent to reclaim the 11,000 mark, ...

Bloomberg The Philippine stock market flirted with a bull market run on Wednesday, before ending the day lower. Still, the benchmark recovered a remarkable 18% in just three months, and investors say positive earnings results will further spur gains. The Philippine Stock Exchange Index climbed as much as 1.8 percent in Manila, before it fizzled, dipping below the 8,212.59 level ...

Bloomberg Major US banks shaved about $21 billion from their tax bills last year — almost double the IRS’s annual budget — as the industry benefited more than many others from the Republican tax overhaul. By year-end, most of the nation’s largest lenders met or exceeded their initial predictions for tax savings. On average, the banks saw their effective tax ...