The unveiled budget by the Italian government looks like a “Greatest Hits” album containing all the measures that have failed to spur growth in the past. The populist administration has largely neglected companies and younger workers, who will receive little benefit from the proposed policy changes. Instead, it is letting workers retire early and handing out a still undefined income ...

Two hip, young startups are set to become the latest challenge to Tencent Holdings Ltd. just as China’s dominant social-media company struggles with shrinking margins and slowing growth. Pop and Echo, social apps created by former Tencent executives, have already secured venture-capital funding, The Information reported. Echo is valued at $40 million, while Pop got backing from Bertelsmann Asia Investments, ...

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s steps to increase immigration and raise the consumption tax are both signs that Japan’s shrinking population is as much opportunity as challenge. With an unemployment rate of 2.4 percent and a job market that by other measures is the tightest since the 1970s, something has to give. Robots will play a greater role, as will foreign-born ...

Nigeria’s population is growing rapidly. It now stands at 182 million, and is projected to exceed 300 million by midcentury, surpassing the US to become the world’s third-largest country. And thanks to a high fertility rate — more than five children per women, higher than the average for sub-Saharan Africa and more than double the global rate — that growth ...

Internet giant Amazon recently ran into a problem that eloquently illustrates the pitfalls of big data: It tried to automate hiring with a machine learning algorithm, but upon testing it realised that it merely perpetuated the tech industry’s bias against women. What’s most troubling isn’t the discovery itself. It’s that most companies using similar algorithms don’t even want to know. ...

Calm down, the world’s biggest car market isn’t going to drive off a cliff. Sales to dealerships in China fell for a third month in September, dropping almost 12 percent from a year earlier, data showed. Retail sales declined 13 percent. Total vehicle sales could now be on track for their first annual drop in more than two decades. Scary ...

Bloomberg US stocks fell as the week’s second big serving of corporate earnings did much less to reassure bulls than the previous day’s almost uniformly strong reports. The dollar and Treasuries rose. The S&P 500 Index slid back below 2,800, heading for a second loss in three days. IBM’s disappointing results dragged the Dow Jones Industrial Average lower by more ...

Bloomberg Europe’s dark pools are filling up with equities again as some trading bans imposed under the MiFID II rules get lifted. About 8 percent of all equities trading took place on private stock markets known as dark venues in the past month, after regulators ended suspensions on nearly half of the previously affected stocks, according to a Bloomberg calculation ...

Bloomberg Nordea Bank Abp, Scandinavia’s biggest lender, now risks being dragged into a money laundering scandal that has rocked the Nordic and Baltic region. Bill Browder, the UK-based investor tracking dirty money flows out of Russia, has filed complaints with Nordic prosecutors alleging he can pinpoint 365 Nordea accounts in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway that received $175 million from ...

Bloomberg Danske Bank A/S’s top pick for a new chief executive officer was rejected by the Nordic nation’s financial regulator, adding to turmoil at the lender that is mired in a money laundering scandal. The Copenhagen-based bank on Wednesday withdrew its application to the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority to name 40-year-old Jacob Aarup-Andersen, the head of its wealth management, as ...