After four successive days of increasing risk spreads, and after a prominent politician, Claudio Borghi, said there was an advantage to having your “own currency,” Italy is back squarely on both public and private radar screens as a potential source of systemic economic and financial disruptions. This has led to suggestions that the country could become “a new Greece.” While ...

We all agree, they said. Please make more rules for us, they said. Give more money to our regulators, they said. When an assemblage of savvy corporate lawyers converges on such improbable sentiments, skepticism is usually in order. Last week’s privacy hearing on Capitol Hill demanded a load of it. Representatives from numerous tech and telecom luminaries — including Amazon, ...

Christine Lagarde and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have answered the easy question but dodged the hard ones. Yes, of course an era of tit-for-tat tariffs dims the global economic outlook. So … what can the IMF do about it? Does it need more funding to protect the international economy, given the weakening scene? Director Christine Lagarde should say so ...

The Italian government has finally presented its much-awaited economic and fiscal forecasts. They are an exercise in smoke and mirrors of which American-Hungarian illusionist Harry Houdini would be proud. The inflated growth figures and frankly incredible future budget adjustments are unlikely to sway investors and the European Commission. Italy is heading for a fight with the European Union (EU) and, more ...

When the world’s de facto central bank rustles up an interest-rate whirlwind, you don’t use a fig leaf of flexible exchange rates to stand in its path. That memo, already well-received in Indonesia, doesn’t seem to have reached India. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) chose to hold its policy interest rate at 6.5 percent last week. And by delaying ...

Amazon.com Inc.’s decision to raise wages to $15 an hour for all of its US workers is good news. It will mean more money in the pockets of thousands of hard-working Americans struggling to make ends meet. Even more importantly, Amazon’s example may start a trend, encouraging other companies to raise wages as well, and prompting workers to demand more. ...

Bloomberg If there’s one thing the prophets agree on, it’s that the end will come in the bond market. Even for stocks. Prophesies of doom are everywhere. There’s billionaire investor Stan Druckenmiller, who says our “massive debt problem” will ignite a crisis. Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks warns that public and private debt will be “ground zero when things next go ...

Bloomberg Municipal bonds suffered their worst week since early February, but the real test of the market lies ahead: Will slow-to-react individual investors pull their money out in droves, as they have during previous downturns? Individuals, who own more than half of all state and local governments bonds directly or through mutual funds and don’t follow the minute-by-minute movement of ...

Bloomberg India’s central bank stared down the rupee’s slide to a record low, opting to keep interest rates unchanged as it flagged risks to the economy from global monetary policy tightening, trade wars and surging oil prices. In a surprise decision, the monetary policy committee led by Governor Urjit Patel voted 5-1 to leave the repurchase rate at 6.5 percent. ...

Bloomberg The Estonian laundromat scandal has been on Danske Bank A/S investors’ radar for more than a year. But last week, everything changed. News of a US Department of Justice investigation has caused panic. The bank’s shares were dumped and some bondholders are even wondering whether Danske might start having trouble making interest payments on its riskiest debt. At Swedish ...