Bloomberg US workers may be finally getting a pay raise — and perhaps more importantly, they’re earning it by becoming more efficient. Average hourly earnings for private workers increased 2.9 percent in August from a year earlier, the most since the recession ended in mid-2009, the Labor Department said. The gains were broad-based, ranging from manufacturing to retail. The fatter ...

Bloomberg Volkswagen AG Chief Financial Officer Frank Witter was asked this week whether the world’s largest carmaker would be open to selling shares in the luxury-car unit that includes Porsche and Lamborghini. He didn’t say no to the option, which could potentially unlock billions of dollars in value for Volkswagen investors. “It is a legitimate question, without a doubt,” Witter ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc. is suing BlackBerry Ltd. for patent infringement, escalating the legal battle between the two companies over protected technology. In a 118-page complaint filed filed in San Francisco federal court, Facebook accused BlackBerry of stealing its voice messaging technology, among other patented processes. Facebook is seeking unspecified damages for infringement of six patents. BlackBerry didn’t immediately respond to ...

Is US  President Donald J Trump dismantling the regulatory state? Not close. To be sure, recent headlines give the impression that he is. On one day, the Department of Transportation proposes to scale back fuel-economy requirements for motor vehicles. On another, the Department of Education proposes to eliminate regulations on for-profit colleges, designed to protect against exploitation and abuse of students. ...

Italy’s new government has clearly learned that saying the right sort of thing works. Yields have raced in this week on a barrage of press reports that the populist government is going to respect European Union rules in the 2019 budget. Ten-year BTP yields have fallen nearly 40 basis points this week, driving the spread to German debt down to ...

Whenever there’s a bout of emerging-markets flu, Indonesia catches it. Jakarta may be crying foul, because it looked as though the nation was inoculated: Since May, Bank Indonesia has raised benchmark rates by 1.25 percentage points as insurance against the stronger dollar, almost as aggressive a move as during the 2013 taper tantrum. Meanwhile, President Joko Widodo’s government may increase ...

Apparently, President Donald Trump doesn’t like the news that he sees about himself on Google, Facebook and Twitter. So he’s accusing them of being rigged against him — and against conservatives in general. Absurd as Trump’s claim may be, the tech giants have it coming. Trump is probably wrong that the gatekeepers of the internet are suppressing conservative views and ...

The antitrust movement is making a comeback. Zephyr Teachout, candidate for New York state attorney general, is promising to fight monopolies. Activists such as Matt Stoller of the Open Market Institute are beginning to draw attention to the problem of concentrated market power. Think tanks like the Washington Center for Equitable Growth are starting to zero in on the issue ...

Hedge funds haven’t been this bearish for years. In the last month, funds quickly sold down their positions in emerging markets to levels last seen in August 2015, when China scared the world with a surprise devaluation, and early 2016, when Beijing terminated a silly experiment with circuit breakers in a futile attempt to rescue the stock market. Emerging markets ...

Will robots run the factories of the world? There may be clues in Japan. Tokyo-listed Nidec Corp. makes motors of all sizes that show up in just about everything: your car, your washing machine, even hard-disk drives from back in the day. The company was founded in 1973 by Shigenobu Nagamori, an acquisitive and ambitious Japanese billionaire who counts Masayoshi ...