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 ...

Bloomberg Canon Inc. is finally entering the full-frame mirrorless camera market, joining Sony Corp. and Nikon Corp. in a new battleground for professional-grade camera equipment. The Japanese electronics giant will begin selling in late October the EOS R for 237,500 yen ($2,130), a price tag targeted at professionals and enthusiasts. It aims to move 20,000 units a month. Canon is ...

Bloomberg In a modern-day version of John Henry taking on a steam drill, Lockheed Martin Corp. is pitting human pilots against artificial intelligence in a $2 million drone race. The catch is that the computer-driven drones can’t be pre-programmed for the route or rely on human intervention. They must depend only on artificial intelligence and self-learning to navigate obstacle-filled racecourses ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc. is launching Watch, its video rival to YouTube, internationally and expanding the financial incentives that encourage people to share their content there. Video makers in five countries will be eligible to take a percentage of the ad revenue that comes from their content around the world as long as their videos on Watch are popular enough and ...

Bloomberg Japan is making a push to develop flying cars, enlisting companies including Uber Technologies Inc. and Boeing Co. in a government-led group to bring airborne vehicles to the country in the next decade. The group will initially comprise 21 businesses and organizations, including Airbus SE, NEC Corp., a Toyota Motor Corp.-backed startup called Cartivator, ANA Holdings Inc., Japan Airlines ...