When Enda Kenny’s center-right Fine Gael party came to power in 2011, Ireland was dealing with the collapse of its banking system and struggling to comply with the demands of an international rescue program. Six years later, the economy is booming. Unemployment has fallen from nearly 15 percent to a little over 6 percent, and Ireland pays less to borrow ...

Emmanuel Macron is nothing if not persuasive. He’s built a political movement from scratch and won enough votes from France’s established parties to take the keys to the Elysee Palace. He’ll need those skills and more to carry out an essential reform that has eluded all his predecessors — freeing up France’s labor market. Just last year, France debated the ...

For a long time, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a point of not disagreeing publicly with European Central Bank President Mario Draghi. This year, however, that tradition is broken, and Merkel appears interested in making sure Draghi’s successor is more acceptable to Germany, perhaps even a German. Recently, for the second time this year, the chancellor blamed ECB for euro ...

Brexit is driving up prices and there’s an election around the corner, but Britons are still hitting the shops, to judge by a raft of reports from retailers. Marks & Spencer Group Plc said that while its same-store clothing and home-furnishing sales fell more than estimated in the three months through April 1, full-price sales were up, and there are ...

Sitting in my Hangzhou hotel room one evening last September, I caught a helpfully subtitled Chinese TV show about Song Dynasty inscriptions carved on a mountainside near Quanzhou — the city Chinese media invariably call “the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road.” With prayers for good winds and safe returns, the carvings bore witness to China’s far-flung commercial relations ...

Bloomberg Bank of Montreal’s US push hit a speed bump in the second quarter as higher loan losses eroded earnings from its Chicago-based BMO Harris Bank. The lender set aside C$259 million ($192 million) for soured loans, up 29 percent from a year earlier and the highest since at least 2011, tied largely to U.S. personal and commercial banking and ...

Bloomberg State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender by assets, picked Bank of America Corp. and Deutsche Bank AG to arrange a share sale that could raise about $2 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said. The lender also chose IIFL Holdings Ltd., Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd., JM Financial Ltd. and SBI Capital Markets Ltd. to work on ...

Bloomberg Royal Bank of Canada’s (RCB) acquisition of City National Bank is paying dividends. The Los Angeles-based lender contributed C$77 million ($57 million) in profit for the fiscal second quarter, helping fuel a 12 percent jump in earnings for Royal Bank’s wealth-management division. This marks the fifth quarter of results since the Canadian lender bought Hollywood’s “bank to the stars” ...

Bloomberg The Philippine central bank isn’t in a race to raise interest rates, incoming governor Nestor Espenilla said, despite economists’ predictions the country will be the first in Southeast Asia to do so. “It’s not a race to raise interest rates,” Espenilla, 58, deputy governor in charge of bank supervision, said in an interview. “Is it time to raise interest ...

Bloomberg Maria Silvia Bastos resigned as the head of Brazil’s state development bank (BNDES) amid a corruption scandal engulfing both the institution and President Michel Temer. The BNDES in a statement cited personal reasons for Bastos’ decision, without elaborating. Brazil’s currency and the Ibovespa stock index trimmed gains. Paulo Rabello Castro, an economist in charge of the national statistics agency ...