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It’s not easy being the front-runner. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, the leading Democratic presidential hopeful, has come under increasing attack from the rest of the pack for her backing of fellow candidate Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” proposal and her disinclination to explain how she’d pay for it. They’ll continue to do so as they attempt to prevent her from ...

Germany’s refusal to use fiscal policy, in the form of a big and quick stimulus, to ward off recession is a serious problem for the global economy. This excessive caution is enshrined in a balanced-budget law known as the “debt brake.” Several other countries have been emulating it, or thinking about doing so. They shouldn’t. And Germany should reconsider the ...

Snatch-and-grab is the new hallmark of Indian finance. As a banker friend in Mumbai put it to me only half-jokingly, a unit of “grabbed” cash collateral in hand is worth more than two units of hypothetical receivables. Yet this is no laughing matter. Not only is opportunistic behaviour going to worsen India’s $200 billion-plus bad loan crisis, but now that ...

WeWork’s valuation keeps sliding. SoftBank Group Corp., its largest outside investor, is now targeting $8 billion through a rescue package it’s putting together, according to Bloomberg News. But Masayoshi Son ought to be careful. While the deal may set a floor under WeWork, it could also diminish his standing along with SoftBank and its $100 billion Vision Fund. Mere months ...

“I am a classically trained engineer,” says Rep. Will Hurd, a Texas Republican, “and I firmly believe in regression to the mean.” Applying a concept from statistics to the randomness of today’s politics is problematic. In any case, Hurd, 42, is not waiting for the regression of our politics from the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum to something like ...

Bloomberg US equity-index futures dipped and European stocks struggled for traction as investors plowed through earnings reports without finding much to justify optimism for global growth. Treasuries and European bonds advanced broadly. S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average contracts fell after Caterpillar’s results missed analysts’ forecasts, sending the stock tumbling in pre-market trading. Contracts on the Nasdaq also edged ...

Bloomberg Equity investors clamouring for interest-rate cuts in emerging economies are getting a wake-up call: monetary easing is failing to revive growth impaired by the trade war. Any stimulus unlocked by lower interest rates is being outweighed by weaker local currencies because trade tensions between the US and China are boosting the dollar. The underperformance of emerging-market stocks relative to ...

Bloomberg With the costliest UK banking scandal fading into memory, a Brexit deal looking more plausible than it once did and trading likely to surprise on the upside, British lenders are going into earnings season with the wind in their sails for once. That doesn’t mean the numbers won’t have ugly spots. Third-quarter results, which kick off this week, are ...

Bloomberg The US House passed legislation to strengthen anti-money-laundering rules, moving closer to a victory for Wall Street banks. The bill, HR 2513, which passed 249-173, would make it harder to use anonymous shell companies to break the law. A similar bill in the Senate has yet to get a committee hearing, which would be the next step before a ...

Bloomberg Deal volumes in India are set to surge as embattled founders sell businesses to tide over a cash squeeze, according to Axis Capital Ltd, the investment banking unit of one of India’s largest private-sector lenders. “As the funding situation erodes, founders are selling businesses to deleverage, or are raising equity to gain an edge over the competitors,” Chirag Negandhi, ...