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Bloomberg After seeing housing costs jump by more than 50 percent in the past five years, officials in Barcelona are moving to introduce Spain’s most aggressive rent controls. Under a decree, landlords will have to negotiate leases based on benchmark prices set for each property in those neighbourhoods tagged as most desirable. That regulation follows a national law implemented in ...

Bloomberg The European Commission is considering proposing a disciplinary procedure for Italy next week over its failure to rein in debt, which could pave the way for a 3.5 billion-euro ($4 billion) penalty, according to an official familiar with the matter. The step could come as part of the European Union’s regular budget monitoring process, most likely on June 5, ...

Bloomberg British Conservatives may have suffered their worst election results ever, but their members of parliament are still feeling loved. Barely a day goes by without an invitation to coffee from one senior minister or another, hoping to win their support in the coming race to succeed Theresa May. Perhaps they would like to come to the Foreign Office, to ...

Bloomberg Ousted Austrian leader Sebastian Kurz started his campaign to take back the chancellery hours after his estranged coalition partners in the nationalist Freedom Party joined the opposition in a vote to dismiss him. The youngest Austrian head of government also became the shortest-serving and the first to be thrown out of office since the country was reconstituted after World ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump rallied US and Japanese troops to wrap up a four-day state visit that focused more on pageantry than resolving deep differences on trade between the long-standing allies. On a trip where no major agreement was reached, Trump’s statements were persistently at odds with the Japanese. He said he’s aiming to reach a trade deal by August, ...

Bloomberg President Emmanuel Macron will push chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier as his choice to lead the European Commission, a senior French official said, as European leaders meet in Brussels to begin the jostling to fill the bloc’s leadership spots. The official said on condition of anonymity that the French leader first wants to agree on the commission president before ...

Bloomberg The European Court of Human Rights delivered a blow to the Catalan secessionist movement, ruling that in 2017 Spanish judges legally suspended a regional parliamentary session in the wake of a controversial independence vote. The complaint brought by 76 people living in Barcelona was “manifestly ill-founded” and the Spanish judges’ move was legal, the Strasbourg, France-based human rights court ...

The US-China tech cold war is about to spread, and that will force leaders to make some difficult decisions. I wrote last week that a digital Iron Curtain had been drawn when President Donald Trump moved to isolate Huawei Technologies Co. Within a week, global corporations were caught in this divide. Alphabet Inc.’s Google said it would cease some ties ...

After correcting for inflation, wage gains remain sluggish. In April, average weekly earnings for nonsupervisory workers were up 3% from a year earlier, to $785.55. Meanwhile, prices as measured by the consumer price index were up 2%. Considering that the economy has been expanding for nearly a full decade, this is perplexing, even allowing that wages are growing faster at ...

It’s become depressingly familiar to watch Italian government bonds yields push higher, with the spread over German bunds getting close again this week to its widest point of the year. For that, you can thank more political posturing by the country’s populist leaders ahead of the May 23 European elections. Matteo Salvini, leader of the League and deputy prime minister, ...