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Bloomberg In the final days of Spain’s complex political chess match with Catalan separatism, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy made the best tactical moves. The longer game of keeping the country’s economic powerhouse in Spain may prove harder to win. Rajoy lined up backing from the opposition Socialists for his plan to sweep out the Catalan government while his diplomats ensured ...

Bloomberg Czechs moved closer to a rare minority government envisaged by billionaire Andrej Babis as his euroskeptic party failed to find coalition allies after winning this month’s general elections. President Milos Zeman said he won’t object if Babis proposes forming a government that lacks a parliamentary majority, because a single-party cabinet would rule more efficiently. While Babis, the second-richest Czech ...

Bloomberg Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s Progressive Party is considering triggering the third snap parliamentary elections since 2014 as it moves to further consolidate power in the European Union candidate. Vucic, a former ally of war-time leader Slobodan Milosevic, said his party are discussing early elections this week. His party won snap bal- lots in both 2014 and last year bef-ore ...

Bloomberg Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the landslide winner of a chaotic election rerun that his main rival Raila Odinga rejected as a sham. Kenyatta, 56, won 7.48 million votes, or 98.3 percent of the total cast on Oct. 26, Wafula Chebukati, the chairman of the Independent Electoral & Boundaries Commission, said in Nairobi, the capital. The turnout was ...

China is witnessing something most of the world’s major economies haven’t seen in quite some time: rising prices. With growth strong but debt at perhaps 300 percent of gross domestic product, that’s a welcome sign. The danger is that China’s government now hopes inflation will solve its other problems. From 2013 until this year, the GDP deflator, a broad measure ...

Nomura Holdings Inc. may be ruing its international presence right now. It shouldn’t. Low volatility — the bane of global investment banks — caused a slump in fixed-income trading in the three months through September, driving Japan’s biggest brokerage to its first profit decline in five quarters. Net income slid 15 percent to 51.9 billion yen ($457 million), with huge ...

Sharp Corp. shares are up 33 percent since January, and that’s on top of their 116 percent gain last year after Foxconn Technology Group took control. That’s great for investors; not so much for sell-side analysts. They’ve remained stubbornly bearish on the Japanese liquid crystal display maker, so much so that if you had followed the recommendations of all but ...

Responding to revelations of the Trump administration’s luxe travel habits, which have already cost one cabinet secretary his job, the House government oversight committee has opened an investigation. That scrutiny should apply to members of Congress and their staffs as well. By its own accounting, Congress spent 27 percent more on foreign trips last year than it did in 2015. ...

A missing piece in the global growth jigsaw appears to be falling into place. Spurred by higher profits and buoyant stock markets, some of the world’s best known companies from Amazon.com Inc. to Volkswagen AG are ramping up spending on new plants and equipment after years of caution. For an international economic expansion already gathering speed, that could prove a ...

After months of wrangling, the Italian parliament has finally passed a new electoral law. The new rules will make it much harder for the anti-establishment Five Star Movement to come to power. They will not, however, give Italy the stability it needs to escape the low-growth trap. The law is a complex combination of first-past-the-post and proportional representation. Any party ...