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The latest escalation of the crisis in Catalonia is a grave threat to Spain and a serious test for the European Union. The immediate priority should be moving back from the brink of violent confrontation, and the EU can help by urging restraint on Madrid. This was an avoidable breakdown. The Catalan leadership is chiefly to blame — first, for ...

India has long been faced with a slow-motion bank crisis. In particular, the state-controlled institutions that dominate the sector have a bad-loan ratio that’s almost twice as bad as their private counterparts. At last count, non-performing assets made up more than 10% of banks’ advances, and were growing ever faster. Naturally, banks faced with this burden aren’t exactly eager to ...

It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged these days that an investor in want of a good fortune needs to be in possession of an index-tracking fund rather than an active manager. UBS AG, though, disagrees — at least in Europe. The Swiss bank’s analysts, led by Michael Werner, who covers the fund management industry from London, crunched the numbers ...

As of early fall, it was clearer than ever that production problems meant Apple Inc. wouldn’t have enough iPhone Xs in time for the holidays. The challenge was how to make the sophisticated phone—with advanced features such as facial recognition—in large enough numbers. As Wall Street analysts and fan blogs watched for signs that the company would stumble, Apple came ...

Bloomberg One of Sony Corp.’s most promising bets on the future is hiding in plain sight. Inside the electronics maker’s Atsugi Technology Center, a research campus located an hour outside Tokyo, engineers and researchers are developing sensors that can detect people and objects by calculating how long it takes for light to reflect off surfaces. With plans to go into ...

Bloomberg Delphi Automotive Plc agreed to acquire self-driving startup NuTonomy Inc. for $450 million, speeding up its plans to supply carmakers with autonomous vehicle systems. NuTonomy will add more than 100 employees, including 70 engineers and scientists, to roughly double Delphi’s team developing autonomous driving software, according to a statement. The company was spun out from a research and technology ...

Bloomberg Google unveiled software aimed at making it easier for scientists to use the quantum computers in a move designed to give a boost to the nascent industry. The software, which is open-source and free to use, could be used by chemists and material scientists to adapt algorithms and equations to run on quantum computers. It comes at a time ...

Bloomberg Nintendo Co. has made its biggest move in mobile gaming so far with plans to add Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp as its third smartphone title. The game will be available on both Apple Inc.’s iOS and Android from late November and is the first smartphone iteration of a popular series about anthropomorphic animals. It will be free to download ...

Bloomberg As markets cheer European Central Bank President Mario Draghi for keeping the exit from monetary stimulus wide open, the decision is sitting uneasily with some of his colleagues. A day after policy makers extended their bond-buying program for a third time and pledged to do yet more if needed, Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann went public with his opposition by ...

Bloomberg Not everyone at the Bank of England will be on board with raising interest rates. While November 2 may see the UK’s first rate increase in more than a decade, economists surveyed by Bloomberg say three out of nine officials on the Monetary Policy Committee will vote against the move. That’s based on the median estimate from 24 responses. ...