Business

By Sara Rossi MILAN, April 13 (Reuters) - Italy's economic vulnerabilities are being laid bare by war in the Middle East, with Rome's heavy reliance on imported energy and the threat of rising government and fiscal instability ahead of 2027 elections taking the shine off its bonds. Italy's two-year borrowing costs surged 75 basis points in March in ‌their biggest monthly rise since 2022 - at least 10 bps more than peers France, Spain and Germany. And while a two-week ceasefire announcement in early April has given bond ‌markets some reprieve, Italian yields at around 2.76% remain well above levels traded before the United States and Israel attacked Iran at the end of February. Even after the fragile ceasefire, Italian debt financing costs rose at an auction nL8N40S0RU on Friday ​t...

WAHOO, NE (AP) — Strong winds whipped around Doug Bartek, a fifth-generation farmer, as he headed into a grain bin to shovel soybeans onto a conveyor chute. The 60-year-old was anxious at the onset of the spring planting season, rattling off the long list of issues affecting his family’s livelihood at their 2,000-acre farm near Wahoo, Nebraska. The high cost of fuel, equipment, and fertilizer — compounded by the Iran war — and also tariffs, perceived “price gouging” by suppliers, and low soybean prices driven by a global supply glut. All of it weighs on Bartek, who is chairman of the Nebraska Soybean Association. “Our biggest struggles are our inputs, be it fertilizer, seed, chemical, parts,” Bartek said. “There has been so much drastic markup in all of these. And I just kind of fee...

Trustmark’s equipment finance team delivered year-over-year growth, increasing new originations by 57% from 2024 to 2025. Last year, Trustmark captured $376 million in new originations, up from $237 million in 2024, to reach $896 million in total originations since inception in 2023. Additionally, equipment finance assets grew by $176 million year over year from 2023 to 2024, and by $254 million from 2024 to 2025, bringing total assets to $698 million as of Dec. 31, 2025. “We are proud of the tremendous growth that Equipment Finance has achieved. Trustmark has quickly established itself as a proven leader in the industry, as we advance towards a significant milestone of $1 billion in total originations,” Joe Hines, head of equipment finance at Trustmark, said. “As business has grown, we ha...

ContentsKey Takeaways 1Introduction. 2The Evolution of American Capitalist Investment System. 3Divergences Between the Short-Term Profits and National Techno-Economic Power 10Alternatives to Financial Capitalism. 21Toward National Power Capitalism. 23Conclusion. 32Endnotes 34The United States has been the world’s dominant techno-economic power for over 125 years. That has induced complacency. As the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has written, China is hungry and determined not only to displace American techno-economic leadership, but also to make America dependent on China.[1]ITIF predicts that China will soon surpass the United States in what we have termed “national power industries”: advanced traded-sector industries that are critical to national security or sov...

April 10, 2026, 11:01 a.m. PTGov. Tina Kotek signed a bill April 9 that makes changes to forthcoming campaign finance updates, angering advocacy groups who say they now have "no choice" but to put their own plan to voters in 2028.Kotek said in a signing letter she was supporting House Bill 4018 because "despite its flaws, this legislation is necessary to ensure that Oregon’s overdue effort to have campaign contribution limits can begin effectively by next year."Supporters have portrayed the bill as making necessary technical changes to a 2024 bill overhauling Oregon's campaign finance system. New contribution limits would still begin in 2027, but disclosure requirements and penalties would be pushed to 2031 to give the Oregon Secretary of State's Office more time to implement the legislati...

Find winning stocks in any market cycle. Join 7 million investors using Simply Wall St's investing ideas for FREE. Open Text (OTEX) is back in focus after issuing preliminary third quarter fiscal 2026 revenue guidance of about US$1.28b and confirming that incoming CEO Ayman Antoun will join the May 7 earnings call. See our latest analysis for Open Text. The preliminary Q3 fiscal 2026 revenue guidance and upcoming CEO transition come after a weak run for the stock, with a 90 day share price return of a 37.89% decline and a 1 year total shareholder return of a 14.02% decline. This suggests sentiment has cooled even as investors reassess the risk and growth profile around new leadership and upcoming results. If this kind of reset has you thinking about where else growth and risk mi...

What To Expect From Wells Fargo’s (WFC) Q1 Earnings Financial services giant Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) will be announcing earnings results this Tuesday before market hours. Here’s what investors should know. Wells Fargo missed analysts’ revenue expectations last quarter, reporting revenues of $21.37 billion, up 4.4% year on year. It was a slower quarter for the company, with a slight miss of analysts’ revenue estimates and a slight miss of analysts’ net interest income estimates. Is Wells Fargo a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free for active Edge members. This quarter, the market is expecting Wells Fargo’s revenue to grow 7.6% year on year, a reversal from the 3.5% decrease it recorded in the same quarter last year. Wells Fargo Total Revenue...

Private credit concerns One of those possible shocks relates to private credit. Investors have been fleeing private markets where they can profit off loans to risky companies made by financial firms that aren’t banks. Panic has spread as some of those loans have soured, catching the attention of regulators. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has said that while some people will lose money, for now the problem doesn’t seem like it will feed out and threaten the stability of the financial system. But he added that the central bank continues to monitor the situation closely. On the other side of the Atlantic, the tone is a bit more worried. Bailey has highlighted the need to probe banks’ potential exposure to these markets closely, harkening back to the 2008 financial crisis when su...

The hottest new trade in crypto doesn't involve meme coins, stablecoins, or altcoins. It's not a buzzy new AI crypto, and it certainly does not involve Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC). Instead, the hottest new trade in crypto, according to the Wall Street Journal, is tokenized oil futures. If you've been following geopolitical events in the Middle East (and who hasn't?), then you'll understand why. Oil prices can zigzag wildly, based on nothing more than a single social media post, and crypto traders want a way to get in on the action. Will AI create the world's first trillionaire? Our team just released a report on the one little-known company, called an "Indispensable Monopoly" providing the critical technology Nvidia and Intel both need. Continue » There's nothing new, of course, about s...

Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol speaks during an economy-related ministerial meeting at the government complex in Seoul, Monday. YonhapKorea aims to expand its free trade agreement (FTA) network with emerging markets, such as Latin America and Africa, in its latest effort to diversify supply chains, Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol said Monday."Rather than simply responding to trade issues, the government will expand its FTA network to support export growth," Koo said while presiding over an economy-related ministerial meeting.He noted that the global trade environment is undergoing a structural change due to the weakening of multilateral trade norms and increasing competition among major countries.In response, the government sees a need to continuously expand and strategically upgrade its FT...