Bloomberg A key critic of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro says he may be barred from travelling to Russia, where he’ll seek to build relations with one of the ailing regime’s few foreign backers. National Assembly President Julio Borges plans to leave Venezuela over the weekend to attend an international parliamentary forum in St. Petersburg and meet with Russian lawmakers. “In ...

Bloomberg Secessionist allies piled pressure on Catalan President Carles Puigdemont to formally declare independence from Spain as a deadline looms for him to clarify his stance or face being stripped of his powers by the central government in Madrid. CUP, a radical party that’s part of Puigdemont’s pro-independence coalition in the Catalan parliament, published a letter saying that the only ...

It’s time to build the wall—and, in doing so, prevent an estimated 690,000 DACA ‘dreamers’ from being deported from the United States. It’s a fair deal that could be scuttled only by intense and self-serving partisanship from the White House and the Republican and Democratic congressional leadership. As almost everyone knows by now, DACA stands for ‘Deferred Action for Childhood ...

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy showed that he doesn’t merely hold a better poker hand than Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont; he’s also the better player. Unfortunately, the Catalan separatism problem won’t be resolved by this particular game. At some point, Spain will need to offer Catalans an arrangement with which they can live. An example of a potentially acceptable arrangement ...

The general perception is that global bond yields are historically low because monetary policy has been aggressively eased. This leads to expectations that yields will rise—possibly sharply—once the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank start the process they call “balance sheet normalization.” After all, when he was Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke spent a lot of time and effort ...

When the economies of Nigeria and South Africa recently rebounded, it wasn’t oil or minerals that did the trick. It was agriculture. Faster and more sustainable agricultural growth is crucial not only to the continent’s economy, but also to its ability to feed and employ its surging population. Agriculture still accounts for a quarter of gross domestic product and as ...

Communism is officially dead. North Korea, the last holdout of the 20th-century Soviet-style central planning, is moving towards a hybrid economy. David Volodzko in a Bloomberg View op-ed reports: Economic reforms made in 2011 have begun to take hold, allowing factory managers to set salaries, find their own suppliers, and hire and fire employees. Farming collectives have been replaced by ...

With a 2 percent gain in September, the S&P 500 Index has set a record: positive returns in each of the first 10 months of the year. There’s never been a full calendar year when this has happened every month. Going back to November 2016, the index has ripped off 12 consecutive monthly gains. The S&P hasn’t had a down ...

As you are by now all probably aware, Richard Thaler won this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. All question of whether this is a “real” Nobel can now be laid to rest, since the announcement was made via the Nobel Prize’s official verified Twitter account. Thaler won the prize for his research in behavioral economics, although he’s far ...

Bloomberg Volkswagen AG is flanking its push into electric cars with plans to roll out battery-powered commercial vehicles targeted at urban areas as growing public concerns about air quality boost demand. The Volkswagen Truck & Bus division will invest 1.4 billion euros ($1.7 billion) in new technology including electric drivetrains, autonomous systems and cloud-based software, Andreas Renschler, head of the ...