Opinion

Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill has passed the Senate, clearing the way for it to become law. Much of the legislation is dedicated to handing out cash to individual Americans. This is a sign post for a tectonic shift that’s underway in US policy thinking towards unconditional money transfers as the optimal way to help people in need. When ...

The post-Brexit war over financial services — and to what degree Europe can lure business away from the City of London — is far from over. The latest battle is derivatives clearing. But compromise is possible and would serve everyone best. Set up in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, central counterparty clearing houses (CCPs) act as middlemen between ...

The idea that much of today’s cash use will shift to digital tokens is neither faddish nor outlandish, as long as you don’t start equating the future of money with Bitcoin. Sure, governments will borrow some elements of the distributed ledger technology behind private cryptocurrencies, but they will very much want to retain control of what circulates as money in ...

The jump in global bond yields this past month has drawn many analogies to the so-called taper tantrum of 2013, a market upheaval triggered by comments from then-Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke about gradually reeling back quantitative easing. Unfortunately, these references don’t accurately capture that pivotal episode, or the circumstances around it. Without fully understanding what unfolded almost a decade ...

The Biden administration has opted for now not to impose new sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the pipeline that will double the amount of natural gas Russia transports directly to Europe. For the time being, the decision allows the US to avoid a confrontation with Germany, the project’s main supporter. It also risks inflaming Congress and handing a geopolitical victory ...

Democrats are closing their eyes and throwing the dice. Congress is passing President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill with shockingly little information about whether the US economy can safely absorb it. The Federal Reserve isn’t helping. Its signals to markets, businesses and households have been surprisingly blasé about the possibility of the economy overheating and inflation accelerating. Predictions ...

The American Petroleum Institute is debating whether to support a price on carbon. It’s not every day that a top lobbying group contemplates taxing itself. That’s big news, and it’s tempting to call it a win for the climate. Not so fast. While API’s expected endorsement is indeed a sign of the times, it’s not a good one. For one, ...

Sometimes economists are just flat-out wrong. According to economic theory, annuities and reverse mortgages should be very popular for managing risk and liquidity — yet both products struggle for mainstream acceptance. Another favorite of economists is prediction markets: contracts with payoffs contingent on some real-world event. Their future is also highly uncertain. In essence, prediction markets let people “bet” on ...

Those Americans who cheered President Joe Biden’s announcement this week that the US would have enough vaccines to inoculate every citizen by the end of July might want to note the cold silence with which the rest of the world greeted the news. Biden’s triumphalism was more than a little grating, considering that the U.S., alongside most other rich countries, ...

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak has only one more rung to climb on the UK political ladder — to the position so many of his predecessors have coveted and failed to get: prime minister. This week the most powerful man in Westminster after Boris Johnson pitched his future wares in his second budget and set out Britain’s post-pandemic ...