Opinion

    U.K. banks are giving new meaning to the term “Brexit”: They’ve been pulling money out of the rest of the world at a pace not seen since the global financial crisis. The latest data from the Bank for International Settlements suggest that financial institutions have been beating a retreat just about everywhere. In 25 countries whose banks report …

  Last week, international capital markets enthusiastically granted redemption to Argentina, a serial defaulter on money it has borrowed from external creditors. The scale of this reaction is counter-intuitive and could provide the wrong incentive underpinnings for financial relationships that involve an important element of trust. Yet this kind of forgiveness has occurred regularly — for good and bad reasons …

  The Russian government has approved a sober, and sobering, economic forecast for the next three years. The country’s prospects look so joyless that President Vladimir Putin may finally start listening to the mainstream economists who have stuck with him despite his unconcealed preference for a huge public sector tempered with a dose of crony capitalism. Today’s Russian leaders appear …

  Du Nhat Dang SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS For Vietnam, 2016 seems fated to be a crucial year. Hanoi’s sovereignty disputes and related diplomatic efforts will be impacted by ongoing changes in Russia, China, and Japan and, yes, the results of the United States’ presidential election. The role of Russia is of particular interest for Vietnam. On April 14, Vietnamese …

  This week’s U.K. Treasury report and last week’s IMF report are the latest in a long line of predictions suggesting doom and gloom if the U.K. leaves the European Union. Are they right? Economists are far more split on the consequences of a U.K. exit than the conventional view suggests. While a number of global investment banks have given …

  It has become a truism to say that the American political system is suffering from dysfunction. But weirdly, even the insurgent candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, don’t talk much about how they would fix it. This is a populist insurgency without a clear manifesto. So it’s refreshing to hear Rep. John Sarbanes present a detailed action plan to …

  On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl disaster left a trail of destruction. The worst nuclear accident was blamed on human error triggered by flawed Soviet reactor technology. Fukushima was another rude awakening in March 2011 when the world discovered similar challenges. Human error was again detected after the world felt it had drawn lessons from Chernobyl to avoid nuclear …

  Barry Ritholtz Before the Great Recession, almost two-thirds of Americans owned stocks. That number has since fallen to a little more than half, as you can see from the chart below: This is an important development with ramifications for retirement planning, demographics and income inequality. First, a little history: Since late in the last century, one of the defining …

  Most central bankers would agree that their primary goal is to give people and companies confidence that inflation will remain stable over the long term. Unfortunately, the U.S. Federal Reserve may be failing at that task. The Fed began pulling back on its efforts to stimulate growth back in May 2013, when then-Chairman Ben Bernanke said that the central …

  The U.K. Treasury’s paper on the economic costs of Brexit seems competent and thorough, as you would expect — and says those costs would be high, as you’d also expect. That said, it would be a mistake to regard this analysis as settling much. Judging the likely economic costs is an unavoidably uncertain exercise. The range of possible outcomes …