Opinion

Not everybody is observing the supposed ceasefire in the currency wars. The Reserve Bank of Australia lowered rates by 25 basis points each in June and July. The moves were ostensibly intended to ease monetary conditions and boost flagging growth. Their unstated purpose was to bring down the value of the Australian dollar. Since the currency rate was floated in ...

The European Systemic Risk Board, which was created to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis, is out with a new report examining exchange-traded funds. It’s worthy endeavour, given that the market for ETF’s has grown to $5.6 trillion, raising questions about whether these vehicles have the potential spark another crisis despite being created at the urging of the US ...

Apple Inc. looks like it may put down close to $1 billion just to keep its devices at the leading edge. Japan Display Inc., one of its key providers of screens, said it would get up to $400 million from bailout partner Harvest Tech Investment Management Co. Nestled into its two-page stock exchange statement was the revelation that the funding ...

With a disgust commensurate with the fact, Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat, says that during 40 percent of his 10 Senate years the government has been run on “continuing resolutions.” Congress passes these in order to spare itself the torture of performing its primary function, which is to set national priorities. Bennet is too serious a person to be content ...

Car launches are 10-a-penny so it’s very rare that a particular model’s demise captures the world’s attention. The Volkswagen Beetle, the last of which rolled off the production line in Mexico this week, was no ordinary vehicle though. The downfall of the “People’s Car,” an icon of post-war German prosperity as well as the 1960s counterculture, is all the more ...

Day two of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s congressional testimony was much like the first. He reiterated that the economy is “in a very good place,” but that the central bank has room to lower interest rates to keep the expansion on track. As dovish as that may sound, the comments didn’t offer much comfort to bond traders – they ...

When Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, praised bitcoin last year as “disruptive populism“ and revealed he was working on his own cryptocurrency, it was evidence of something many people had long suspected: The forces driving the growth of anarchic, get-rich-quick digital tokens are very similar to those buoying Trump and his imitators. Both are born out of a resentment ...

Earlier this week Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez challenged Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on whether something known as the Phillips curve — the hypothetical inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation — is “no longer describing what is happening in today’s economy.” In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, presidential economic adviser Larry Kudlow agreed. Ocasio-Cortez is probably concerned about wages. Although ...

Amid the turmoil of the oil-price bubble and credit crunch in 2008, a few analysts and economists discovered something remarkable. An obscure shipping index compiled in the shadow of London’s “Gherkin” tower had become a sort of daily prophecy about the direction of the global economy. The Baltic Dry Index could be used as a ”Predictor of Global Stock Returns, ...

It’s easy to criticise just about any proposed climate change solution as not effective enough. The buildup of greenhouse gases is simply too big of a problem to be solved by one course of action alone, whether it’s increasing the use of solar energy or giving up beef orcapturing carbon from the atmosphere. A recent estimate that planting lots of ...