Opinion

Catalonia’s separatist leaders say they will declare independence from Spain within 48 hours of victory in the independence referendum they’ve called for October 1. Spain’s highest court has ruled the referendum unconstitutional, and the government is determined to disrupt the ballot. A toxic combination of festering frustrations, nationalist myth, and mismanagement by Madrid has brought Spain to this point. Climbing …

The competition to host HQ2, as Amazon’s planned second headquarters is called, has captivated the nation. The lucky city can expect an economic bonanza: 50,000 jobs, plus the tech ecosystem that the online retail giant’s presence will inevitably attract. But the winner doesn’t have to be a big metropolis. On the contrary, Amazon has the power to create an entirely …

The yuan’s ascent this year has brought with it some of the usual handwringing about the impact on China’s exports. The anxiety kind of misses the point about modern China, as does much of the political conversation in America. A peek at the past week’s data from China is instructive. The really important numbers weren’t a decline in exports, but …

Federal Reserve Vice Chair Stanley Fischer’s decision to resign in October with nine months remaining on his term could mean the potential is high for central-bank policy to be reshaped much sooner than many investors expected. Fischer’s departure will leave four of the seven seats on the Fed Board of Governors vacant, and that doesn’t include the one held by …

Can we get real about ‘tax reform,’ the Republican promise to enact deep tax cuts that will spur economic growth? Probably not, but let’s give it a try. For starters, we can stop calling it ‘reform.’ That’s a charged word, implying that the new tax system will be superior to the old. We don’t know that for a fact; the …

The 1997 Asian crisis forced Indonesia to replace a 93-year-old relic with something resembling a modern bankruptcy code. India took another 20 years—and its own $191 billion bad-debt crisis—to get to the same point. With the country’s top court backing the new insolvency code, a warped power equation between debtors and creditors is heading for a big shift. It remains …

Even more than before, President Donald Trump now has the chance to entirely reshape the Federal Reserve. Janet Yellen’s term as chair ends early next year, and her deputy, Stanley Fischer, has just resigned, citing personal reasons. Soon Trump will be able to appoint a new person to the top job and three other positions on the seven-member board — …

Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s iconic leader, is sacrificing her moral authority for political expediency. By failing to speak out against repression — and, more broadly, by not doing enough to help her country grow and prosper — she risks losing both her power and her reputation. Suu Kyi, whose years leading the resistance to the Burmese junta earned her …

I recently had a discussion with my Bloomberg View colleagues Conor Sen and Justin Fox about whether cities or suburbs are the future in the US, this turns out to be a very popular and contentious topic. Richard Florida, the noted urbanist, recently bemoaned the death of the great urban revival that saw young Americans flocking to city centers during …

Imagine buying a home when the previous owner continues to live in it and call the shots, indefinitely. Imagine running a market that matched such sellers with buyers. That’s the dilemma facing Hong Kong and other financial hubs such as Singapore and London as they consider accepting the dual-class shareholding structure used by US-listed tech giants like Facebook Inc. and …