Opinion

Markets, to paraphrase Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling, often forget that they keep forgetting. That’s especially true when it comes to the intractable challenges posed by global debt. Since 2008, governments around the world have looked for relatively painless ways to lower high debt levels, a central cause of the last crisis. Cutting interest rates to zero or below made ...

A conventional view is forming about what happens next in Brexit. If, as expected, parliament rejects Theresa May’s deal in January, a second referendum becomes inescapable. But there is an alternative: A general election. While calls for a second referendum have some logic, two big problems explain why May has so far ruled it out. First, it would be seized ...

After the 2008 financial crisis, Congress created a new federal entity with an important mission: to ensure that regulators would never again be caught off-guard. The Financial Stability Oversight Council brought together different agencies to watch for threats within the banking system and beyond. The Trump administration is now undermining those efforts — at the very point in the economic ...

Season’s greetings, travelers! Here’s something new to worry about: Your trip may be disrupted by drones. London Gatwick, Britain’s second-busiest airport, had to be shut twice after unmanned aerial vehicles entered its airspace in what police called a “deliberate act.” Some 10,000 passengers were diverted, hundreds of flights were delayed, and chaos reigned on the ground. The army had to ...

This hasn’t been the best of years for those of us who worry about climate change. The US administration has firmly turned against emissions controls. State backing for construction pushed China’s emissions higher. And, far from peaking or even stagnating, worldwide emissions actually increased at the fastest rate in the past seven years, according to the Global Carbon Project. The ...

Like the Nasdaq, emerging markets are no strangers to booms and busts. Unlike the US market, valuations no longer matter much outside the developed world. That’s because sell-side analysts’ earnings estimates are unreliable. The 10% correction in the Nasdaq 100 Index shouldn’t have surprised US analysts — they’ve been revising down earnings estimates since April, when trade tensions started to ...

Resisting unusual pressure from both politicians and notable market participants, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues on the Open Market Committee raised interest rates by 25 basis points and slowed the path for future hikes by less than markets hoped. In doing so, the central bank reaffirmed that its focus remains firmly domestic and economic. But the markets’ ...

“You’re the top! You’re an Arrow collar. You’re the top! You’re a Coolidge dollar. You’re the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire, You’re Mussolini, You’re Mrs. Sweeny, You’re Camember.” A version of “You’re the Top,” Cole Porter (1934) In the early 1930s, when Benito Mussolini was one of the world’s most admired political figures, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed in ...

It was one year ago that Bitcoin reached an intraday peak of almost $20,000. Since then, it’s been all downhill. The market value of all cryptocurrency assets have fallen to about $100 billion from about $800 billion at the start of the year. That looks bad, but if you look at the market’s fundamentals, 2018 gets a B+ grade. To ...

When you’re trying to build that tech dream, reality can really suck. Ofo Inc. founder Dai Wei apparently just discovered this, and the results were displeasing. His bike-rental company has immense cash flow problems and he’d even considered applying for bankruptcy, the Financial Times reported, citing a letter to employees. “For the whole of this year we’ve borne immense cash ...