Opinion

President Trump’s planned nomination of Nellie Liang to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, which oversees everything from interest-rate policy to financial stability, is a little surprising. She’s admirably well-qualified and in every way a good choice. Trump hasn’t always shown such good judgment. Some of the officials he’s appointed elsewhere are even at odds with the missions of the ...

Just when it looked like big central banks were swimming in the same direction, they are starting to come apart. The gaps this time are not explained simply by inflation or employment, but are driven by the international outlook and how that may affect domestic economies differently. Central banks all have domestic mandates, but the world is so inter-connected and ...

Last week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) launched the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2, which will monitor Earth’s ice sheets, recording changes in ice thickness as small as half a centimeter. The satellite will allow us to see one consequence of our collective pressure on the planet’s environment. And yet it will, in a small way, also ...

Citigroup Inc. has struggled to regain its footing since the financial crisis. The stock is still down more than 60 percent since the fall of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the worst performance by far of the big US banks. But there’s one thing for which Citi and Michael Corbat, CEO for the past six years, have been praised: cost control. ...

Bond investors often say that “No one wants to be a forced seller.” And that makes perfect sense: If you need to sell during a rout, no matter the price, you’re going to take a big hit. But it should be equally as scary to be a forced buyer. Increasingly, that’s what happening in the US high-yield corporate bond market. ...

After the big bang of the Singapore summit in June, with its showy but vague North Korean commitment to denuclearisation, many analysts doubted that the deal had any real substance. But we’re beginning to see the first signs of what a serious accord would look like. This week’s North-South summit meeting in Pyongyang produced accord on some basic essentials of ...

The UK finance industry still has few clues about what the post-Brexit landscape will look like other than the certainty that doing business with the European Union will have more friction than it does now. Fund managers aren’t hanging around for the conclusion of the divorce negotiations, and the slow hemorrhaging of jobs and assets poses a clear and present ...

The world’s third-largest economy has suffered from a caricature. Yes, Japan fell from its pinnacle in the 1990s because of a property crash, enfeebled banks and a dwindling population. But that was then. It’s not falling anymore. When Japan’s economy was stumbling, China became the darling of the commentariat, investors and multinational companies developing supply chains. The mood towards China, ...

As promised, US President Donald Trump has escalated his trade war against China — announcing tariffs of 10 percent on another $200 billion in goods, plus a threat to raise the levy to 25 percent next year. Nearly half of China’s exports to the US now face Trump’s taxes on trade. The president boasts that the latest measure will bring ...

When you hear about economic growth, or the size of the economy, it’s referring to gross domestic product. Invented in the 1930s, GDP measures the market value of everything produced in a country (or region, or state) in a given year. When you hear about the labor market, it usually involves the unemployment rate, which is the percent of people ...