Opinion

The best reality TV show in Australia right now is the televised hearings of the Royal Commission into Australian banks. The formal public inquiry, led by a retired judge with broad coercive powers, has uncovered a litany of wrongdoing including bribery and fraud rings, poor lending practices, and pervasive lying to regulators. The most startling revelations relate to financial planning ...

As scientific terms go, ‘climate change’ is failing. Good terms are specific, descriptive and help people to understand complex concepts. Climate change is ambiguous, referring perhaps to the most pressing human-generated environmental problem of the century, or to other kinds of changes that happen through natural forces and have been going on since long before humans arose. Last week I ...

Banks have become too safe. That is a chief justification cited by lawmakers to roll back the Dodd-Frank banking regulations and loosen other financial rules. The Senate passed a bill in March, and Speaker Paul Ryan said earlier this week that he had a deal to push the measure through the House. But at least one layer of protection that ...

Germany’s new government is composed of the same two parties as its previous one, but many in Germany and outside expected one major change: more government spending. Olaf Scholz, the new finance minister, comes from the Social Democratic Party, which heavily campaigned on a promise of more investment and growth in Germany. And yet Scholz’s first budget suggests those hopes ...

The world is not ready for another financial crisis, but another financial crisis may be ready for the world. OK, the odds of this are long. Still, they’re not nonexistent. The history of modern financial crises is that, originating in obscure corners of the financial system, they are initially ignored because they seem innocuous — and then wham! Think Thailand ...

Political turmoil is rarely a good backdrop for Italian bonds. This time seems different. An auction of government debt showed investors had little inclination to demand higher borrowing costs to offset the risks around the prospect of a populist, anti-immigration government of the Five Star Movement and the League. This shows the strength of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) firepower. ...

Citigroup Inc., soon after the financial crisis, split itself into two banks — a good one and a bad one. Citi said it was going to sell the latter, which included a subprime loan portfolio and other businesses that had gotten it into trouble. But it never did. Eventually CEO Michael Corbat did away with the charade and recombined them. ...

Theresa May’s government is still promising to quit Europe’s customs union when Brexit happens next year. The prime minister’s position is politically understandable, yet entirely indefensible. And it perfectly captures the bind Britain has gotten itself into. Staying in the European Union’s customs union after Brexit, or joining some specially tailored version of it, would leave the UK with a ...

Academic macroeconomists almost never try to make forecasts about the macroeconomy. That probably sounds almost unbelievable to most people, but it’s true — look at any macro paper in a mainstream economic journal, and there’s only a very small chance that it will be about forecasting. There are one or two economists out there who are deeply interested in the ...

A year after the world economy’s synchronized boomlet was recognized, it’s time to consider what the next chapter will be in the global economic story. To many people, it feels like the good times just got going, with all the major players pulling in unison. After years of moderate, patchwork expansion from the great recession, 2017 saw just about all ...