Opinion

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the global financial crisis that set off the Great Recession. What the then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had characterized as a mere “$50 billion problem” morphed into a plunge in equity values with investors losing trillions of dollars, and a recession that caused unemployment to peak at 10 percent in …

The latest round of congressional sanctions against Russia garnered much attention for the message they sent to President Donald Trump: We don’t trust you to decide when to lift or ease sanctions on Moscow. True, it was an important signal to the American people, the president and the rest of the world that nearly all of America’s legislators felt Russia …

In politics, holding the center ground might be a useful strategy for winning elections, but rarely for generating enthusiasm. Emmanuel Macron’s favorability ratings just dropped seven points, to a low 36 percent, according to a recent poll for the HuffPost and CNews. If he’s not careful, Macron may repeat the mistakes of Francois Hollande, his mentor and predecessor. Macron’s victory …

July was another month of very low inflation, we learned it. That’s too bad. Economists had anticipated a small but respectable gain in the US consumer price index. That would have relieved some pressure on the US Federal Reserve to delay interest-rate increases in the name of economic growth. The increase was indeed small at 0.1 percent in July from …

During a recent White House meeting with President Donald Trump, Apple CEO Tim Cook remarked that “coding should be a requirement in every public school.” He’s right. But turning an aspiration into a reality—whether in the classroom or in the Apple store—takes time, money and concentrated effort. The economic argument for upgrading computer science education in the US is strong. …

Can Amazon do to the pharmacy business what it’s done to … well, everything else? Rumor has it they’re thinking about doing just that. They’ve reportedly created a new general manager position to look into such an expansion. In May, when those rumors started floating, Bloomberg’s own Max Nisen explained why they might find the business attractive: CVS Health Corp.’s …

A little-noticed statement last week could portend the next big battle in China’s effort to control its debt. On August 2, the finance ministry issued directives that state-owned companies improve returns, control risks and make sure that “projects are financially viable before decisions are made.” That the government feels the need to spell out such obvious goals tells you the …

My Bloomberg View colleague Tyler Cowen has a running series of blog posts bearing the title “Markets in Everything.” Plenty of other economists and writers have picked up the phrase, and with good reason—it’s evocative of a powerful idea that defined much of Western political economy in the later part of the 20th century. The idea is that markets—systems of …

Southern Gothic is a literary genre and, occasionally, a political style that, like the genre, blends strangeness and irony. Consider the current primary campaign to pick the Republican nominee for the US Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions. It illuminates, however, not a regional peculiarity but a national perversity, that of the Republican Party. In 1985, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III—the …

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is worried about a bond bubble. “By any measure, real long-term interest rates are much too low and therefore unsustainable,” Greenspan said in a recent interview. “When they move higher they are likely to move reasonably fast. We are experiencing a bubble, not in stock prices but in bond prices. This is not discounted …