Opinion

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy showed that he doesn’t merely hold a better poker hand than Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont; he’s also the better player. Unfortunately, the Catalan separatism problem won’t be resolved by this particular game. At some point, Spain will need to offer Catalans an arrangement with which they can live. An example of a potentially acceptable arrangement ...

The general perception is that global bond yields are historically low because monetary policy has been aggressively eased. This leads to expectations that yields will rise—possibly sharply—once the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank start the process they call “balance sheet normalization.” After all, when he was Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke spent a lot of time and effort ...

When the economies of Nigeria and South Africa recently rebounded, it wasn’t oil or minerals that did the trick. It was agriculture. Faster and more sustainable agricultural growth is crucial not only to the continent’s economy, but also to its ability to feed and employ its surging population. Agriculture still accounts for a quarter of gross domestic product and as ...

Communism is officially dead. North Korea, the last holdout of the 20th-century Soviet-style central planning, is moving towards a hybrid economy. David Volodzko in a Bloomberg View op-ed reports: Economic reforms made in 2011 have begun to take hold, allowing factory managers to set salaries, find their own suppliers, and hire and fire employees. Farming collectives have been replaced by ...

With a 2 percent gain in September, the S&P 500 Index has set a record: positive returns in each of the first 10 months of the year. There’s never been a full calendar year when this has happened every month. Going back to November 2016, the index has ripped off 12 consecutive monthly gains. The S&P hasn’t had a down ...

As you are by now all probably aware, Richard Thaler won this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. All question of whether this is a “real” Nobel can now be laid to rest, since the announcement was made via the Nobel Prize’s official verified Twitter account. Thaler won the prize for his research in behavioral economics, although he’s far ...

Critics have complained about President Trump’s bombast on foreign policy, but some GOP insiders worry about a less visible problem—a hollowed-out bureaucracy that has been slow to develop and implement strategy. Skeptics say that on major issues—Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Russia—the Trump administration hasn’t explained clear, systematic plans for achieving results. Even where there seems to be a coherent diplomatic ...

Several state attorneys general have announced they will sue to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s rollback of President Barack Obama’s signature Clean Power Plan. Can they win? And should they? The answer to both questions is no, but not because of anything inherently wrong with the plan to cut greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants. Although administrative decisions must be rational, ...

The vast majority of high-level economic officials gathering at the International Monetary Fund-World Bank annual meetings in Washington this week will welcome and embrace both the recent and the prospective improvements in the global economy. And they should. The ongoing synchronized pick-up in growth has taken a long time to materialize, and is occurring in the context of unusually subdued ...

Three years since their banking union began to take shape, European Union regulators are seeking fresh powers to deal with lenders in trouble. Their plan would let them stop withdrawals from a failing bank for a few days while they address the problem, with the aim of preventing a run. But this approach could easily have the opposite effect, spreading ...