Opinion

  Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has been the only “adult in the room” since the U.K. vote to quit the European Union, according to former BOE policy maker Danny Blanchflower. It’s an assessment many would agree with. Unfortunately, Carney looks like he may be planning a Brexit of his own. Prime Minister Theresa May, former Foreign Secretary William ...

  Back in 2012, Daron Acemoglu — an economist I follow and greatly respect — wrote a paper along with James Robinson and Thierry Verdier claiming to explain why Scandinavian countries are (supposedly) less innovative than the U.S. Acemoglu et al. theorized that Scandinavia embraces “cuddly capitalism” — a strong safety net that prevents failure — while the U.S. goes ...

  In the 2000s, a series of academic papers showed that corporate America had become a much less comfortable place for incumbents. Lots of people in corporate America already knew this, but it was helpful to see peer-reviewed evidence: L.G. Thomas and Richard D’Aveni found big increases in profit volatility among manufacturing companies from 1950 to 2002. Diego Comin and ...

  Where are living standards the highest? You might think that’s an easy question to answer. Just take a country’s total income (in the United States, that’s now about $18 trillion) and divide by the nation’s population (U.S.: now about 320 million). The result is per capita income (now about $56,000 for every man, woman and child in America). Compare ...

  With its debts surging and growth sluggish, China has hit on a new strategy to revitalize its ailing economy. It’s the same as the old strategy. Only this time, it won’t work. Earlier this month, China’s State Council released guidelines for a new swap program, in which companies can exchange troubled debt with banks in return for equity. The ...

  Next Tuesday will be the start of open enrollment for Obamacare’s state exchanges, which offer health insurance to the 7 percent of Americans who buy their own coverage. It’s an anxious moment for the program: Enrollment is expected to remain significantly less than originally hoped. Some insurers have pulled out of the exchanges altogether. And those that remain have ...

  Former deputy head of the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority Paul Fisher has made an emphatic remark: Climate change could trigger the world’s next financial crisis. This should ring alarm for the policy makers. Fisher has warned that sudden repricing of assets due to climate change could hugely affect businesses across the globe. His comments come close on ...

There’s a backlash against globalization underway in many Western countries. Although Americans still say positive things about international trade and immigration, political candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have gotten a lot of support for opposing both to a degree that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Meanwhile, trade deals like the relatively innocuous Trans-Pacific Partnership are suddenly ...

  India’s Tata group of companies, which sells everything from salt to software, is known for being, well, old-fashioned. Genteel, even. It tries very hard to avoid any sort of controversy. That’s why the sudden removal of the group’s young chairman, Cyrus Mistry, and his replacement by his predecessor, Ratan Tata, is particularly startling. Apparently, not even Tata Sons Ltd., ...

  Some 12,000 years ago, with the invention of farming, humans started a war against weeds — and the weeds are still a step ahead. As farmers advanced from using hard labor to protect their crops to using chemicals and genetic engineering, the weeds survived thanks to the oldest weapon known to living things: evolution. Now, while scientists work on ...