Opinion

  Nobody expected the conservative Swiss to approve the idea of a hefty monthly payout to everyone in the country without exception. The proposal for a universal basic income (UBI) — a monthly payout of 2,500 francs ($2,560) — was rejected by 77 percent of Swiss voters in Sunday’s referendum, just as their government recommended. That’s a shame, because the ...

  Mohamed A. El-Erian The very sharp drop in yields on U.S. Treasuries on Friday suggests that the fixed-income markets have interpreted the last week’s disappointing jobs report as an indication that the economy is facing diminishing demand momentum. As a result, traders significantly lowered their expectations of an interest-rate hike by the Federal Reserve this summer, which also drove ...

When President Barack Obama came into office, the fact that Russia sold the U.S. the rocket engines it needed for launches was a feature of U.S. foreign policy, not a bug. Obama was trying to reset the U.S. relationship with Moscow, and that meant finding areas where the two former Cold War rivals could cooperate. If the U.S. would rely ...

  WASHINGTON Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric (2015 revenues: $117 billion), gave an interesting speech the other day that illuminates some pressing questions about the future of globalization. This involves politics as much as economics. It should be no surprise that the three remaining major presidential candidates (Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump) are no fans of ...

  As the vote to Remain or Leave the EU approaches, both sides are stepping up their campaigns, with the Remain campaign focusing on the economic dangers of Brexit, while the Leave campaign is painting a scary scenario of an uncontrolled immigration if the UK stays in the EU. Amid the feverish atmosphere, the Remain campaign received a major boost ...

  Sara Hsu SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS The question of increasing competition and jobs in the healthcare sector is hardly a priority under China’s current reforms, and reasonably so, even though this would aid the transition to a highly skilled service-based economy. The main question now is whether health care costs can be kept low for the consumer, but high ...

  In a continent where politics is still painted as a battle between the left and right wing, Peru is hard to place. Consider Sunday’s presidential election, in which an election-eve poll showed Pedro Pablo Kuczynski pulling slightly ahead of former frontrunner Keiko Fujimori. Both candidates are business-friendly pragmatists who have pledged to respect the free market, keep the country ...

On May 29, 2016, South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s spokesman announced that Uganda pledged to suspend all military and police ties with North Korea. This announcement followed a bilateral meeting, between Park and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni. The Ugandan government has been careful to insist that Kampala will maintain diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, but the suspension of military cooperation is ...

  There is an important, but quiet debate in the economics profession about what leads to big recessions: wealth or debt. Almost everyone agrees, at this point, that the Great Recession of 2007-09 was caused by the financial system. But that leaves the question of what, exactly, happens in a financial system that leads an economy to crash. Formal economic ...

  LONDON Misery loves company, so refugees from America’s Republican Party should understand that theirs is not the only party that has chosen a leader who confirms caricatures of it while repudiating its purposes. Jeremy Corbyn, the silliest leader in the British Labour Party’s 116-year history, might kill satire as well as whatever remains of socialism. Labour was founded in ...