The Socialist candidate for the French presidency, Benoit Hamon, says he doesn’t believe in the ‘myth’ and “quasi-religion” of growth– it’s part of the “consumerist, productivist and materialist model” of development, he argues. That’s outside the economic mainstream, and many see those views as a symptom of the meltdown of the global left. But the just-released Global Happiness Report ...

  The global smartphone market has seen better days, yet the industry underpins the hottest stocks in Asia’s best-performing sector this year. The MSCI Asia Pacific Infotech index is up almost 16 percent in 2017, outgunning the runner up (industrials) by just shy of 7 percentage points. And leading that sub-index, in dollar terms, are smartphone suppliers. What’s interesting is ...

  Markets are never perfect in their predictive abilities but they tend to be forward-looking in how they trade to anticipate what will happen next. Take last week’s interest-rate increase by the Federal Reserve, its third since December 2015, and the bond market. Bond yields have been rising for some time. In what some investors are calling a generational bottom ...