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 ...