I spend a decent amount of time traveling around the U.S. speaking at conferences and visiting clients. Doing this is a visceral form of economic research — you can witness just how various regions are recovering and expanding with your own eyes. It doesn’t take much to realize that, to paraphrase science fiction writer William Gibson, the recovery is here, ...

Canada, home to some of the world’s largest gold-mining companies, recently announced that it had effectively liquidated all of the country’s holdings of the shiny metal and is moving to what a government spokesperson described as “easily tradable” assets. It has been a long process. Canada held 1,088 tons of gold in 1955. By 2000, it was down to 46 ...

Bloomberg Prologis Inc., the world’s largest owner of industrial real estate, would like to buy more property in the U.K. That’s unlikely to happen until the country decides whether it wants to stay in the European Union in June. “For the sake of another quarter, let’s just wait,” Ben Bannatyne, president of Prologis in Europe, said in an interview at ...