China has begun a great rental giveaway, offering cheap land and subsidized loans in an effort to kick-start development of home leasing markets in major cities across the nation. Anyone expecting a rental housing boom to match the growth of the private purchase market may be disappointed, though: China’s real estate industry is likely to remain dominated by the development …

‘California Regulates Cow Farts,’ is how a New York Post headline put it, implying it was a wacky move by Governor Jerry Brown. In fact, California’s methane law represents a serious attempt by America’s biggest dairy state to come to grips with a potent greenhouse gas. Methane is responsible for about a quarter of human-generated global warming. While it’s not …

Even by government standards, it is a colossally dumb idea: revoking someone’s license to work as a way to get them to pay off their student loans. Yet many states do just that. Student loan debt has more than doubled since 2009 to $1.3 trillion today. The average borrower in the class of 2016 left campus more than $30,000 in …