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 …