Bloomberg Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, is in a quandary over whether its long-serving leader and founder Morgan Tsvangirai, who’s undergoing treatment for colon cancer, should retire before this year’s elections. While Tsvangirai, 65, has appeared increasingly frail, he remains the party’s most-popular official and his absence from the ballot could undermine its campaign. The MDC ...

The record of economists, including those at the Federal Reserve, over the past half century has been discouraging. The two greatest blunders are well-known: policies that fed double-digit inflation in the 1970s, reaching a peak of 13.5 percent in 1980; and the more recent failure to prevent the 2008-09 financial crisis and Great Recession, sending unemployment to 10 percent. Unfortunately, ...

It’s been almost a month since Wall Street took a step towards adopting Bitcoin as its own with the launch of cash-settled futures contracts. The results haven’t been stellar. Promoted as ‘Gold 2.0,’ Bitcoin hasn’t quite worked out that way: Its price in dollars has fallen by about 20% from a mid-December high, while its volatility climbed to its highest ...