Catalonia’s now ousted separatist leader Carles Puigdemont has to look for hopeful signs wherever he can get them. After Girona FC, his hometown soccer team, sensationally defeated Real Madrid 2-1 on Sunday, Puigdemont tweeted it was ‘an example and a reference for many situations’ — and added a winking emoticon. In reality, the weekend’s events showed Puigdemont and other Catalan ...

The status of bitcoin as a legitimate financial asset may be rising even faster than its price. Just last month, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase, said that bitcoin was A) a fraud and B) something his bank would never touch. Dimon said he would personally fire anyone who deigned to trade it. CME group president Bryan ...

In his final months as European Central Bank president in 2011, a frustrated Jean-Claude Trichet lamented that “In the face of the crisis, we felt abandoned by conventional tools.” Economics models, he argued, could learn from other disciplines like physics, engineering and psychology; they should better capture the simple fact that humans are not rational, particularly in a crisis. His ...