Speculators have piled back into oil since OPEC announced output cuts in November. But don’t be fooled into thinking that means prices are set to soar. As my Bloomberg News colleague Alex Longley pointed out last week, hedge funds and money managers have placed record trades on an oil rally. Net long positions of so-called oil speculators reached an ...

  Europe’s promise to lower greenhouse-gas emissions looked bright a dozen years ago, when its leaders created the first big market for trading carbon permits. Sadly, though, its system has failed to encourage investment in clean technology and appreciably lower carbon dioxide emissions. Until the European Union trims the number of permits traded enough to drastically raise the cost of ...

  US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in Iraq as forces of the war-torn country embarked on major air-and-ground offensive to drive IS extremists from western Mosul. Iraq’s second-largest city Mosul fell into the hands of the extremists in the summer of 2014, when the group captured large swaths of northern and western Iraq. Iraqi army, special operations forces, and federal ...