The ideas of France’s Benoit Hamon, the surprise front-runner in the presidential primaries of the Socialist Party, are far to the left of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and even the U.K. Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn. This, of course, is the era of the expanding Overton Window, with radical ideas bursting into the mainstream. One Hamon proposal in particular, however, ...

  Without question, the most exciting economic story of the past half century has been the dramatic, and probably unprecedented, decline in global poverty. In a recent study, the World Bank estimated that in 2015, just over 700 million people remained trapped in desperate poverty, or 9.6 percent of the world’s population. Those sound like big numbers until you compare ...

  Much business in Asia is still done the old way — trust is the most important asset. As the region becomes the biggest source of dollar bonds in the developing world, however, investors are starting to question whether they need more in writing. It’s high time. For one thing, bond fund managers are talking about limiting the freedom of ...