Two European companies — French drugmaker Sanofi and German household products maker Henkel — last week became the first firms to persuade investors to pay them to borrow euros. By selling bonds yielding minus 0.05 of a percentage point, they may well have signaled the bond market’s peak, delivering this decade’s equivalent of the “Ukrainian Chicken Farm Moment.” That ...

  Of all the economic questions being debated today, the most frightening one is “Will the robots take our jobs?” This nightmare scenario comes in several flavors. The extreme version is that automation simply makes human workers obsolete, just as cars made horses redundant. A less apocalyptic possibility is what economists call “skill-biased technological change” — people who are technically ...

  Bloomberg Bitcoin technology is starting to seep into the electricity business, shaking up the way payments are managed every time a light switch is flipped. From New York to Vienna, researchers and utilities are adapting the cloud-based ledger system used to track bitcoins as a replacement for slower administrative systems that require constant human input and multiple spreadsheets. Once ...