Lionel Laurent Italy has a well-known problem: A stack of bad loans on the books of its banks and nobody willing to buy them at current prices. Until investors get more reassurance on what these loans are truly worth, Italian banks won’t emerge from their crisis — and will suffer more losses in future. The plan to rescue Banca ...

  Helicopter money is back in the headlines amid speculation that Japan may turn in desperation to the final chapter of the handbook of unconventional monetary policy. But there’s an alternative to handing consumers a one-time payment in the hopes they’ll spend it: Give them a permanent wage hike instead. Milton Friedman’s thought experiment about whirlybirds dropping cash from the ...

  Istanbul / AFP President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday launched his most bitter attack yet on Turkey’s Western allies over the July 15 attempted putsch, accusing them of supporting both “terror” and the coup plotters who tried to unseat him. Erdogan, who blames the plot on the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, also described the coup as a “scenario written ...