When Indonesia’s Joko Widodo visited Ukraine and Russia this summer, Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi explained the president was “choosing to try to contribute, instead of choosing to be quiet.” And yet now, with the world at a perilous juncture, he has bafflingly chosen silence. Jokowi, as the president is known, is once again sitting out the United Nations’ General Assembly, ...

  The US dollar has surged almost 14% from its low last year in trade-weighted terms. This has led to a huge terms of trade shock (the price of exports compared with the price of imports) affecting any country that imports a lot of energy, which trades in dollars. On top of that, in Europe and the UK, at least, ...

  The Federal Reserve is inching towards acknowledging how painful its inflation fight is likely to be, but it’s still a lot closer to the optimists than the pessimists. On a day when it raised interest rates by 0.75 percentage point to a range of 3% to 3.25%, the Fed also released economic projections showing that its median forecast for ...