When consumer prices began soaring last year, a trade union representing staff at the European Central Bank (ECB) demanded their wages increase in lockstep with inflation. This grassroots effort to index pay to price increases was ultimately unsuccessful, but it was incendiary stuff coming from the supposed guardians of euro-area price stability. Indexation, after all, can determine who is ...

  In 2018, German government officials war-gamed a massive natural-gas shortage. With the real thing looming, the lessons are sobering. Some hospitals, nursing homes and jails were forced to close; companies shut; livestock was left to die; hundreds of thousands of jobs vanished; rationing for households was imposed, according to the official account of the crisis-management exercise. In just a ...

  Bloomberg Southwest Airlines Co expects a rebound in domestic travel to carry into the summer, joining rivals predicting that consumers will shrug off worries about coronavirus variants, fork over higher fares and fill planes in the coming months. Southwest maintained a plan to restore 93% of its pre-pandemic flight capacity this quarter as robust leisure demand is joined by ...