Yields on German government bonds last week ventured deeper into the uncharted territory of negative nominal levels, triggering various direct and indirect market reactions. More subtly, this reinforces a trend of the past decade: Advanced countries are behaving more like emerging economies in certain ways. This does not mean that these countries are converging down towards their less prosperous and ...

Central banks and financial regulators have been on high alert since the launch of Facebook Inc.’s proposed cryptocurrency, Libra. It’s still at the conceptual stage, but the prospect of a tech giant with 2.6 billion users shuffling digital money around and backing it with piles of dollars, euros and pounds is a potential heart attack in the making for those ...

Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw is one of the most influential economists in the United States. But the 61-year-old’s authority does not stem from advancing an arcane scholarly finding. Nor has Mankiw coined some catchy phrase that captured the popular imagination. Instead, Mankiw’s power derives from his position as the author of one of the most-widely used introductory college economics ...