Bloomberg Chancellor Angela Merkel reached a preliminary accord with the Social Democrats to end Germany’s political gridlock, moving closer to a fourth term and defying domestic critics who say her time is running out. The next hurdles are a key vote by her reluctant SPD partners later this month and then finalising the deal in another round of talks. After ...

Bloomberg Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, is in a quandary over whether its long-serving leader and founder Morgan Tsvangirai, who’s undergoing treatment for colon cancer, should retire before this year’s elections. While Tsvangirai, 65, has appeared increasingly frail, he remains the party’s most-popular official and his absence from the ballot could undermine its campaign. The MDC ...

The record of economists, including those at the Federal Reserve, over the past half century has been discouraging. The two greatest blunders are well-known: policies that fed double-digit inflation in the 1970s, reaching a peak of 13.5 percent in 1980; and the more recent failure to prevent the 2008-09 financial crisis and Great Recession, sending unemployment to 10 percent. Unfortunately, ...