Risk assets such as stocks, corporate bonds and bank loans have been trading in a wide and volatile range, taking investors on a roller-coaster ride up and down, including most recently a rally of about 10 percent in U.S. equity markets. This phenomenon is likely to continue in the short-term, so here are eight characteristics of this financial environment: Pronounced ...

Astronomer Fred Hoyle famously quipped in 1982 that the odds of a simple living thing assembling itself from inanimate chemicals were as slim as the chance that a tornado passing through a junkyard would leave in its wake a Boeing 747. The statement reflects the 20th-century understanding that even pond scum was composed of cells of mind-boggling complexity. Today biologists ...

Technically speaking, the U.S. State Department is the foreign policy arm of the United States. But increasingly, the U.S. Defense Department has taken a leading role in conducting foreign policy on its own: primarily through providing security assistance to countries around the world, sometimes contrary to State’s recommendations. This will come as no surprise to Central Asia watchers, who have ...