Say it ain’t so, Doug. From 2009 to early 2015, Douglas Elmendorf was the widely respected director of the Congressional Budget Office, where he repeatedly warned lawmakers that chronic deficits are unsustainable, pose long-term dangers — and that shrinking them sooner rather than later would make the task easier. Now, economist Elmendorf, who has become dean of the Kennedy School ...

Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), made a pertinent point when she described tax as “the lifeblood of modern states”. Addressing finance ministers at the recent Arab Fiscal Forum in Abu Dhabi, she drove home the idea of introducing Value Added Tax (VAT) to shore up GCC economies. Her call for the Gulf states to introduce ...

Call it the new normal for European bank earnings. Standard Chartered shares plunged by the most in more than three years on Tuesday after the bank posted a “surprise” 2015 pretax loss of $1.5 billion, somewhat different from the $1.37 billion average profit estimate from 20 analysts. On Monday, HSBC delivered a “surprise” fourth-quarter pretax loss of $858 million, rather ...