All upheavals leave their marks. Some fade away, some linger. Following the Black Death, the plague that’s believed to have killed 60% of Europe’s population in the second half of the 14th century, the realisation that life is short, played a big role in shaping interest rates in late medieval Europe, stretching all the way to the Enlightenment. Could we ...

If the recent selloff in markets proves anything, it’s that for too many years too many people were focussed solely on returns with zero consideration for risk or safety. The last time anyone really thought about safety in markets was during the financial crisis more than a decade ago, when investors couldn’t get enough government bonds or cash. But as ...

It doesn’t matter that the United States doubled China in reported Covid-19 cases because those numbers (164,610 and 82,198 respectively as of March 31) don’t tell us how many people actually became infected in either country. Nor do they tell us how fast the disease is spreading, since only a tiny portion of the population in the United States has ...