Economists still get a lot of flak for failing to predict the 2007-2009 recession. These criticisms are often misguided. Nonetheless, there’s an important sense in which forecasting models were badly mistaken — and probably remain so today. Critics of forecasting tend to misunderstand its purpose. Forecasters know perfectly well that, in a random world, the one certainty is that their …

A blind spider creeping through America’s judicial thicket might be heading to the Supreme Court, which will have to decide if the contentment or even the survival of the Bone Cave Harvestman spider species, which lives only in two central Texas counties, is any of the federal government’s business. If it is, what isn’t? The US Fish and Wildlife Service …

Reuters Egypt’s stock market tumbled in heavy trade on Monday after the central bank unexpectedly raised key interest rates overnight, while Qatar outperformed in an otherwise quiet Gulf. Cairo’s blue-chip index dropped 2.5 percent after the central bank hiked its overnight deposit rate and overnight lending rate by two percentage points — its first increase since a hike of three …