One of the controversies that swirls around the Federal Reserve — America’s central bank — is whether it could rescue the economy from collapse in the event of another financial crisis. Among economists, there are many skeptics, but Ben Bernanke, who was Fed chairman during the 2007-09 Great Recession, isn’t one of them. In a long and detailed paper, Bernanke ...

Give Macy’s Inc. a polite clap, and no more, for kicking off the retail holiday reporting season in reasonable style. The department store giant said that like-for-like sales from company-owned stores fell 0.7% in November and December, compared with the year earlier period. That’s by no means stellar, but it was much better than its dismal third quarter, when same-store ...

A perennial risk in the airline industry is that executives splash money on shiny new planes but fail to make an adequate return. Willie Walsh, the chief executive officer of International Consolidated Airlines Group, has tried to do things differently by — shock! — insisting that the British, Irish and Spanish airlines he oversees make decent money. (Created in 2011, ...