Bloomberg European Union ministers finalized their Brexit negotiating position a day after the UK threatened to quit talks on its departure unless the bloc drops its demands for a divorce payment as high as 100 billion euros ($112 billion). Governments of 27 remaining nations approved their mandate for EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier at a two-hour meeting in Brussels. The …

To Indian eyes, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s big One Belt One Road Belt (OROB) Forum — which attracted 29 heads of government and representatives of 130 countries — looked awfully familiar. It looked, in fact, like an imperial durbar — the sort of grand spectacle that the British in India used to arrange periodically, with princelings from across the subcontinent …

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 …