Economists may be finally closing in on the reason for asset bubbles. How to pop them before they grow too large, however, is a much harder problem. The study of bubbles has steadily gathered urgency during the past four decades as crashes became more spectacular and more damaging. The stock crash of 1987 was a wake-up call for those who ...

In recent years, much of the commentary about climate change has gone from sternly serious to wildly despairing. A new report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the effects of climate change are accelerating and that the world has barely more than a decade to make deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions and limit ...

A simple lesson we should have learned from the financial crisis is that complexity begets abuse, and undermines stability. Yet the key measure we use to determine banks’ health is so fiendishly difficult to understand that outsiders have no choice but to accept what we’re told by the lender. That’s the conclusion of a broad UK government review of the ...