After the financial crisis, Europe’s political leaders put together a complex set of rules to make it harder for future governments to bail out banks. That system is looking so full of holes that one wonders what the point of it is. Two episodes in a fortnight show that taxpayers are still very much on the hook for the financial ...

Thirty years ago, India endured its last big financial crisis when it had to send gold held in the central bank’s vaults over to London to borrow hard currency from the Bank of England. Luckily, the flights landed safely, and so did India. The turnaround in economic thinking triggered by that balance-of-payments humiliation saw the state shed controls on production ...

According to Elizabeth Warren, economists who say that her proposed wealth tax would stifle investment and growth are “just wrong.” Leaving aside the question of whether economic projections, which by definition require assumptions about future human behaviour, can be right or wrong, it is true that her proposal has spurred a vigorous debate among economists. A lot of the points ...