With worries about a currency war growing and bond yields collapsing, investors have reached for their usual haven of gold. Only this time it has a friend (as my colleague Tim Culpan wrote): Bitcoin. Gold’s dollar price has risen 7 percent this month, Bitcoin’s by 18 percent. This apparent use of the two commodities as companion ports in a storm ...

Christine Lagarde is still to be confirmed as the European Central Bank’s next president, but work is already piling up on her desk. The euro zone is in danger of becoming the biggest collateral victim of the US-China trade war and Lagarde will need all her political skills to plot an escape route from the threat of recession. The euro ...

Summer wildfires devouring Siberian forests are hardly unusual, but this year’s are a bigger worry than normal because clouds of smoke have reached big cities in the Asian part of Russia and because the authorities have reacted clumsily. The extra attention from the Russian and global media is welcome, even if it’s tinged with unnecessary alarmism: Russia needs to start ...