Ten years after risky mortgages helped spark a global financial crisis, lenders and policymakers have lost none of their talent for helping people make big-ticket purchases they couldn’t otherwise afford. True, 100 percent mortgages are rare now, let alone the 125 percent loan-to-value deals offered by Northern Rock. Fibbing about your income to get a loan is more difficult, though ...

The Trump administration has taken on three ambitious statistical projects: tracking down cases of voter registration fraud, identifying racism in college admissions and developing an algorithm for “extreme vetting” of visa applications. These would all be very tricky even for a trained professional. I doubt the president’s people are up to the task. Let’s start with voter fraud. It’s actually ...

Latin America, a region maligned by recent crises that nonetheless boasts a $4.6 trillion economy, needs urgent policy shifts to bring growth rates back to where they were during years of high commodity prices. Time is running out because its demographic advantage — when active workers outnumber retirees — will peak in 2020, according to a report from the Inter-American ...