The U.S. Federal Reserve’s latest economic projections contain an encoded message crucial to understanding the central bank’s policies: Inflation has been stuck below the Fed’s target in part because officials don’t actually want to get it back up. It’s important to recognize that the Summary of Economic Projections, released four times a year, does not consist of forecasts about the ...

Asia’s major economies marked International Women’s Day 2016 with relatively little fanfare, despite the demographic imperative that confronts the aging populations of China, Japan and South Korea. According to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Asian corporate boardrooms have low gender diversity despite moves such as Japan’s “Womenomics,” although the bank blames societal issues rather than deliberate hiring decisions. In its ...

The value of the Canadian dollar and the price of oil, one of the nation’s top exports, have both tumbled to near record lows. But those details — and the apparent demise of the Keystone XL pipeline — don’t begin to tell the story of what lies ahead for the economy of Canada, America’s second-largest trading partner. Last year, Canadian ...