Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s speech at last week’s central banking conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, was brief — but financial markets took notice. The S&P 500 fell sharply as investors adjusted their thinking on how tough the Fed was willing to be to get inflation back under control. Powell underlined that restoring price stability is the Fed’s “overarching focus” ...

  Corporate junk bonds in the US are paying investors a paltry premium for the risk of holding them into a looming recession. Either spreads need to widen or the recession clouds need to vanish, but something’s got to give. Consider the first possibility, the base case. Junk spreads typically track recession risk closely, and the economic gloom has been ...

  Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday at 91, defied convention in ways small and large throughout some of the most tumultuous years of the Cold War. He failed in his most basic ambitions. But the world was better for them all the same. Born to peasants in a rural village that had been ravaged by collectivization, Gorbachev grasped the ...