“Enlightened statesmen,” wrote James Madison, “will not always be at the helm.” His genius extended to understatement, and until Tuesday it was approaching probable that by midnight of November’s first Tuesday, sensible Americans would be elated and distraught — elated because someone grotesquely unsuited to the presidency would have been denied that office, but distraught because such a person had ...

It was December 2017 and Apple Inc’s recently released iPhone X was delighting a small cohort of owners with its upgraded technology and blazing performance. At the same time, a different cohort of iPhone owners was dismayed by the slowing performance of their older models. The culprit, it turned out, was Apple: It had sent a software update that slowed ...

In ordinary times, February’s US jobs data would have been labeled as nothing short of a blowout. Treasury yields would have climbed, with the expectation that the Federal Reserve would leave interest rates alone and let the labor market run hot, reviving dormant inflation. Needless to say, these are far from normal times. US payrolls surged by 273,000 in February, ...

Since taking over as the euro zone’s main banking supervisor, the European Central Bank (ECB) has spearheaded efforts to reduce the amount of bad loans that had cumulated throughout the great recession and the euro zone sovereign debt crisis. This pile has fallen from 6.8% of total loans at the peak in the December 2015 to 2.9% in September 2019. ...

As the coronavirus spreads, it’s increasingly clear that the US government has made mistakes. This is a difficult time to assess those mistakes, however; it’s not yet clear, and won’t be for some time, either the extent or the responsibility for things that have gone wrong. We’re going to see more articles about how things went awry, and that’s part ...

Recently, the S&P 500 ETF SPY traded over $100 billion in volume in a single day. With a .1% financial transactions tax, something that a few US presidential hopefuls had proposed, that volume would have generated $100 million in government revenue. Those types of numbers have lawmakers salivating over the potential to raise untold amounts of money from applying very ...

For travellers intrepid enough to share an aircraft with a group of strangers in the grip of an epidemic, now is a great time for bargains. Americans can get return flights from New York to Miami right now for around $51, Bloomberg News reported earlier. In China, premium budget carrier Juneyao Airlines is offering one-way tickets for the three-and-a-half hour ...

Bloomberg Oil prices crashed, equities plunged and Treasuries soared on Monday as the world headed for a full-blown price war in crude and panic appeared to grip financial markets. In a dramatic start to the week across assets: Futures on the S&P 500 Index fell about 5%, triggering trading curbs designed to limit the most dramatic moves while cash markets ...

Bloomberg Sovereign bonds in India rose to their highest in more than a decade and stocks fell the most since 2015 amid rising risks to the nation’s financial system along with a plunge in crude that led to panic sell-off of risk assets globally. The yield on the benchmark 10-year debt slid below 6% for the first time since 2009. ...

Bloomberg India, home to one of the world’s worst piles of bad debt, once again finds itself defending the stability of its financial system after the biggest bank failure in its history. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) took to Twitter to affirm the safety of deposits in the wake of a decision to seize Yes Bank Ltd. and invite ...