The Swedish word flygskam or its German version, Flugscham, meaning “flight shame,” is one of the words of 2019. While it’s not easy to separate its effect on airlines’ business from other factors, the countries where people are most worried about climate change do appear to be seeing drops in avoidable air traffic. In November, the number of people taking ...

Central bankers deserve credit for saving the economy from the financial crisis. They won the battle, but not the war. So now they are asking for new powers to fix the side effects of a decade of ultra-low low and even negative interest rates. The price may be a Faustian bargain with governments. The Federal Reserve had room in 2007 ...

A new government with an ambitious fiscal plan should be bold in how it finances such a rapid increase in state spending — especially with money so cheap. Boris Johnson has won an impressive electoral mandate for his Brexit deal, regardless of the slightly overdone jitters around sterling related to his 2020 deadline for a European Union trade deal. So ...

Expect the night sky to start changing fast. One day soon, the stars we can see from Earth could be outnumbered by a vast swarm of satellites. While many people today live under the murk of light pollution, we can at least still travel to a glittering night sky in the mountains, the desert, or at sea. But if communications ...

Bloomberg Wall Street sleuths are wondering whether the Federal Reserve is quietly doing more to calm the US repo market than just the headline-grabbing liquidity injections that have captivated observers for months. The New York Fed runs something called the foreign reverse repo pool, a place where other nations’ central banks can park cash. The amount outstanding has shrunk by ...

Bloomberg India’s government should avoid a fiscal stimulus to spur the economy, and focus instead on cutting public debt so that financial resources can be freed up for investment, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said. While the national government has a budget deficit target of 3.3% of gross domestic product in the year through March, a better reflection of the ...

Bloomberg Troubled Chinese conglomerate HNA Group Co repaid a 1.3 billion yuan ($185 million) bond due on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter, avoiding what could have been its first default on a publicly issued note. HNA’s move is the latest of a series of developments that have helped calm frayed nerves in China’s debt markets in recent ...

Bloomberg Sri Lanka appointed Weligamage Don Lakshman as the new central bank governor, days before the monetary authority is due to review interest rates. Lakshman is a former adviser to the Mahinda Rajapaksa government and succeeds Indrajit Coomaraswamy, who stepped down earlier citing personal reasons. The announcement on Tuesday is among the top economic appointments by Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who won ...

Bloomberg Mexico’s central bank could take monetary policy action as soon as February if it sees that inflation as well as internal and external risks remain low, Governor Alejandro Diaz de Leon said in an interview. “We have to monitor if conditions in the economy continue having this favorable trend in terms of inflation and lower external and internal risks, ...

Bloomberg China last week commissioned its first home built aircraft carrier to project its military might. It’s now on a mission to create “aircraft carrier-sized” investment banks to take on Wall Street’s giants. As the nation prepares to fully open its $45 trillion financial industry to foreign competition next year, policy makers and regulators are pushing to beef up its ...