For years, Russia has been the world’s biggest sovereign gold bug: Even while gold prices were in the doldrums, it doggedly kept increasing its reserves. Now that gold is at the highest level since 2013, the tactic appears to be paying off. The US dollar’s dominance as a global reserve currency is commonly thought to result from the dearth of ...

China’s central bank is stretching its arms far and wide to stem convulsions in the real economy. In the process, it’s lending legitimacy to financial firms that have long operated in the shadows. Beijing has invited non-bank financial institutions to play a larger and more formal role in the aftermath of the first regulatory takeover of a commercial lender in ...

The euro area economy is in a real bind, as Mario Draghi admitted at European Central Bank (ECB) summit in Portugal. So he won’t have been too thrilled that his suggestions on how to respond were subject to a rapid and damning response from the world’s most famous Twitter account. “Mario Draghi just announced more stimulus could come, which immediately ...

Last week, the New York State Assembly passed the most aggressive clean-energy target in the United States, requiring New York to get 100 percent of its electricity from zero-emissions sources by 2040. Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is expected to sign the bill into law, called it “the most aggressive in the country.” On the other side of the country, Oregon’s ...

Yields on German government bonds last week ventured deeper into the uncharted territory of negative nominal levels, triggering various direct and indirect market reactions. More subtly, this reinforces a trend of the past decade: Advanced countries are behaving more like emerging economies in certain ways. This does not mean that these countries are converging down towards their less prosperous and ...

Central banks and financial regulators have been on high alert since the launch of Facebook Inc.’s proposed cryptocurrency, Libra. It’s still at the conceptual stage, but the prospect of a tech giant with 2.6 billion users shuffling digital money around and backing it with piles of dollars, euros and pounds is a potential heart attack in the making for those ...

Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw is one of the most influential economists in the United States. But the 61-year-old’s authority does not stem from advancing an arcane scholarly finding. Nor has Mankiw coined some catchy phrase that captured the popular imagination. Instead, Mankiw’s power derives from his position as the author of one of the most-widely used introductory college economics ...

Bloomberg US stocks fell while gains in Treasuries pushed the 10-year yield below 2 percent as simmering geopolitical tensions damped investor appetite for risk. Gold jumped. The S&P 500 dropped for a third-straight session, the longest since May 9, as US officials downplayed expectations of a resolution to the trade war ahead of highly-anticipated meeting between President Donald Trump and ...

Bloomberg The pound will tumble to levels not seen since 2017 against the euro as Brexit turmoil outweighs a dovish European Central Bank, according to analysts. Sterling is likely to slide towards 92 pence per euro by year-end, about 3 percent below current levels and a rate not seen in 21 months, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. That pessimism ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve policy makers are discovering they likely need to shift into an even lower gear if they are to speed up the US economy. Chairman Jerome Powell and colleagues last week estimated that the so-called neutral interest rate — the level which neither stimulates nor restricts growth — now sits around 2.5 percent, down from 2.75 percent in ...