The year ahead looks to be dangerous for health-care security in the US, as Donald Trump’s administration continues to sabotage the law that Congress couldn’t repeal. New proposals would let many more healthy Americans drop their Obamacare coverage — raising costs for the unhealthy and risks for everyone, sick or well. It will fall to state governments to resist this ...

The economics profession’s gender problems came to the fore last year. A number of people had been speaking up about the issue for a while, but this time the concern really boiled over. The spark was a paper by then-undergraduate Alice Wu, highlighting sexist language in an anonymous internet forum used by some economists. But the profession’s gender issues run ...

It is perhaps fitting that President Donald Trump’s salvo of tariffs on solar-power equipment was unleashed in a press release dropped late on Monday and sporting a headline that actually led with “large residential washing machines.” Why? Because, digging into the impact, the tariffs help to demonstrate one thing: Solar modules— blocks of cells that are put together to make ...

I began sharing my work online two decades ago as one of the early financial bloggers. I started on Yahoo Geocities in the 1990s, Typepad in 2003, and finally on WordPress at my own domain in 2008. That is where the Big Picture still resides. In those days, blogs had robust comment communities. They were a terrific source of discussion ...

Bloomberg As Nordea Bank AB blazes a trail in Europe by banning its employees from trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the regulator is taking a back seat in a decision-making process it says is better left to the industry. Sweden’s Financial Supervisory Authority thinks “every institution must decide on the details of their internal regulations specifying the rules for their ...

DUBAI / Reuters Citigroup has won formal approval from Saudi Arabia’s Capital Market Authority to begin investment banking business there, the US bank said on Tuesday. More than a dozen foreign banks have licences to operate branches in Saudi Arabia, battling for business resulting from the kingdom’s reforms to wean its economy off oil revenues. Citi was among the banks ...

Bloomberg Governor Haruhiko Kuroda delivered a message to investors speculating that the Bank of Japan might be nearing the start of policy normalisation: Not so fast. Kuroda said the BOJ wasn’t in a position to even consider exiting its current policy, after it maintained its massive stimulus program and kept its inflation and economic forecasts unchanged earlier on Tuesday. “Given ...

Bloomberg The African Development Bank plans to increase its loans to Nigeria by more than $2 billion next year with investments in energy, infrastructure and agriculture, its President Akinwumi Adesina said. “The total portfolio we have in Nigeria is $6 billion,” Adesina said in a Jan. 18 interview in Abuja, the capital. “We expect that by the year 2019, we ...

Bloomberg Foreign-currency trading on Egypt’s interbank system has climbed to $14.5 billion since the November 2016 decision to float the currency, central bank Governor Tarek Amer told Bloomberg. Bank trading in dollars — almost non-existent before the float — had reached $9 billion in September. The 60 percent rise since then reflects growing confidence in the economy after reforms aimed ...

Bloomberg Europe’s financial technology startups are on hiring mode, fighting each other – and the incumbents — in what one executive described as a “war for talent.” Payments company GoCardless Ltd., which employs 170 people in London, will open a Paris office in February, said chief product and technology officer Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas. Online lender LendInvest Ltd. said it will make ...