One of the hardest questions in economics is mobility versus stability. What happens to workers who are displaced by recessions, technological and industrial change, regional shifts, or corporate failure? Can humans move fluidly from occupation to occupation, industry to industry, and city to city, like interchangeable parts in a well-oiled economic machine, always going to where their contributions will be ...

China’s economic performance is all about what hasn’t happened. That’s huge. The world’s No. 2 economy didn’t implode under a mountain of debt, nor did trade tensions with the US bring exports undone. And there certainly hasn’t been the trade war many feared a year ago. The country’s growing reliance on services and consumption as an engine of growth — ...

Many predicted that the beginning of last year would finally bring an uptick in volatility. Instead, 2017 was one of the least volatile periods on record for the stock market. The S&P 500 was up every month. The largest peak-to-trough drawdown was slightly more than 3 percent, the lowest on record since at least the mid-1990s. And this phenomenon isn’t ...

There’s little doubt that the Higher Education Act, which affects more than $120 billion in annual federal spending, needs an update. Less clear is whether Republicans’ proposed reforms will do more harm than good. The law, last revised a decade ago, sets the conditions under which federal student financial aid is disbursed. It is the government’s primary tool for preserving ...

For more than two decades, Jeff Bezos has famously sacrificed profit for growth, persuading Wall Street that Amazon.com Inc. was best served pouring money into the logistical nuts and bolts that have turned his company into the Wal-Mart of the web. More recently, investors have found solace in the company’s profitable cloud services business, which has helped offset losses in ...

No one is more eager for the next bear market than long-short hedge funds. Long-shorts had a good year in 2017. The HFRI Equity Hedge Total Index — an index of long-short equity hedge funds — returned 13.5 percent last year, its best performance since 2013. But as my Bloomberg View colleague Barry Ritholtz pointed out last week, it wasn’t ...

Experts may be out of favour these days, but when it comes to reforming the euro zone, expert consensus is as important as political consensus. Most voters only understand the basic drift of such change; if experts agree on details, it can be reassuring. Luckily for political leaders, an expert consensus now exists: It’s laid out in a paper signed ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG investors were left underwhelmed by the bank’s first share buyback since the credit crisis and rejigged financial targets. The stock declined the most since July after the Zurich-based bank downgraded a key profitability target, as well as paring back forecasts for its asset- management business and net new money at its combined wealth-management unit. The bank ...

Bloomberg The Central Bank of Nigeria won’t hold its rate-setting meeting scheduled for Monday and Tuesday because lawmakers have yet to approve monetary policy committee members, leaving the body unable to form a quorum. The bank will “maintain key monetary policy variables” at levels decided in November, Governor Godwin Emefiele said in an emailed statement, effectively leaving the key interest ...

Bloomberg When euro-area finance ministers launch the process to find a new European Central Bank vice president, they won’t be flooded with nominations. So far, only Spain has said it will put forward a candidate to replace Portugal’s Vitor Constancio, whose term expires at the end of May, with Finance Minister Luis de Guindos the most likely nominee. The meeting ...