“Insider trading is not about fairness,” I often say; “it’s about theft.” It’s not a crime to know things that other people do not know, and to trade on your knowledge. In fact it is good. In fact it is the point of securities markets, or a point of them anyway: Society wants capital to flow to good projects and ...

The UK has a productivity problem and its Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is out to solve it. At first glance, its new plan exemplifies the problem — a 255-page tome published on Monday is longer on blue-skies reflection than detailed policy. Still, government needs to be to held to account when it meddles in business, and the ...

In their rush to pass something, anything, that they can call ‘tax reform,’ congressional Republicans have achieved the impossible: They have made an awful plan even worse. The first thing to note about the bill the Senate passed early Saturday is that it is not, by any reasonable definition of the term, tax reform. The elements of a smart reform ...

Eight years since the birth of bitcoin, central banks around the world are increasingly recognizing the potential upsides and downsides of digital currencies. The guardians of the global economy have two sets of issues to address. First is what to do, if anything, about emergence and growth of the private cryptocurrencies that are grabbing more and more attention — with ...

People who invest in the world’s energy systems often want to know how many trillions of dollars will be needed to finance renewable energy and natural gas. One way to find the answer is to look at what those who have already invested trillions of dollars want to happen as the world transitions to a lower-carbon power system and electrifies ...

Sir John Templeton, the pioneer in global mutual funds, once said “the four most costly words in the annals of investing” are “this time is different.” That should resonate with monetary policy makers and institutional investors grappling with the causes, impacts and risks of the lowest market volatility, by far, in the era of modern finance. As this cycle of ...

Bloomberg India’s central bank kept interest rates unchanged as rebounding inflation limits room to spur an economy struggling to recover from disruptive government policies. The benchmark repurchase rate was left at 6 percent, the Reserve Bank of India said in a statement in Mumbai on Wednesday. Five of the six-member monetary policy committee voted for the move, which was predicted ...

Bloomberg Bank Indonesia sees no reason to adjust monetary policy if inflation and the currency remain in line with its forecasts, Assistant Governor Dody Budi Waluyo said. Inflation is still within the central bank’s target and the currency is sta- ble, Waluyo said on a panel at Bloomberg’s Year Ahead Asia Conference in Jakarta on Wednesday. “As long as our ...

Bloomberg Hungarian central bankers are joining the quantitative easing (QE) era just as major global counterparts such as the US Federal Reserve look to leave it. The National Bank of Hungary will start buying mortgage-backed securities from January in its latest move to bring investors to heel and drive down interest rates. Departing from the approach of most small central ...

Bloomberg The chief executive officer of Nordea Bank AB says his industry needs to rethink pretty much everything it’s doing to brace for the future. And that includes how much it’s paying bankers. The Nordic region’s biggest financial conglomerate is already in the process of cutting 6,000 jobs as part of a shift towards relying more on technology and less ...