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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 ...

Bloomberg Goldman Sachs Group Inc. now expects the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by 25 basis points in both July and September and isn’t ruling out the possibility of a bigger move of 50 basis points “if the news flow disappoints.” The need to get ahead of the bond market could be another reason to push Fed officials towards ...

Bloomberg Policy makers around the globe have been cool to the idea of Facebook Inc.’s planned Libra cryptocurrency. In Switzerland? They liked it so much, Facebook decided to set up shop there. Geneva is “excited” to work with Facebook, the canton’s economic development chief Pierre Maudet said last week after it emerged Facebook had picked the Swiss city as the ...

Bloomberg German banks may face about 610 million euros ($695 million) of costs after helping investors take improper advantage of a loophole to reduce taxes on dividends, according to the country’s regulator. About 60 lenders were directly involved in so-called cum-cum trades that allowed foreign investors to profit from tax breaks meant for Germany-based shareholders, a BaFin spokesman said, citing ...

Bloomberg The Bank of England (BOE) acknowledged rising concerns over a no deal Brexit as it kept interest rates on hold and cut its near-term economic growth forecast to zero. While officials, led by Governor Mark Carney, said they still see need for interest-rate hikes in coming years if their forecasts bear out, they also ackno-wledged that investors are tak- ...