Bloomberg Poland’s sweeping judicial overhaul, which includes lowering the retirement age of Supreme Court judges, violates European Union rules, the bloc’s top court said in a stinging rebuke of measures described by government critics as a political “purge.†The Polish reform “is not justified by a legitimate objective†and “undermines the principle of the irremovability of judges, which is essential ...
Read More »Parliament ready to support no-deal Brexit, says Johnson
Bloomberg Boris Johnson said he believed the British Parliament would now support a no-deal Brexit, even as senior figures in his Conservative Party warned they had the numbers to stop him if he tried to push one through. Johnson, a former foreign secretary, and the favourite to succeed Theresa May as prime minister, used a BBC interview to argue that ...
Read More »Putin’s big bet on gold is finally paying off
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 ...
Read More »China looks for a saviour in shadows
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 ...
Read More »Donald Trump has a point about Draghi and the euro
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 ...
Read More »Fighting climate change is just good business
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 ...
Read More »How advanced economies look like emerging markets
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 ...
Read More »When Facebook’s banker is Carney
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 ...
Read More »Tear-up ‘economic’ textbooks – and start over!
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 ...
Read More »Stocks slide as 10-year yield drops back below 2 percent
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 ...
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