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If we learned anything from the bitter debate over the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) – which seems doubtful – it is that we cannot discuss health care in a way that is at once compassionate and rational. This is a significant failure, because providing and financing health care has become, over the past half-century, the principal activity of the federal ...

No matter how well-regarded a particular airport happens to be, the slog from curb to cabin is pretty much the same wherever you go. A decades-old paradigm of queues, security screens, snack vendors, and gate-waiting prevails—the only difference is the level of stress. The sky portal of the 2040s, however, is likely to be free of such delights. Many of ...

Washington began taking the threat of gun violence more seriously. The gun dealers in the state will be required to notify law enforcement when someone who is not legally allowed to buy a firearm tries to do so. There were more than 3,000 such people in Washington in 2015. They went to a licensed gun dealer and filled out a ...

Congressional Republicans and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are clashing over a question that has implications far beyond the world of finance: How far can companies go to protect themselves from customer lawsuits? Neither side has got the answer quite right. If you’ve ever signed up for a credit card, you’ve most likely skipped through the boilerplate contracts at the ...

The Brexit talks have started, and there’s little sign yet of an intelligible UK strategy. All is disarray. The shambles makes two bad possible outcomes more likely. One is that the UK will crash out of the European Union in 2019 with no agreement in place. This would cause enormous economic disruption — damage that would take years to repair. ...

Greece has decided to brave the waters with a new five-year benchmark bond, the first fresh deal for nearly three years. Fortune favors the brave — but not the greedy. For now, a successful return to the fixed income markets matters more than securing the very best terms or the most money. Greek bonds have been the stand-out performer in ...

Never again. That’s the mantra of Indonesia’s class of 1998 — the officials who were young adults when the country plunged into the Asian financial crisis that began two decades ago this month. The question now is whether their understandable caution could hold back Southeast Asia’s biggest — and at times, most frustrating — economy. Most retrospectives of the crisis ...

Bloomberg Keith Kueh was expecting Pacific Andes Resources Development Ltd. to pay back the company’s bonds last year so he could finance his son’s college bill and his own retirement. Now it’s 18 months after the Singapore-listed fishing company didn’t honor some obligations and he hasn’t gotten his money yet. “For investors like myself, we are not portfolio managers who ...

Bloomberg The plethora of companies propped up by the European Central Bank will limit policy makers’ ability to withdraw monetary stimulus that’s been supporting the continent’s bond market since the financial crisis, according to strategists at Bank of America Corp. About 9 percent of Europe’s biggest companies could be classified as the walking dead, companies that risk collapse if the ...

Bloomberg A record number of Ghanaians are saving money using mobile phones as lenders push products to lure deposits using technology that is cheaper than building branches. Deposits with mobile-money providers jumped 25 percent to 1.57 billion cedis ($360 million) this year through April, the Accra-based central bank said in a response to questions this month. That compares with 19.6 ...