Jun 6th 2024 Many people have experienced the joy of finding some spare change down the back of the sofa. On May 30th the World Bank experienced something similar, if on a grander scale. After rooting...
Investors in China’s stockmarket have been doing handsomely this year. The Shanghai composite index has risen by 12% from a multi-year low in February, notwithstanding a recent drop. Equity analysts a...
Jun 11th 2024 | Washington, DC Ahead of America’s election in November, company bosses, financiers and diplomats are busy calling on Donald Trump’s allies, trying to divine the economic policies the f...
The HISTORY of leveraged finance—the business of lending to risky, indebted companies—is best told in three acts. High-yield (or “junk”) bonds were the subject of the first. That ended in 1990 when Mi...
From some angles it seems as if thermal coal, the world’s dirtiest fuel, is having a tough year. Prices are down a bit. China, which gobbles up over half the world’s supply, is in economic trouble; a ...
Jun 13th 2024 | Washington, DC It is the million-person mystery, and its solution will help determine just how strong American growth truly is. According to an official survey of employers, America’s ...
Chinese officials seem pleased with the yuan’s recent progress as a global currency. The international monetary system is diversifying at an accelerating pace, said Pan Gongsheng, the governor of Chin...
It was a French politician, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who coined the term “exorbitant privilege” in the 1960s. He was referring to benefits received by America as issuer of the world’s reserve currenc...
How can you tell it is time to get out of the market? In 1929 Joseph Kennedy, an American businessman and politician, supposedly realised the party was over upon hearing a shoeshine boy dispensing sto...
Owing to the rapid spread of solar power, Spanish energy is increasingly cheap. Between 11am and 7pm, the sunniest hours in a sunny country, prices often loiter near zero on wholesale markets (see cha...
India’s stockmarket swooned upon the news that Narendra Modi, the country’s business-friendly prime minister, would return to power diminished and in a coalition after a recent general election. One b...
Things are big in America. That is true of houses, cars and food portions. Perhaps most shocking of all is the size of tips. In much of the rest of the world, gratuities are a small gesture for good s...
