Category: Finance

John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group and pioneer of index funds, may have saved investors more money than anyone...

Be more productive. That is how ChatGPT, a generative-artificial-intelligence tool from OpenAI, sells itself to workers. But despite industry hopes...

It is easy enough to understand what is motivating Kamala Harris’s economic strategy. Poll after poll demonstrates that many Americans...

Silicon Valley’s tech bros are having a difficult few weeks. A growing number of investors worry that artificial intelligence (AI)...

Over the past year-and-a-half inflation has fallen sharply across the rich world. Although some central banks have now begun to...

The outcry was immediate. On August 11th Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, said that his country could permanently...

When an economy contracts for two consecutive quarters, it is often considered to be in recession. European policymakers will be...

Many governments live in fear of bond-market “vigilantes”, investors who punish errant policies by aggressively selling the sovereign’s debt, driving...

Just ignore it. That, in short, is the advice given to retail investors when stockmarkets convulse, as plenty have over...

Across the world worries are mounting about the economy. In America and Canada unemployment is rising, while consumer sentiment remains...

“Even those born poor fear the heat.” This slogan, printed on a lemonade from Mixue, a drinks-and-ice-cream chain, says a...

No investor commands attention quite like Warren Buffett. As boss of Berkshire Hathaway, an investment firm that he has run...

Division is not always a weakness

When times are tough, politicians reach for metaphors. In Ethiopia, which floated its currency and entered a $3.4bn IMF programme...

Meat-eaters may want to avoid Argentina

A weak jobs report in America has raised fears that the world’s largest economy is heading for recession. America’s stockmarkets...

This year’s hottest months are shaping up to be especially wild

For a while on August 5th things were looking awful. During the Asian trading session Japan’s benchmark Topix share index...

As fears of an American recession spread, stockmarkets around the world have been jittery. The moves have been the wildest...

As fears of an American recession spread, Japan’s markets took another beating. On August 5th the Topix plunged by 12%...

Kamala Harris has all but erased Donald Trump’s polling lead in America’s six swing states, which is testament to the excitement...

They would be doing even better if the Biden-Harris administration had been more cynical

Budget talks in the European Union are a game of 27-dimensional chess. Members play simultaneously against one another, negotiating over...

How many Securities and Exchange Commission chairs can you name? Even in Washington it is hard to imagine a passer-by...

How quickly the mood turns. Barely a fortnight ago stockmarkets were on a seemingly unstoppable bull run, after months of...

Cities everywhere are busy implementing measures to deter excess tourism. But most people agree holidaymakers offer an economic bounty. So...

We are seeking promising journalists and would-be journalists to apply for our Marjorie Deane internship. Successful candidates will spend six...

The developing world has fallen back in love with economic planning. As protectionism sweeps the West, poor countries are no...

China’s economic miracle emerged from dozens of industrial entrepots. Dongguan, famous for producing furniture and toys, as well as its...

Cooling off is easy in Barcelona. Swim in the sea, sip sangria—or just hang about looking like a holidaymaker. Recently...

All come with their own drawbacks

In a video clip that has gone viral recently, Kamala Harris quotes her mother asking her whether she thought she...

To meet the world’s biggest news junkies, head not to Washington or Westminster. Instead, make your way to a trading...

Vast new holdings of grain, natural gas and oil suggest trouble ahead

Mortgages used to be a tough sell in Russia. Decades of Soviet propaganda, which denounced credit as an unbearable burden,...

Immigrants are increasingly unwelcome. Over half of Americans favour “deporting all immigrants living in the US illegally back to their...

Believe it or not, corporate America still makes room for the little guy. Around half of working Americans are employed...

Even though political instability is an economic threat

Consumer banks, on the other hand, are starting to suffer

Currency meddling will prove futile

Houses in Bouldin Creek, a neighbourhood in Austin, Texas, are cavernous, but occupy only a small portion of their plots....

We assess what could bring the bull market to an end

The Jingxi Hotel in Beijing is known for its home-made yogurt—and for hosting some of the most important meetings in...

In markets it is known as the “Trump trade”, a bet that Donald Trump’s return to the White House would...

In the early 20th century, for brief periods, the most frenetic American trading pits were not the raucous markets in...

“We cannot carry on trade without war, nor war without trade,” wrote Jan Pieterszoon Coen, a brutal governor-general of the...

Rachel Reeves, Britain’s new chancellor, says that she has inherited the worst fiscal circumstances since the second world war. An...

China’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping, contains multitudes. His economic philosophy touts both self-reliance and openness. His vision of policymaking embraces...

In May 27 members of the Community Empowerment Resource Network (CERNET), a Philippine charity, were charged with bankrolling communist rebels....

The earliest depiction of the ouroboros—a serpent coiled in a circle, eating its own tail—was found in the tomb of...

The world is still, in a sense, swimming in cash. Or at least the electronic equivalent: central-bank reserves. The Bank...

Starbucks offers endless opportunities for innovation. Parts of social media delight in hacking the chain’s menu to create highly instagrammable...

The savings and loan (S&L) crisis terrorised America’s banks for years. Starting in the mid-1980s, a mix of aggressive lending...

Move to San Francisco and it is hard not to be swept up by mania over artificial intelligence (AI). Advertisements...

War is still exacting a heavy toll on Ukraine’s economy. The country’s GDP is a quarter smaller than on the...

Sixteen years ago American stockmarkets reached their modern nadir. During the early 2000s European and emerging-market equities went on a...

Queues of idle trucks trying to enter America are standard fare at Mexico’s border. Recently, however, vehicles at the Otay...

From some angles it seems as if thermal coal, the world’s dirtiest fuel, is having a tough year. Prices are...

Which is the greatest rivalry in tennis? Older players might reminisce about the “fire and ice” contests between the cool-headed...

In the cartoon “SpongeBob SquarePants”, Mr Krabs, purveyor of krabby patty hamburgers, is a frequent and ruthless price-gouger. He can...

In April a New York fried-chicken shop went viral. It was not the food at Sansan Chicken East Village that...

Owing to the rapid spread of solar power, Spanish energy is increasingly cheap. Between 11am and 7pm, the sunniest hours...

India’s stockmarket swooned upon the news that Narendra Modi, the country’s business-friendly prime minister, would return to power diminished and...

Editor’s note (June 20th 2024): The Supreme Court has ruled in Moore v United States, upholding the tax at issue...

Things are big in America. That is true of houses, cars and food portions. Perhaps most shocking of all is...

It was a French politician, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who coined the term “exorbitant privilege” in the 1960s. He was referring...

How can you tell it’s time to get out of the market? In 1929 Joseph Kennedy, an American businessman and...

Is a fresh housing boom under way? In April a house-price index for the world, excluding China, rose by more...

The HISTORY of leveraged finance—the business of lending to risky, indebted companies—is best told in three acts. High-yield (or “junk”)...

Returning from his paternity leave last week, your columnist was keen to get writing. After all, numerous studies say parents’...

In some parts of the world, not least America’s capital, “trade” is a dirty word. Both Donald Trump and Joe...

It is the million-person mystery, and its solution will help determine just how strong American growth truly is. According to...

Chinese officials seem pleased with the yuan’s recent progress as a global currency. The international monetary system is diversifying at...

Ahead of America’s election in November, company bosses, financiers and diplomats are busy calling on Donald Trump’s allies, trying to...

Investors in China’s stockmarket have been doing handsomely this year. The Shanghai composite index has risen by 13% from a...

A new paper suggests the answer is “yes”

Many people have experienced the joy of finding some spare change down the back of the sofa. On May 30th...

Days after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Raiffeisen, an Austrian bank, said it was considering selling its business in Russia....

“Equities in Dallas,” cried the traders in “Liar’s Poker”, an account by Michael Lewis of his life as a junior...

On June 7th each share in Nvidia will become many. In one sense such stock splits ought not to matter...

Nothing has been able to stop American consumers. At first they splashed covid-19 savings on home-exercise bicycles; now they are...

Twenty years ago Joshua Cooper Ramo, a consultant, first wrote about the “Beijing consensus”. The Washington consensus of financial liberalisation,...

When William Nordhaus, who would later win a Nobel prize in economics, modelled the interaction between the economy and the...

How to explain the disparity? India’s economy is growing astonishingly fast, Bangalore and Mumbai have become destinations for bosses of...

What China’s leader may learn from a pair of reform-minded academics

Buying art can be a nerve-racking experience. But investors have long been able to console themselves with the thought that,...

Watch professionals play poker, and one of the first things to strike you is how often they fold when the...

The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies, a group that produces 40% of the world’s crude,...

Baby-boomers were born between 1946 and 1964—and are the luckiest generation in history. Most of the cohort, which numbers 270m...

Three decades ago much of the housing in China’s cities belonged to state-owned enterprises, which provided homes to workers at...

At last, it seemed time for a manufacturing take-off. Having struggled to compete with China’s industrial might, other emerging markets...

As one of the leaders of the passive-investing revolution, BlackRock is usually a disruptive force in the financial world. But...

If current forecasts are accurate, 2064 will be the first year in centuries when fewer babies are born than people...

Governments are splurging on handouts to avert demographic catastrophe

There is only one problem with the chatter about Europe’s “soft landing”: its economy never truly flew. While America’s growth...

Great investors are often known by a signature style. Warren Buffett made it big by investing in companies he thought...

The president has turned volatility into profit

Speaking in 2005, Mervyn King, then governor of the Bank of England, outlined his “Maradona theory of interest rates”. The...

In the early 1990s India abandoned the principles of swadeshi, or self-sufficiency, that had guided its policies since independence. Subsidies...

Land in Shenzhen, China’s southern technology hub, is scarce. Plots in years past have grabbed sky-high prices. But when Vanke,...

Just over six years ago, when Donald Trump first announced tariffs on Chinese goods, it was as if a bomb...

Pearls, it is said, represent purity. They may soon stand for something else: business dynamism. In Greenville, South Carolina, two...

Since Russia began its invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s economy has shrunk by a quarter. But the ravages of war are...

On a regular Tuesday morning, a large crowd has gathered outside a grocery store in Xuchang, a city of 4m...

The EU is no stranger to overcapacity. Its economic landscape once featured butter mountains, milk lakes and other landmarks of...

BARRY CALLEBAUT, the world’s largest maker of bulk chocolate, is full of beans. Its share price has jumped by 20%...

In 2020, when BBVA and Sabadell abandoned merger discussions, it was difficult to find investors with anything positive to say...

Working on a trading desk is perhaps the closest an office job can get to a sport. Focus and reflexes...

The Plaza Hotel has New York glamour in spades. Sitting at a corner of Central Park, it was the setting...

Since Russia invaded in 2022, Ukraine’s economy has shrunk by a quarter. But the ravages of war are not the...

When Russia’s leaders stopped most of the country’s gas deliveries to the EU in 2022, they thought themselves smart. Prices...

Hedge funds take great pains to hide their inner workings. So a recent court case in which Jane Street sued...

One-third of Ivy League graduates end up working in finance or consulting. So perhaps it is unsurprising that campus protesters...

When it comes to economic growth, America comfortably beats Europe. Many factors have fed America’s outperformance, from tech innovation to...

The West faces an unprecedented number of new arrivals

The hedge fund’s branding is a clue. 1789 Capital was set up last year and named for the year Congress...

Perhaps it was always too good to be true. The big economic story of 2023 was the seemingly painless disinflation...

If any politician has the demeanour to ease tensions with Beijing, it is Janet Yellen. America’s treasury secretary comes across...

In “Permutation City”, a novel by Greg Egan, the character Peer, having achieved immortality within a virtual reality over which...

We are hiring a writer on economics, ideally based at first in London. Journalistic experience is not necessary. The ability...

Last year Xi Jinping, China’s leader, paid a visit to Heilongjiang in the country’s north-east. Part of China’s industrial rustbelt,...

Investors differ in their approach to elections. Some see politics as an edge to exploit; others as noise to block...

For a brief moment, everyone who owned bitcoin had made money from it. On March 5th the crypto token rose...

The Economist is seeking promising journalists and would-be journalists to apply for the 2024 Marjorie Deane internship. The successful candidate...

In the next few weeks, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, hopes to gain final parliamentary approval for an emergency war...

In economic terms, an asset has value because an owner might derive future benefits from it. Some assets, like cryptocurrencies,...

Less than two months of 2024 have passed, but the year has already been a pleasing one for stockmarket investors....

In midtown manhattan reminders of commercial property’s difficulties are everywhere. On the west side, near Carnegie Hall, stands 1740 Broadway,...

Central banks have embarked on austere monetary policy to crush inflation. Worries about the financial system, from bond markets to...

Universities have boomed in recent decades. Higher-education institutions across the world now employ on the order of 15m researchers, up...

“Enough is enough,” declared a Hong Kong judge on January 29th of Evergrande, a failing Chinese property behemoth, and its...

The interest-rate market has a dirty secret, which practitioners call “the hairy chart”. Its main body is the Federal Reserve’s...

A dusty, scuffed slab of concrete is the last hope that many Gazans have of escaping the nightmare which will...

“HOW SHOULD one look at the Chinese economy?”, asked Li Qiang, the country’s prime minister, at the World Economic Forum...

Science advances one funeral at a time, to paraphrase Max Planck. The Nobel prize-winning physicist was arguing that new ideas...

WHEN JAMES GORMAN took the helm of Morgan Stanley it was barely afloat. His tenure as the bank’s chief executive...

As with every skirmish in America’s culture wars, how you view the ousting of Harvard University’s president has much to...

In late 2021 Jerome Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, called for the retirement of “transitory” as a description for...

At some point American economic growth will disappoint expectations. For now, though, it appears to have ended 2023 much as...

By 2050 there will be a new crop of economic powers—if things go to plan. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister,...

Could 2024 be a year unlike any in America’s post-war economic history? Never since 1945 has annual inflation, measured by...

IT TOOK A jury just four hours to deliberate on the seven, complicated charges of financial fraud facing Sam Bankman-Fried,...

For financial markets the Holy Grail is a perfect leading indicator—a gauge that is both simple to monitor and consistently...

Chopping off their heads does not work: cockroaches can live without one for as long as a week. Whacking them...

It is hard to get a man to understand something, wrote Upton Sinclair, an American novelist, when his salary depends...

The history of inflation in Russia is long and painful. Following the revolution of 1917 the country dealt with years...

In the run-up to its attack on Israel on October 7th, Hamas maintained tight operational security. The timing of the...

In 1790 America’s finances were in a precarious state: debt-servicing costs were higher than revenues and government bonds traded at...