It’s very easy to become overwhelmed by the onslaught of news about Brexit, especially when you’re trying to identify meaningful developments amidst the flood of confusing information pouring out from UK political circles. Quartz has some ideas to help you navigate the news without drowning in it.
Mario Draghi is the reluctant face of the euro-zone economy’s perpetual sluggishness.
The City of London wields extraordinary influence as one of the world’s leading financial centers, but its place at the top of the global finance industry is threatened by Brexit.
Since the Brexit negotiations began, the UK government has been accused of trying to have its cake and eat it too. It’s a fair judgment, given that Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary and one of the country’s most well-known politicians, said that was precisely what the government’s policy was. Continuing with the culinary analogies, the European Union has consistently said that the UK cannot “cherry pick” the parts of the EU that it likes and leave the rest behind.
Sir Stephen Wall spent 35 years in the British diplomatic service, the last 20 years of which were devoted to Europe. From 1993 he was Britain’s ambassador to Portugal, then for five years from 1995 he was the permanent representative to the EU, the most senior civil-service diplomatic position. Then he returned to London and served as Tony Blair’s advisor on Europe until 2004.
Jonny Wren specializes in Europe. To be precise, he specializes in European wines from lesser-known regions, like wines using the Vermentino grape, which is popular in Sardinia; or Priorat wines from Tarragona in Catalonia; or Primitivo, a grape found in the southern Italian regions of Puglia and Campania.
In what could turn out to be her last speech as German chancellor at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Angela Merkel made a strong plea for the world not to abandon the international order that rose from the ashes of WWII.
“It’s a time of enormous ebullience.” “We are in an exceptionally favorable context.” “The world is in a good place economically, about as good as it could be.”
The Federal Reserve is beginning 2019 with a trip down memory lane.
2018 marked the enthusiastic return of volatility to financial markets. Amid all the mayhem one of the biggest surprises of the year has been the strength of the US dollar.
At the end of every year, Bill Gates questions himself. It’s part of a long-standing tradition, one upheld by many of us, as we set resolutions and broader themes for the year ahead.
Capping off a painful year, the holiday season is proving cheerless for the British high street. HMV, the music retailer that’s been in business for almost a century, said today (Dec. 28) it was calling in administrators from KPMG.
As 2018 draws to an end, so does the 10-year anniversary of the worst part of the financial crisis, an ordeal that plunged the economics field into its own crisis. As economists puzzled over the swift and brutal nature of the recession, many wondered why they hadn’t seen a crash coming, and why the recovery proved so mediocre.
The US Federal Reserve just announced its fourth interest rate hike of the year, setting the target range for its benchmark overnight rate at 2.25-2.5%, up from 2.0-2.25%. It’s a move that was clearly telegraphed, but amid weeks of market volatility and jitters about the state of the global economy, some doubt crept in about the Fed’s commitment to continued rate hikes.
The US is in its third biggest housing boom in the modern era, according to Robert Shiller, the Nobel-prize winning economist and expert in financial bubbles.
Economics is searching for its third act.
On June 5, 2017, Raphael Bostic became the 15th president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. This also made him the first African American president of any regional Fed in the US central bank’s 100-year history.
On a dreary Wednesday lunchtime in October, more than 300 students are packed into one of University College London’s larger lecture halls. They are all out of their seats, and the chatter has risen to a near-deafening din. They are playing a market-trading game. It is a familiar one to students of Economics 101, an introductory class. Students recreate auctions over and over again, ultimately proving the theory of equilibrium in competitive markets, a lynchpin of the principle of supply and demand.
This is a momentous day in Frankfurt. The European Central Bank’s president, Mario Draghi, just announced the end of its massive bond-buying program. Since March 2015, the ECB commanded purchases of €2.6 trillion ($3 trillion) of debt, mostly sovereign, from across the euro zone.
Sustainable investing is booming. The industry has spawned its own lingo—ESG, SASB, SRI, GRI—dedicated to describing this seemingly moral turn in the finance industry, where money is invested in ways that make the world a better place. After all, it feels good to generate a return while promoting the SDGs (that’s the UN’s sustainable development goals, if you’re wondering).
There’s never a good time for a government to plunge into crisis. But the UK has managed to pick a particularly bad moment, in the midst of a global selloff in markets.
The European Court of Justice just handed the UK a fire extinguisher.
On the whole, the numbers were pretty good: US employers added 155,000 jobs in November, below October’s bumper 237,000 gain but still a healthy pace. Today’s report also featured the 98th consecutive month of job gains, by far the longest stretch on record.
OPEC, the once-mighty oil cartel, has lost one of its oldest members in the midst of a deep slump in oil prices. The energy minister of Qatar announced today (Dec. 3) that the country will withdraw from the group at the start of next year to focus on natural gas production instead.
