Eshe Nelson

Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency from 2013 to 2017, believes that Donald Trump’s efforts to rollback environmental standards are unlikely to succeed. When it comes to the environment, many misunderstand that the Trump administration’s announcements are just that—announcements that haven’t translated into action, McCarthy said at the Financial Times’s climate finance conference in London today.

Since the early 1970s, William Nordhaus has been studying climate change and its economic impact. Yesterday, the Yale University professor won the Nobel Prize in economics (jointly with NYU’s Paul Romer) for his decades of work, especially the efforts that led to a model used widely to understand the effects of climate change and energy- and environmental-policy interventions.

The 2018 Nobel prize in economics was awarded to two Americans, William Nordhaus of Yale University and Paul Romer of New York University (and a former chief economist at the World Bank), for their decades of research into how to create sustained long-term economic growth.

Last month, US employers added 134,000 jobs (pdf). While this was well below economists’ expectations of 185,00, there was plenty of other data to confirm that the US economy is on a roll—so much so, in fact, that traders appear to be wondering if there’s such a thing as too much good news. 

A vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US Supreme Court is expected this weekend, after Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell filed a late-night motion for a “cloture” vote to be held tomorrow (Oct. 5).

Brits did a lot of household work for free in 2016—about £1.24 trillion ($1.6 trillion) worth, according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics. That’s almost £19,000 per person.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there was an effort to call time on the US dollar as the world’s most important currency.

Italy settled on a new anti-establishment government made up of opposing political parties, the Five Star Movement and the League, after many months of commotion this year. Now the coalition is in the midst of its first big populist fight.

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, which manages more than $6 trillion of assets, said last week that “how to invest in environmental, governance, and social issues is becoming the number one conversation we’re having with clients.”

Ten years after the financial crisis, the Pew Research Center has asked people in 27 countries—representing two-thirds of global GDP—how they feel about their home economies and the future.

On Sept. 15, 2008, a credit crunch turned into a full-blown crisis when New York-based investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. The global recession that followed is still too fresh in many people’s memories to be considered history. But 10 years on, the state of the financial system suggests that the crisis has been relegated to the history books for many in the industry.

On the 10-year anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, the event commonly cited as the start of a global financial crisis, it’s still worth asking: What the hell happened?

Shiny metals are losing their luster. Traders have turned their backs on gold, silver, and platinum in recent months. It’s a somewhat surprising turn of events for the metals, which are normally considered haven assets. But the turmoil in emerging markets and escalating trade tensions between the US and China haven’t stoked demand for the precious metals.

Argentina is in a fierce battle against the collapse of investor confidence (paywall) in its government. Right now, it’s losing.

After just a brief respite, the turmoil in emerging market currencies has resumed. What began in Argentina and Turkey has snowballed into broader collapse in confidence that has policy makers in Indonesia, India, South Africa, and Brazil scrambling to protect their economies.

Traders have an unfortunate habit of incriminating themselves in chat messages when they try to manipulate markets. This week, BNP Paribas was fined $90 million by US regulators for attempting to rig a benchmark for interest-rate derivatives between 2007 and 2012. The French Bank’s fine was the seventh enforcement action related to that particular derivative benchmark in the US.

The link between unemployment and mental health is receiving more attention, with research revealing that people who unexpectedly lose their jobs are more likely to suffer from depression or other impairments to their mental health. A new study suggests that, like many features of American economic life, the impact isn’t equal across races.

If you see a penny on the floor, do you even bother to pick it up?

At the close of trading in New York today, the stock market will make an impressive milestone. It will set the record for the longest bull market in history.

Precious metals are losing their shine.

Most retellings of the 2008 financial crisis, which began in the US and swiftly spread across the world, hinge on the understanding that the crisis came to an end—and that, in the US, it ended quite quickly.

In an Aug. 16 interview with the New York Times, Elon Musk revealed that he fired off the fateful tweet saying he was considering taking Tesla private while driving himself to the airport. He says that he’d wanted to offer a roughly 20% premium over the price at the time for the electric car company’s stock. As he sat in his car in California, midday Aug. 7,  that would have been $419. Then he decided to round it up to $420, saying his funding for privatization was secured.

Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary-general and Nobel peace prize winner, died today (Aug. 18) at the age of 80. His family confirmed that he passed away at a hospital in Switzerland “after a short illness.”

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the US dollar. Nearly 90% of all currency trades involve the dollar, meaning the currency is involved in $4.4 trillion worth of trades every day (pdf). Some 60% of currency reserves held by global central banks are in dollars, a total of $6.5 trillion. As the world’s dominant currency, the dollar is the lifeblood of the global financial circulatory system.