Scott Rubner, a managing director in the derivatives sales and macro execution team at Goldman Sachs, has left the investment bank, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday. Rubner had joined the Wall Street giant in 2015. Prior to that, he spent about a decade at Merrill Lynch. Rubner could not be […]
Protesters gathered on Monday outside the world’s largest annual meeting of energy executives, where the U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that climate change was a side effect of building the modern world. The CERAWeek energy conference is taking place as the new U.S. administration of President Donald Trump reverses the policies of his predecessor aimed at accelerating the […]
The weather in some of the world’s most densely populated cities is swinging from droughts to floods and back again as rising temperatures play havoc with the global water cycle, a study commissioned by the charity WaterAid showed on Wednesday. South and Southeast Asia face the strongest wetting trends, while Europe, the Middle East and […]
Only seven countries met World Health Organization (WHO) air quality standards last year, data showed on Tuesday, as researchers warned that the war on smog would only get harder after the United States shut down its global monitoring efforts. Chad and Bangladesh were the world’s most polluted countries in 2024, with average smog levels more […]
Germany’s constitution contains a so-called debt brake – a constraint that keeps the structural deficit to 0.35 percent of GDP. This measure of fiscal prudence has been blamed for unduly holding back public investment in Germany, undermining modernisation. However, in the context of the pressing need for European countries to spend more on infrastructure and […]
There is growing evidence of a decline in the mental health of the young in Western developed countries such that, today, the young tend to be less happy than their older counterparts. This column explores new research across Asia and the Middle East which suggests that the mode of a survey influences reported wellbeing: web-based […]
How costly are business cycles and inflation? This column reports on a survey that asked consumers across 13 countries how much consumption they would be willing to sacrifice to eliminate business cycles. Contrary to the prediction of standard macroeconomic models that business cycle fluctuations are close to costless, consumers reported that they would give up […]
Despite digitalisation in the 21st century, productivity growth rates in advanced economies seemed to stagnate in the 2010s. One hypothesis to explain this phenomenon is the ‘productivity J-curve’, which suggests that the high costs associated with digitalisation during an investment boom induce an underestimation of productivity growth. This column tests the hypothesis using data from […]
There has been an unprecedented increase in the number of sanctions imposed in world over the past 70 years, raising questions over their effectiveness. This column uses the fourth release of the Global Sanctions Database to quantify the impact of the 2022 sanctions on Russia on the country’s trade. The authors find that the sanctions […]
Despite formal restrictions, untracked oil continues to reach global markets, calling into question the true effectiveness of oil sanctions. This column presents a novel ship clustering model to detect ‘dark shipping’ – where tankers disable their location signals to evade detection – linked to sanctioned oil transport. Following Western sanctions on Russia in 2022, officially […]
