How central banks weigh the risk of inflation against the risk of slowing growth
Interest-rate decisions are a judgement about which mistake would be more costly. Here is how policymakers frame that choice.
Explainers
How broadcast rights became the most valuable asset in professional sport
Live sport is one of the few things audiences still watch together and in real time. That makes the rights to show it unusually prized, and unusually hard to price.
Reading the bond market: what the yield curve does and does not tell investors
The gap between short- and long-term interest rates is one of the most watched signals in finance. It is also one of the most misunderstood.
How zoning rules quietly decide how many homes a city can build
Land-use regulation rarely makes headlines, yet it sets the ceiling on housing supply. Understanding it explains why some cities grow up, some grow out and some barely grow at all.
Why advanced chipmaking is so hard to copy
Why reproducibility has become one of science's central concerns
How compounding works for savers and against borrowers, often in the same household
Latest in Explainers
Explainer
How the choice of electoral system shapes a country's party politics
The rules for turning votes into seats are among the most consequential decisions a democracy makes. They influence how many parties thrive, how governments form and how voters behave.
Explainer
How health systems decide which treatments to pay for when budgets are finite
Every health budget involves rationing, whether openly or not. Formal assessment methods try to make those choices consistent, transparent and defensible.
Explainer
How to read a national budget without getting lost
Government budgets run to hundreds of pages. A few questions cut through to what actually matters.
Explainer
How international disputes are settled when there is no world government
States cannot be hauled before a judge the way citizens can. Yet a patchwork of courts, tribunals and arbitration panels resolves a surprising number of quarrels.
Explainer
Following the money: a guide to how global payment systems actually settle
Tapping a card or sending money abroad feels instantaneous. Behind it sits a layered architecture of messages, ledgers and central bank accounts that determines when a payment is truly final.
Explainer
Who really pays a tariff? How import duties pass through to prices
A tariff is collected at the border, but its cost is shared among foreign exporters, domestic importers, retailers and consumers. How it divides depends on market power and the time horizon.
Explainer
What moves commodity prices: supply shocks, storage and the dollar
Oil, metals and grains trade in markets where small imbalances can produce large price swings. Understanding why requires looking at inventories, futures curves and the currency in which they are priced.
Explainer
How clinical trials are designed to tell whether a treatment really works
Proving that a medicine helps is harder than it sounds. Randomisation, control groups and blinding exist to separate genuine effects from chance, hope and bias.
Explainer
Fixed, floating or somewhere in between: how exchange-rate regimes differ
Every country must choose how its currency relates to others. The choice is a trade-off between stability, monetary independence and openness to capital — and no country can have all three.
Explainer
How player transfer markets work, and why prices can seem so detached from reality
When teams buy and sell the contracts of athletes, they are trading scarce talent under unusual rules. The result is a market prone to bidding wars and sharp swings in value.
Explainer
How carbon markets work, and what determines whether they cut emissions
Putting a price on pollution lets markets find the cheapest ways to reduce it. The design details — caps, allowances, offsets and exemptions — decide whether the theory holds.
Explainer
How to read a company's cash-flow statement — the account that is hardest to dress up
Profits are an accounting opinion; cash is a fact. The cash-flow statement shows where money really came from and where it went.
