CHRISTINE LAGARDE has been an outsider before. Speaking to The Economist, she relishes the memory of shaking up bureaucrats—“men in grey suits”—when she took over …

PACKED TRADING floors are rare these days. An exception is the Shahzada currency-exchange market in Kabul. Seven days a week hundreds of men crowd into …

DEBT-COLLECTION videos have become a popular subgenre on Chinese clip-sharing platforms. Many feature young men deftly fielding phone calls from aggressive collectors. Some portray the …

IN 2005 BEN BERNANKE, then a governor of America’s Federal Reserve, noted a “remarkable reversal in the flows of credit” to several emerging economies, especially …

AS COVID-19 spread across America, its fiscal and monetary tsars donned their masks, bumped elbows and presented a united front. Jerome Powell, the chairman of …