Europe

Greek retail sales have fallen 32 percent, almost double the drop in GDP. That would jibe with other evidence of the gravity of Greece's suffering, like the number of people going without food or fuel.

There's a compensation tool that accomplishes almost everything we want from incentives. It comes at the end of a year of good performance. It encourages employees to stay longer to realize its full benefit . It is the "raise."

Cyprus no longer has a problem of how to raise $5.8 billion to fund a bank bailout. It has a problem of what to do when most of Cyprus's bank deposits leave the country.

The most recent permutation of the euro crisis seems to have enlivened a renewed interest in Bitcoin, the artificial "currency." Unfortunately it's missing the most essential aspect of money: it's not useful for buying anything. Bitcoin's rise as a...

The only people who don't seem to hate the plan are those who are just left speechless. Still there's a case to be made that (a) for most Cypriots it beats the alternatives and (b) a devastating run on the...

In his new book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, demonstrates how when people are confronted with difficult questions, they tend to get around them by answering easier ones. You can't find a better example than the...

There may be no clear winner in Italy’s election so far, but it’s not too early to declare a loser: austerity. That wouldn’t have been a big surprise to Monti 1.0, who came in with no plans to run again....

The message coming from the European Central Bank seems to be that the debt crisis has passed and the time for austerity is finally over. Was that ever the right approach?

Just how badly is Italy teetering? By the standards of the credit rating agencies, Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investor Service, things aren't so dire. If you trust the world's biggest money manager, it's a lot worse.

Swiss bank UBS AG agreed to $1.5 billion in fines in the Libor fixing probe in a settlement with U.K., U.S. and Swiss regulators. To those who’ve been following the probe carefully and know that a settlement of that size...