Free exchange

ON DECEMBER 14th, finance and economics journalists gathered for a long-awaited Federal Reserve announcement: that the Fed's benchmark interest rate would rise once more, by 25 basis points, to a range between 0.5% and 0.75%. If the scene looked familiar, well, no surprise there. It was December a year ago that the Federal Reserve announced another increase in its benchmark interest rate, of 25 basis points—the first in nearly a decade. It was also December a year ago that Fed projections suggested that rates would soar upward in 2016, to close to 1.5% by year's end.

IN A fascinating new piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Parry examines an intense, ongoing debate between historians and economists on the role American slavery played in the industrial revolution. A number of recent books by historians (including Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told, with which The Economist has an unfortunate history) argue that growth in output in American cotton, made possible by America's slave economy (and rising brutality within it), was crucial in fostering the nascent industrial revolution, which had its beginnings in the mechanisation of textile industries.

MARIO DRAGHI has shown a remarkable ability to find a way out of tight spots since he became boss of the European Central Bank (ECB) in 2011. Has he done so again? At its regular monetary-policy meeting, on December 8th, the ECB’s governing council decided to extend its programme of quantitative easing, or QE, by a further nine months to December 2017. It also said it would reduce the monthly pace of bond-buying from €80bn to €60bn from April. But the ECB has given itself the option of stepping up the pace of bond-buying again, should markets become choppy.

We examine Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the bank at the epicentre of the crisis in Italy. Last week OPEC moved to rescue oil prices. Will companies now rush back into exploration? And how the birth of a new motorbike in downtown New York could revitalise inner-city manufacturing

THE political shock of Brexit and of the election of Donald Trump have led to new interest in the problem posed by regional inequality. Both shocks drew support from places to which recent economic trends have not been especially kind, and both were reactions, at least in part, against the economic success enjoyed by elites concentrated in a relatively small number of rich metropolitan areas. Even economists, whose "nihilism...about what we can do to help struggling places in the U.S. is, quite frankly, strange" (in the words of Adam Ozimek) have taken to reconsidering their priors on the issue. Myself included; as I noted recently:

OXFORD Dictionaries has just named “post-truth” its word of the year. The timing certainly seems apt. Among the many recriminations unfolding in the wake of the American election are darts aimed at the press which, some argue, did an inadequate job during the campaign sorting truth, from half-truth, from innuendo, from outright fabrication. Interestingly, among those groups in the crosshairs is Facebook, which is now struggling to work out what its journalistic responsibilities are in this strange new digital age.

Facebook, which has nearly 2bn monthly active users, is a media goliath.