Finance & economics

Squaring the coin
Coinbase’s listing may break records

But the success of the cryptoexchange is not guaranteed

The dirty truth
Totting up bitcoin’s environmental costs

Without regulation, mining in China could consume as much energy as Italy by 2024

Obituary
Robert Mundell, an influential international economist, has died

He was considered the intellectual father of the euro

Free exchange
In poor countries, statistics are both undersupplied and underused

Governments often lack incentives to collect, share and use data

A new tack
As China’s stockmarket corrects, regulators try doing less

So far, they have avoided heavy-handed intervention

Setting a floor
Janet Yellen calls for a global minimum tax on companies. Could it happen?

Many countries want to link a deal to the trickier issue of taxing rights on profits

The race for space
House prices in the rich world are booming

Unusually, suburbs not cities are feeling the heat

Performance anxiety
How has the IMF fared during the pandemic?

Take-up of its schemes has been lower than the scale of the covid-19 crisis would suggest

Buttonwood
What the enthusiasm for funding startups means for the VC world

More money chasing scarce ideas means that the prices paid for startups rise

Neither predator nor pal
What 100 contracts reveal about China’s development lending

Loans are not obviously predatory; secrecy is sometimes a condition

From the red earth
The electric-car boom sets off a scramble for cobalt in Congo

Western buyers are becoming alert to miners’ poor working conditions