Edit-Oped

Jonathan Bernstein The Democratic presidential nomination cycle is somewhat unusual for a party with a first-term incumbent president. The Republican 2024 cycle? There has never been anything remotely like it. Of course this is all about former President Donald Trump, whose unannounced campaign has been going strong since the day he left the White House.  Trump is doing all the ...

Jonathan Levin The latest bear-market rally in US stocks has brought investors off the sidelines and provided a welcome reprieve from three quarters of gloom. But traders now need to ask themselves whether the risks continue to justify the potential returns. The S&P 500 Index has rallied 7.9% since October 12, helped by hardy corporate earnings, stabilizing US Treasury yields ...

Michael R. Bloomberg The crisis in US K-12 public education continues to deepen, and decisions by many colleges and universities to abandon SAT and ACT scores are making it worse. Instead of demanding more accountability from high schools, colleges are expecting less. In the latest dismal signs for students, scores on the ACT college entrance exam have fallen to the ...

Parmy Olson You have to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg. In the face of criticism about the radical strategic shift he has chosen for Facebook, he is stubbornly focused on turning it into a metaverse company. Other tech billionaires may lash out at dissent, but Zuckerberg remains stoic, tuning out the noise to give earnest interviews and presentations about his ...

Chris Bryant Fed up with having his private jet tracked by climate activists typing on Twitter, Bernard Arnault has sold the capacious Bombardier 7500 aircraft belonging to his luxury goods company LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE. But the world’s third-richest man isn’t about to join the masses flying commercial (quelle horreur!). Instead, Arnault plans to rent private aircraft: “The ...

Allison Schrager To President Joe Biden’s credit, his policies didn’t cause many of the economic problems we face today. But they did make them worse. Even more troubling, his policies might reduce growth in the future and make the economy less equal and resilient. The president normally doesn’t have much impact on the current economy; he doesn’t set energy or ...

The US health-care system needs more nurses. Nursing schools aren’t producing enough graduates, young workers are quitting, and older ones are retiring early. Throughout the pandemic, widespread shortages reduced the quality of care and even cost lives. To bolster the workforce and better prepare for the next crisis, the US must invest in its domestic pipeline and clear hurdles for ...

Rachel Sanderson If Giorgia Meloni had expected a straightforward passage to becoming Italy’s first woman prime minister, she hadn’t counted on her coalition ally Silvio Berlusconi’s enduring desire to control. Italy’s three-time premier started undermining her far-right government even before its ministers were named. But Meloni has something to learn from Berlusconi too. He provides a cautionary tale for all ...

Andy Mukherjee In May, the South China Morning Post published a letter from a reader who wrote to say that Hong Kong’s Mandatory Provident Fund should be abolished as “it has failed on multiple levels from the perspective of ordinary citizens.” Replace it with a universal basic income, he suggested. Hong Kong was recently graded C+ in the Mercer CFA ...

Matthew A. Winkler Gavin Newsom is as familiar as anyone with the media narrative of earthquakes, persistent wildfires, droughts, homelessness and companies fleeing California to Texas for a tax- and regulation-free lifestyle. This is nothing new. California’s governor recalls a 1994 Time Magazine cover story citing “a string of disasters rocks the state to the core, forcing Californians to ponder ...