Opinion

  It has become a truism to say that the American political system is suffering from dysfunction. But weirdly, even the insurgent candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, don’t talk much about how they would fix it. This is a populist insurgency without a clear manifesto. So it’s refreshing to hear Rep. John Sarbanes present a detailed action plan to ...

  On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl disaster left a trail of destruction. The worst nuclear accident was blamed on human error triggered by flawed Soviet reactor technology. Fukushima was another rude awakening in March 2011 when the world discovered similar challenges. Human error was again detected after the world felt it had drawn lessons from Chernobyl to avoid nuclear ...

  Barry Ritholtz Before the Great Recession, almost two-thirds of Americans owned stocks. That number has since fallen to a little more than half, as you can see from the chart below: This is an important development with ramifications for retirement planning, demographics and income inequality. First, a little history: Since late in the last century, one of the defining ...

  Most central bankers would agree that their primary goal is to give people and companies confidence that inflation will remain stable over the long term. Unfortunately, the U.S. Federal Reserve may be failing at that task. The Fed began pulling back on its efforts to stimulate growth back in May 2013, when then-Chairman Ben Bernanke said that the central ...

  The U.K. Treasury’s paper on the economic costs of Brexit seems competent and thorough, as you would expect — and says those costs would be high, as you’d also expect. That said, it would be a mistake to regard this analysis as settling much. Judging the likely economic costs is an unavoidably uncertain exercise. The range of possible outcomes ...

  The pattern is a familiar one. In February, the Malaysian government proposed allowing 1.5 million Bangladeshi workers into the country to seek employment. A popular backlash ensued and the government quickly backtracked, imposing a moratorium on hiring foreign workers of all kinds, which still stands. In advanced economies, where this kind of back-and-forth is common, that might be the ...

Authoritarianism, always latent in progressivism, is becoming explicit. Progressivism’s determination to regulate thought by regulating speech is apparent in the campaign by 16 states’ attorneys general and those of the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands, none Republican, to criminalize scepticism about the supposedly “settled” conclusions of climate science. Four core tenets of progressivism are: First, history has a ...

  The 7th session of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Ministerial Conference on Food Security and Agricultural Development and the inaugural General Assembly of the Islamic Organisation for Food Security (IOFS) to be held in Astana will throw spotlight on food security. Starting Tuesday, the conference will delve into the current state of agriculture and food security in the ...

  Sara Hsu SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS China has faced a steel glut since 2014, when a real estate and debt shock forced demand for construction materials into a nosedive. China has been trying to cope with excess inventories both by cutting capacity in the sector and by reducing existing stocks of steel. China’s leadership is now encouraging steel overcapacity ...

  Asia needs to craft regional rules and norms to defuse lingering tensions and safeguard the stability which has undergirded its prosperity, Singapore’s defense minister stressed at a security conference in Malaysia this week. In his address at the 4th Putrajaya Forum in Kuala Lumpur – a biennial defense meeting – Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen said that ASEAN must ...