Opinion

The Obama administration is moving towards what could be a dangerous showdown with China over the South China Sea. The confrontation has been building for the past three years, as China has constructed artificial islands off its southern coast and installed missiles and radar in disputed waters, despite US warnings. It could come to a head this spring, when an ...

The Bank of Korea is planning for a cashless society by 2020. Swedes are making the shift. I am intrigued but also troubled. There’s a lot to like about the idea of a cashless society, starting with its effect on crime. The payoff to mugging people or snatching their bags has already declined dramatically, simply because fewer and fewer people ...

A host of risks — including turbulence in financial markets, slower growth in economies like China, weak growth in other developed countries and prospects of Brexit — cast shadow on British economy, forcing it to take more austerity measures. With such measures in place, it is quite interesting to see where the additional cuts would be made. Presenting the annual ...

The U.S. Federal Reserve’s latest economic projections contain an encoded message crucial to understanding the central bank’s policies: Inflation has been stuck below the Fed’s target in part because officials don’t actually want to get it back up. It’s important to recognize that the Summary of Economic Projections, released four times a year, does not consist of forecasts about the ...

Asia’s major economies marked International Women’s Day 2016 with relatively little fanfare, despite the demographic imperative that confronts the aging populations of China, Japan and South Korea. According to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Asian corporate boardrooms have low gender diversity despite moves such as Japan’s “Womenomics,” although the bank blames societal issues rather than deliberate hiring decisions. In its ...

The value of the Canadian dollar and the price of oil, one of the nation’s top exports, have both tumbled to near record lows. But those details — and the apparent demise of the Keystone XL pipeline — don’t begin to tell the story of what lies ahead for the economy of Canada, America’s second-largest trading partner. Last year, Canadian ...

On Tuesday, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Afghanistan Nicholas Haysom briefed the UN Security Council on Afghanistan. He launched his remarks by noting that the country is “being as severely tested as it was in 2015.” Afghanistan, Haysom said, faces several challenges: “a contracting economy characterized by low growth and high unemployment; an intensifying insurgency regarded by some as ...

Sen. John Cornyn recalls visiting a Texas prison where some inmates taking shop classes could not read tape measures. Cornyn, who was previously a district court judge and Texas Supreme Court justice, knows that prisons are trying to teach literacy and vocations, trying to cope with the mental illnesses of many inmates and trying to take prophylactic measures to prevent ...

The EU-Turkey migrant draft deal touted last week as a breakthrough to settle the current refugee crisis faces difficulties, as some EU member states voiced resentment over Ankara’s demands, with Paris and Prague branding Turkey’s approach ‘Blackmail”. EU and Turkish leaders had agreed on a tentative plan that would see new migrants landing in Greece sent back to Turkey. For ...

What should the U.S. government do to fight recessions? What should it do to fight slow growth? This is the eternal question of so-called countercyclical policy. The two mainstream ideas are fiscal and monetary stimulus. The fiscal version works by having the government borrow and spend money, either on useful things like infrastructure, or by simply mailing people checks. The ...