Opinion

  A month after it ended, the 2016 US presidential election is only getting stranger. Intelligence agencies and private researchers now largely agree that Russia conducted a pervasive online campaign — through hacking, theft and propaganda — to disrupt the electoral process. The question is what to do about it. The first priority should be conducting a formal investigation. Yet …

  Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s telephone call to US president-elect lasted only for 10 minutes. But it has upended the decades-old One China policy. And this was the closest a Taiwanese president came to getting a formal recognition by United States. Tsai telephone call stirred the hornets’ nest. And it led to a barrage of blunt criticism both from China …

  Americans enjoy an unusual kind of security — their big, domestically focused economy isn’t very vulnerable to external shocks. But most people around the world don’t have that luxury: Their jobs, businesses and livelihoods are very sensitive to events in far-off lands, and the choices of leaders they don’t elect. Right now, much of the world is in danger …

  Don’t tell Tiny Tim, but even if Brexit hasn’t put a damper on Christmas 2016, next year might be a different story. Come January, Britons will pay 5 percent more for their Lego sets, as the Danish company raises prices in response to the pound’s decline in the wake of the UK decision to leave the European Union. And …

  Samuel Johnson got it wrong: Patriotism is the last refuge of the unprofitable. The Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart Online Services Pvt. lost 23 billion rupees last year, and so its co-founder and executive chairman, Sachin Bansal, has suddenly morphed into a great champion of local companies. “We need to take a more India-centric approach” to regulation, he told a …

  Indiana’s Thomas R. Marshall, who was America’s vice president 100 years ago, voiced — he plucked it from a Hoosier humorist — one of the few long-remembered utterances to issue from that office: ‘What this country needs is a good 5-cent cigar,’ which would be $1.11 in today’s currency. A century later, what the country needs is a $12 …

  In Asia, Western banks need to understand that small is beautiful. They need to be more nimble and focused, and accept that some things are best left to the locals. They should also focus on what pays: The multinational clients that were once their top customers and the private-equity firms that provide recurring fees are a lot more loyal …

  Is there a way to measure a country’s overall success? Gross domestic product indicates how well the economy is working. Labor-force participation rates and median wages say something about how workers are faring. Newer measures of happiness, pride and other intangibles may fill in some soft details. There is one metric, however, that speaks volumes about how well any …

  Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unprecedented cash clampdown was initially hailed as a surgical strike against black money menace. But now it seems to be an ill-conceived economic harakiri. One month after Modi government banned the two largest bank notes, people are still struggling to get their hands on the new currency. India is largely a cash –based economy. The …

  The European Union after Brexit is not going to be an indulgent place. The remaining members of the bloc will do what they can to defuse political issues that worked in favour of Brexit, and killing so-called benefit tourism is one of the top items on the agenda. Benefit tourism — citizens of poorer EU countries moving to the …