Opinion

  The surprise deal in which Qatar’s sovereign wealth and the commodities trader Glencore are acquiring 19.5 percent of Russia’s state-controlled oil company, Rosneft, has broad implications for Middle Eastern geopolitics, Russia’s domestic politics and the oil market. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his old associate, Rosneft chief executive officer Igor Sechin, have both won big on the deal, even …

  The beatings will continue until morale improves, the saying goes. That’s one interpretation of the European Central Bank’s somewhat convoluted rejig of its quantitative easing program this week. By insisting he’s not tapering bond buying while simultaneously reducing the monthly purchases and extending the time frame, President Mario Draghi is sending a mixed message that likely reflects disagreements among …

  In a speech to her party this week, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germany, “wherever legally possible,” ought to ban veils that cover the face, and emphasized that German law should not give way to Shariah law. Her audience cheered —but that only confirmed Merkel’s mistake. Pandering to grievances, real or imagined, rarely works. Sometimes it’s meant to soothe …

  Rebel-held east Aleppo continues to be blitzed. The Syrian army tightened its grip on rebels besieged in Aleppo with thousands of civilians. The regime and Russian assaults on rebel enclave go unabated even as US Secretary of State John Kerry warned that regime’s ‘indiscriminate bombing’ amounted to crimes against humanity. US and Russian officials were expected to continue talks …

  Automation may be gutting American manufacturing jobs, but there’s one thing the robots still can’t beat us at: people skills. It just so happens that the future of American labor will require a lot of them. The occupations projected to add the most jobs in the next 10 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, all require people …

  When Walt Disney opened a monorail at his California Disneyland in 1959, he thought it would be the future of mass transit. For a long time, that seemed unlikely. Although a few cities have built successful monorails, for many people they remained synonymous with amusement parks, a notorious “Simpsons” episode and a future that never quite arrived. Thankfully, that’s …

  Once upon a time, there was a lot of optimism that the blockchain — the technology underlying Bitcoin — would help the finance industry deal with a big headache: post-trade processing, the often long and arduous task of making sure money and securities change hands and everybody knows who owes what to whom. The problem might yet get solved, …

  Any reporter who’s written about the federal budget knows that there’s a surefire solution to every problem. It’s called “fraud, waste and abuse.” You want to end budget deficits? Just eliminate all the “fraud, waste and abuse” in the $4 trillion budget. The same is true for cutting taxes or raising spending. Attacking fraud and waste is virtuous and …

  What causes asset bubbles? This question is the great white whale of finance theory. We know that asset prices are given to spectacular rises and falls over short periods of time. Answering this question is hugely important, not just for people’s pensions and retirement, but for the whole economy, since crashes in asset prices can leave growth in the …

  The impeachment of South Korean leader Park Geun-hye should herald the end of a painful and drawn-out political scandal. As they move forward, Koreans should be thinking about how to avoid another one. With Friday’s 234-to-56 vote in the National Assembly, Park’s powers as president have been suspended. For weeks, she tried to fend off public anger over influence-peddling …