Opinion

China’s economy is faltering and so is its currency. The yuan’s drop to a two-year low has led to hand-wringing that emerging markets have lost an anchor. The slide is regarded with foreboding in Asia and trepidation as far away as Africa and Latin America, where China has sought to extend its commercial footprint. Bears are everywhere. That it has ...

  The market is down, inflation is up and your retirement prospects aren’t looking so good. It’s tempting to pine for the old days, when employers provided defined pensions to workers, giving them more certainty in their golden years. Except…. it wasn’t quite like that, actually. Defined benefit pensions are overrated. Even in this scary market, you should be grateful ...

  For the second time in a week, Nasa scrubbed the launch of the Space Launch System designed to return Americans to the moon. First conceived in 2010, and initially scheduled to have its first test flight in 2017, the rocket is now scheduled to take off no earlier than late September, and possibly much later. Nasa, for its part, ...

  With unemployment low, inflation high and interest rates on the rise, the time is right to bring back an old idea: bipartisan talks to reduce the federal budget deficit. I know: Try to contain your excitement. But it wasn’t so long ago — about a decade — that the US was consumed by a mania for deficit reduction. From ...

Like everybody I know in Germany, I bought the so-called 9-euro ticket this summer. Three, in fact — one each for June, July and August. I put the QR codes in my cell phone’s digital wallet, and was free to hop on and off all buses, trams, local and regional trains nationwide. In a country that specializes in making things ...

  With the US unemployment rate near a five-decade low and job vacancies close to a record high, businesses say they are scrambling to find workers. Many complain that large and growing skills mismatches prevent them from getting the staff they need. While the Biden administration has pushed for large government spending increases to support college students and former college ...

  It’s not every day the International Atomic Energy Agency dispatches monitors looking like Hollywood action heroes on a mission to save civilization. But that’s an apt description of the IAEA team now inspecting the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. It’s Europe’s largest nuclear reactor complex and sits right on the front line between the Ukrainian defenders and Russian ...

  US-based airlines canceled more than 100,000 flights between January and July, surpassing the number of cancellations that took place during the same period in pre-Covid 2019. The impact on passengers is significant. Not only must they find alternative transportation; they must also obtain a refund for their advance purchases. That’s harder than it should be. In fact, difficulty obtaining ...

We know that the US economy is currently weak, but the real economy is really weak, and the Federal Reserve’s commitment to precipitate a recession to curb high inflation will make this reality obvious to seemingly oblivious investors. Real gross domestic product dropped for two consecutive quarters, and although the National Bureau of Economic Research has yet to declare that ...

  A few months ago, when India restricted wheat exports following a heatwave, rumbles ran through the world’s food markets. Still, while India is a giant consumer of wheat, it’s not as big an exporter. The real fear was that New Delhi might cut off rice shipments as well: India is the world’s largest exporter by far. Fortunately, rice prices ...