Opinion

  In the early days of the current economic expansion, Texas led the way. That stopped being true a couple of years ago; according to state jobs data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, California has added the most payroll jobs (2.4 million) since employment bottomed out nationally in February 2010; Utah is the leader on a percentage …

  Leonid Bershidsky While it’s unclear how well Russian President Vladimir Putin will get along with Donald Trump and his team of Republican hawks, it looks as though he has already won the French presidential election. The front-runner in the primary vote of the French center-right, Francois Fillon, is nearly as enthusiastic a Russophile as Marine Le Pen, leader of …

  Angela Merkel’s announcement on Sunday that she will run for a fourth term as chancellor was hardly unexpected, given her role as the world’s foremost centrist, one of Europe’s last bulwarks against the hard right and a leader who doesn’t really have a credible rival in Germany. Yet she will probably face the toughest election of her career; victory …

  Talk of war is in the air — trade war! President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to label China a currency manipulator, and has floated the idea of imposing large tariffs on Chinese imports. This sort of policy is considered beyond the pale in mainstream economics and media circles. It is subjected to epithets like “protectionism” and “mercantilism.” Almost everyone …

  Come Jan. 20, President-elect Donald J. Trump will start carrying out his agenda. How does he expect to turn his promises into policy? Do his plans make sense? If not, what should he do? Finally, given the political realities of Washington, what’s most likely to happen? What he says he’ll do: Trump promises to pull the U.S. from last …

  There is no gainsaying the fact that globalization has produced many economic benefits and free trade has spurred global prosperity. However, of late, protectionism is taking over economic liberalization and has triggered a rising concern in emerging economies. Leaders attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Lima expressed wariness about the peril that protectionism poses to global economy. …

Stories of shady Russian influence abounded during the U.S. election campaign, but the evidence in them was often sketchy and the eventual benefits to Russia questionable. The European Union, for its part, is dealing with a scandal in which both the Russian connection and the gain for the Kremlin are far less nebulous. On May 18, EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger …

  Amid whiffs of chemicals and the electric hum of transformers, Kraftwerk Jaenschwalde rises like an ash-colored fortress over a landscape disfigured by decades of open-pit coal mining. The communist-era colossus in eastern Germany is one of Europe’s dirtiest power plants, belching 24 million tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide into the air every year. It could have been closed for …

    Mark Whitehouse Do we have the 2008 financial crisis to thank for Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president? More than a century of human experience suggests it’s a real possibility. Trump’s surprise victory has prompted a lot of worrying about the wave of antiestablishment — and often xenophobic — sentiment that seems to be rolling across the developed …

  Before President-elect Donald Trump brings in the bulldozers to “drain the swamp” in Washington, I hope he will consider the career achievements of two people who embody the nation’s tradition of bipartisan foreign policy leadership, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. The two former national security advisers came from vastly different worlds to join in constructing the foreign policy tradition …