Opinion

  Next Tuesday will be the start of open enrollment for Obamacare’s state exchanges, which offer health insurance to the 7 percent of Americans who buy their own coverage. It’s an anxious moment for the program: Enrollment is expected to remain significantly less than originally hoped. Some insurers have pulled out of the exchanges altogether. And those that remain have …

  Former deputy head of the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority Paul Fisher has made an emphatic remark: Climate change could trigger the world’s next financial crisis. This should ring alarm for the policy makers. Fisher has warned that sudden repricing of assets due to climate change could hugely affect businesses across the globe. His comments come close on …

There’s a backlash against globalization underway in many Western countries. Although Americans still say positive things about international trade and immigration, political candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have gotten a lot of support for opposing both to a degree that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Meanwhile, trade deals like the relatively innocuous Trans-Pacific Partnership are suddenly …

  India’s Tata group of companies, which sells everything from salt to software, is known for being, well, old-fashioned. Genteel, even. It tries very hard to avoid any sort of controversy. That’s why the sudden removal of the group’s young chairman, Cyrus Mistry, and his replacement by his predecessor, Ratan Tata, is particularly startling. Apparently, not even Tata Sons Ltd., …

  Some 12,000 years ago, with the invention of farming, humans started a war against weeds — and the weeds are still a step ahead. As farmers advanced from using hard labor to protect their crops to using chemicals and genetic engineering, the weeds survived thanks to the oldest weapon known to living things: evolution. Now, while scientists work on …

  Donald Trump may never have an opportunity to put his nationalist economic ideas into practice, but they are almost certain to outlive his campaign. Many workers have come to believe that free trade kills jobs and that they and the U.S. economy overall would be better off if more stuff was made at home rather than in China or …

  When told that the New England transcendentalist Margaret Fuller had grandly declared “I accept the universe,” the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle dryly remarked: “She’d better.” Much ink and indignation has been spilled concerning whether Donald (“I am much more humble than you would understand”) Trump will “accept” the election’s outcome. The nation, like the universe of which it is …

  Europe urgently needs to repair a banking system that’s weighing on the region’s economy. Governments say they understand, but they still aren’t taking the task seriously. The issue is global standards for capital — the bedrock financing that makes banks capable of absorbing losses without going bust. Lack of capital in 2008 turned financial setbacks into a full-scale crisis. …

  Venezuela’s political and economic mess is deepening. Pro and anti-government rallies were taken out on Wednesday as the game of trading accusations continues to imperil the country’s future. Its president Nicolas Maduro has been charged by the opposition with halting the decision to call a referendum on removing him from power. On the other hand, Maduro has accused the …

After many years of 7- to 10-percent growth, economies tend to overheat, creating bubbles that burst. That’s what happened to South Korea and Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. But China’s economy keeps plugging along (though probably not at its published growth rate of 6.7 percent), defying the predictions of doomsaying pundits. Some indicators show a recovery this year. That …