Opinion

  To widespread dismay, Colombians voted on Sunday to reject an agreement that might have ended Latin America’s longest-running armed conflict — a decades-long insurgency that has taken more than 220,000 lives, displaced more than 10 percent of the country’s people, and inflicted enormous economic damage. The upset underlines the risks of government by referendum — as if further proof …

  Despite the market headwinds, Islamic economy is gaining traction. And recent studies substantiate the fact that the segment offers hope to achieve economic stability. Strong retail demand and proactive regulations have boosted the Islamic banking sector. According to rating agency Moody’s, the growth of Islamic banking is outpacing conventional banking. Another study said the compound annual growth rate or …

  The International Monetary Fund warned three months ago that Deutsche Bank posed a potential systemic threat to the global financial system. Today the problems facing Germany’s largest lender are fueling a different kind of risk: that of a growing nationalist backlash in Germany. On Monday, the chairman of the German parliament’s economics committee Peter Ramsauer gave an interview to …

  About 7 million American men of prime working age (25 through 54) are not in the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means they don’t have a paid job and haven’t been actively looking for one. This figure does not include those in jail or prison. It does include students and men staying home to …

  The big news this weekend was the leak of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax returns to the New York Times. The returns showed that in that year, Trump claimed $916 million worth of business losses; those losses, said the Times, “could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.” Liberal social media …

  As a rattled Donald Trump struggled to parry a composed Hillary Clinton in the waning moments of last week’s presidential debate, markets began to rally in Asia and the price of gold started to fall. Those were sighs of investor relief, news articles asserted, that a Trump presidency was becoming less likely. If so, it was the first time …

  My column last week focused on the headwinds facing the European banking system and the broader implications of Deutsche Bank’s fall from grace, including the decline in its stock price by more than half. Let’s now take a closer look at factors that are specific to the bank, including what may happen, and what probably won’t, starting with the …

  There continues to be a steady drumbeat of editorials and essays warning about the danger of too much private debt. One of the most articulate and thorough of these was a recent op-ed by Richard Vague in Democracy Journal, arguing that excessive debt levels are putting the world in danger of a big economic crisis. But this worry is …

  It would be wrong to say that all Colombians have rejected their government’s peace deal with the Marxist guerrillas FARC when the turnout for the referendum was only 37percent. The accord was turned down by a razor-thin margin of 50.2percent to 49.8percent. Had the two-thirds who abstained voted, the result would have been very different. The referendum shows only …

  Roiled by fears of a possible conflict with Pakistan, markets in India haven’t been terribly stable in recent days. But at least one source of anxiety has happily been alleviated. Investors are confident that Tuesday’s monetary policy statement from the Reserve Bank of India — the first since the departure of former governor Raghuram Rajan — will signal continuity, …