Opinion

Like all good financial aphorisms, the notion that “profit is an opinion, while cash is a fact” contains a kernel of truth. It’s certainly a lot easier for companies to massage quarterly earnings than it is to lose track of how much cash they have in the bank. Ultimately, investors use projected cash flows to determine what a business is ...

Empty supermarket shelves in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic have put grow-your-own back on the world’s agenda, and nowhere more so than in China, where ensuring food supplies for its huge population has been a political priority for decades. Simply diversifying imports may not satisfy hawkish voices. Emphasizing domestic production, though, will extract a heavy toll for a ...

The Covid crisis has required strong and prompt action by central banks consistent with their mandates. In March, disorderly conditions reached the core financial markets, posing a very real threat to the stability of the financial system — by far the most serious threat since the global financial crisis. Underlying this disorder in markets was an economic downturn almost unprecedented ...

The Supreme Court justices might be bemused, or depressed, by this question they implicitly will consider in Thursday’s conference: Should they review — the answer is yes — a decision by a lower court that evidently skipped history class the day the teacher explained that a huge defect of the Articles of Confederation was the states’ powers to impede the ...

Science has a lot to say about the effectiveness of wearing a mask to stop the spread of the coronavirus, but the communication of that science has been corrupted by a combination of partisan divides, sensationalist media stories, distrust, false dichotomies, and letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The studies on masks aren’t perfectly definitive, but that’s ...

Ever since the coronavirus sent millions of people home to work, people have been predicting that remote work will endure after the pandemic is over. Color me skeptical. I can’t imagine everyone not wanting to race back into the office the minute it is safe to do so. But my wife and I both have full-time jobs, and we have ...

To reduce inequality and racial injustice, a lot of people are interested in making college available to all. The most ambitious proposals would cost a great deal of money — and taxpayers would have to foot the bill. Last week, the city of West Sacramento, California, did something fresh and creative — and cheap. It automatically admitted every one of ...

Last week, cars and pedestrians lined up for free Covid-19 tests in south Minneapolis, six blocks from where George Floyd was killed last month. As protests flared after his death, Minnesota’s Department of Health had set up the testing site and encouraged demonstrators to visit in hopes of stemming a potential new outbreak. Long lines at this center and three ...

A rare meeting of minds between India’s Left and Right on a point of economics should alarm those who belong to neither. The two sides are tossing out similar — and similarly absurd — ideas. Before they make PM  Narendra Modi’s government do something silly and harmful (such as the overnight ban on 86% of currency notes in 2016), both ...

What do you call a country whose government openly embraces illiberalism and exults in the crisis of democracy, cheers the perceived decline of the US and the rise of its authoritarian challengers, makes irredentist claims against its neighbors, and spreads decay within key institutions of the American-led international order? If you answered “NATO ally,” you are, unfortunately, correct. Under PM ...