Opinion

  Like shipwrecked mariners clinging to a floating mast, many Republicans rationalize supporting Donald Trump because of “the court.” This two-word incantation means: Because we care so much for the Constitution, it is supremely important to entrust to Trump the making of Supreme Court nominations. Well. In a Republican candidates debate, Trump complained that Ted Cruz had criticized Trump’s sister, …

  Citigroup has carved out an an improbable niche, given its history of receiving the most federal aid among banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The bank, which already has the most derivatives of any of its U.S. rivals, has been buying credit-default swaps from its European rivals, which are under growing pressure to quickly cut holdings …

  Wall Street threw in the towel on Tesla Motors this week. Sort of, anyway. Analysts’ consensus forecast for Tesla’s earnings per share in 2016 finally slipped into the red this week. A few cuts in the wake of Wednesday’s second-quarter results took the estimate from a profit of about 23 cents to a loss of about 65 cents, according …

  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived Russia on Tuesday for his first meeting with counterpart Vladimir Putin since the two strongmen began healing a bitter feud over Ankara’s downing of a Russian warplane last November. The shooting down of a Russian jet saw a furious Putin slap economic sanctions on Turkey and launch a bitter war of words. Putin …

  There’s no question that mainstream academic macroeconomics failed pretty spectacularly in 2008. It didn’t just fail to predict the crisis — most models, including Nobel Prize-winning ones, didn’t even admit the possibility of a crisis. The vast majority of theories didn’t even include a financial sector. And in the deep, long recession that followed, mainstream macro theory failed to …

  Mac Margolis I have a confession: The other day I went sailing in Rio de Janeiro. I took the whole family, in fact, on a blustery, pre-Olympic afternoon. And we enjoyed it. There were no shoals of garbage, no bodies bobbing in brine, as so many alarming pre-Olympic dispatches have warned. True, my daughter didn’t feel so well, but …

  How did Donald Trump win the Republican nomination despite clear evidence that he had misrepresented or falsified key issues throughout the campaign? Social scientists have some intriguing explanations for why people persist in misjudgments despite strong contrary evidence. Trump is a vivid and, to his critics, a frightening present-day illustration of this perception problem. But it has been studied …

  The tangle of Syria is getting deeper. What started as a bloody crackdown on peaceful protesters mutated into a multifaceted proxy war that triggered Europe’s worst migrant crisis since World War II and facilitated the rise of IS and its global campaign of terror. It has grown into an international proxy conflict. There are regional powers Iran and Saudi …

  The improvement in the US labour market is certainly good news. It could soon become a headache, however, if it persists alongside disappointing economic growth. The economy added 255,000 jobs in July, after adding 292,000 in June. Employment growth was weaker earlier in the year, and two solid months don’t make a trend — but even so, the labor …

  Once again, India is in danger of sabotaging its own efforts to raise foreign investment to China-like levels. The latest salvo in this undeclared, self-defeating war is the government’s reported decision to block Tata Sons from paying what arbitrators say the company owes to a former partner, the Japanese company NTT DoCoMo. The decision is particularly odd because, under …