Opinion

  “Black money” — the colloquial name for a vast network of off-the-book cash transactions and unbanked savings — is one of India’s biggest scourges. Amounting to as much as $460 billion a year, bigger than the GDP of Argentina, all that money lies beyond the reach of the tax authorities, creditors and anti-corruption investigators. Efforts to bring it into …

  WASHINGTON Political conventions are echo chambers designed to generate feelings of invincibility, sending forth the party faithful with a spring in their steps and hope in their hearts. Who would want to be a wet blanket at such moveable feasts? Steve Munisteri would. Although he calls himself “the eternal optimist,” he respects reality, which nowadays is not conducive to …

  British Prime Minister Theresa May’s visit to Berlin would largely focus on establishing working relationship with strong woman of Europe, German Chancellor Angel Merkel. This would be necessary when May triggers the Article 50 to kickstart the UK’s exit process from the European Union (EU). Ahead of her meeting with Merkel, she already took the first step towards Brexit …

  Megan McArdle At first after the convention broke for the night on Monday, everyone on the cable news networks agreed that Melania Trump’s speech was good. An hour later everyone was talking about how much her apparent plagiarism from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech would hurt the Trump campaign. This morning Trump supporters are offering the only defense they can: …

  Tajikistan appears to be inching toward joining the Eurasian Economic Union. With Dushanbe long suggested to be considering membership, this news ought to be taken with a grain of salt. According to Asia-Plus, the head of the Customs Service, Abdufattoh Ghoib (who had previously headed the anti-corruption service before President Emomali Ramon’s son took it over), told reporters on …

  Recent high-profile terror attacks pose a new challenge for police and intelligence services. All seem to be the work of lone wolf actors. Yet police and intelligence services, by the nature of their work, target groups. It’s possible to adjust that focus, but that would require Western societies to make an important trade-off. On Monday, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum …

  At some point, everyone knew, Netflix’s subscriber growth in the U.S. had to slow down. The company’s video-streaming service is nearing market saturation among its core demographic — affluent young-to-middle-aged people — meaning further gains will be harder to come by. Still, it was a bit of a shock for investors to learn from Monday’s earnings report that Netflix …

  The unsettling reality of today’s world is that a bad mood can move readily from one country to another, even when events on the ground call for moderation or optimism. Or in the language of financial economics, emotional and ideological contagion is becoming a more important source of systemic risk. The spread of revolutions during the Arab Spring showed …

  WASHINGTON Let’s salute an unlikely champion of saving energy and switching to alternative fuels — the US Navy. Once a supreme fuel-guzzler whose energy needs sometimes dictated foreign policy, the Navy has become a model for how the country can curb its appetite for fossil fuels. The Navy’s energy diet began seven years ago with an edict from newly …

  An ambitious Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that brings 12 nations together, and accounts for 40 percent of the global economy, faces enormous challenges in terms of ratification in the US Congress, and rejection by the presidential candidates. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has outrightly rejected the TPP though a number of Republicans more Democrats back the agreement. Democratic …