Opinion

The decision of Bank of Japan (BoJ) to keep monetary stimulus unchanged sent mixed messages to the stock markets, with Tokyo shares closing down 0.68% after the announcement, while the yen strengthening against all its 16 major peers. The yen’s reaction on Tuesday threw the ball in the court of Japan’s central bank chief to convince the market of the …

Is Donald Trump benefiting, at least in the short term, from the focus on protests and violence at his rallies? If so, his ability to deflect attention from his rivals’ substantive attacks on him has worked again. From the beginning, we’ve talked about the Red Queen race: Trump must do increasingly outrageous things to maintain his dominant share of press …

In the debate over climate change, there is one group you don’t hear much from: economists. The failure of climate economics to make a difference in the public discussion about climate policy should be a concern for the profession. Climate economists are just as worried as anyone about the prospect of global warming. A recent survey by the Institute for …

Japan and its two decades of economic stagnation seem as if they’re about to have company. The International Monetary Fund and OECD both seem prepared to lower their global growth forecasts for the coming year because of what they see as a continuing slowdown in the global economy. Foreign Affairs even devoted its most recent issue to surviving a slow-growth …

The simplest reading of the protests that swept Brazil on Sunday is that Latin America’s largest nation is clamoring for regime change. The 3 million or more people who filled the streets and parks of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and dozens of other Brazilian cities turned out to say they’re fed up with the relentless corruption scandal that has …

Good countries can sometimes go bad. Donald Trump’s supporters implicitly make this argument when they proclaim “Make America Great Again.” And so do those who loathe Trump and see in him a dangerous populist response to the anger of frustrated middle-class voters. The rise of Trump, love him or hate him, conveys an inescapable message: America’s political institutions are in …

Agreeing on political transition in Syria remains an uphill task as the huge government-opposition divide will likely complicate a settlement. The fate of President Bashar al-Assad, presidential elections and the type of new government are main obstacles that need to be addressed for peace to prevail across Syria. Syria’s conflict, which began on March 15, 2011 with a peaceful protest …

Jack Hands SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS It was Libya in 2011 – the uprising against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and the subsequent shocking scenes of a bloodied dictator reduced to waiting on his fate in a dusty street just west of Sirte – that reinforced North Korea’s long-held belief that the only way to truly deter an outside attack would be …

The Federal Reserve’s policy meeting this week will be closely watched, particularly after the stimulative measures taken by the European Central Bank last week. Here are some steps that U.S. central bankers will and won’t take, and particularly those of greatest interest to financial markets: n Fed officials will note the continued recovery of the U.S. economy, led by strong …

Ronald Dworkin, the legal philosopher who died in 2013, famously used a metaphor once to explain the core of his thinking on the philosophy of law. In the context of American common law and constitutional interpretation, Dworkin analogized the role of judges as the writers of a “chain novel.” The law, per Dworkin, was a collective novel, composed by a …