Opinion

Donald Trump isn’t draining the swamp. The president unveiled his long-awaited “tax reform” package last week, and although many crucial details were missing (for example, the income brackets), he was full of accolades. “This is a revolutionary change,” he said. Well, not yet. The federal income tax system—almost everyone seems to agree—is a mess. It features relatively high nominal rates …

The new chief executive of Uber Technologies Inc. is on a crusade to repair a corporate reputation that’s been badly damaged by scandals over its treatment of women and broader corporate culture. Dara Khosrowshahi even apologized after London’s transport regulator revoked Uber’s local license because of failures to run proper background checks on drivers and report alleged crimes. Losses last …

Warren Buffett may have won his decade-long bet against hedge funds, but can his advice to investors to use only low-cost index funds beat the red-hot record of wealth managers? Readers of the 2017 Capgemini World Wealth Report, released on Thursday, will be shaking their heads. High-net-worth individuals reported an average 24 percent return last year on assets managed by …

With Puerto Rico sweltering in the dark, restoring electricity as soon as possible is vital to averting a humanitarian disaster. The island’s long-term recovery, however, will depend not only on repairing its battered grid but on reforming its feckless power company. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the biggest public utility in the US, is notorious for its mismanagement and …

As she builds her new coalition government, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will be mindful of the need to counter nationalism at home and the imperative of finding a consensus on integration in the euro zone. But the election also exposed a demographic rift that could present an even bigger challenge to Germany’s leaders: between a graying population that backed the …

Picking stocks is famously difficult. But just how difficult is one of the oldest arguments in finance. New York Times columnist Jeff Sommer reopened the debate last week with a piece describing a recent study by an Arizona State University business professor, Hendrik Bessembinder. Bessembinder looked at the performance of publicly traded stocks in the US from 1926 to 2016 …

A few months ago, no one would have noticed British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn’s address at the annual conference of his Labour Party. But that was before he engineered its biggest increase in vote share since World War II after Theresa May gambled on a snap election and lost her majority. The election, Corbyn told the Labour faithful, “has put …

Top US officials have said repeatedly that America is seeking a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis with North Korea. But President Trump’s insulting comments towards North Korean leader Kim Jong un appear to have made such a negotiated settlement more difficult. In the chaotic government-by-Twitter atmosphere of the Trump administration, no senior leader has publicly questioned whether the president’s …

One of the unfortunate aspects of Trumpian populism is the effect it is having on our discussion of economic policy, and thereby on our understanding of the underlying goals that policies are meant to advance. This is perhaps most stark in discussions of international trade. The right used to discuss trade as a way to enrich the nation and raise …

On Tuesday, Twitter announced that a select group of users would be able to send 280-character tweets—double the platform’s signature 140-character limit. It’s part of an experiment testing whether longer character limits would be better for everyone. The company explained that, in languages where a single character carries more meaning—Chinese, Japanese and Korean—they see “more people tweeting—which is awesome!” If …