Opinion

When India’s prime minister announced last November that 86% of India’s currency would be worthless in hours, he presented the decree as a well-thought-out measure to attack cash “hoarded by anti-national and anti-social elements”. We were led to believe that honest taxpayers would line up to return their high-value currency notes, but these “anti-national and anti-social elements” would be unable …

Just when the world thought China was retreating — pushing acquisitive private companies to relinquish their global shopping sprees — it looks like Beijing might be getting out its check book again. China Civil Engineering Construction Corp. will build a $5.8 billion hydroelectric power station in eastern Nigeria, with 85 percent of the funding to come from Beijing’s Export-Import Bank, …

Here’s a story about the US economy that more people are telling these days. Since the 1980s, antitrust enforcement has gotten weaker. As a result, a few big companies have managed to capture a much bigger share of the market in various industries. Technology may have helped too, by letting big companies spread their geographic reach, and by creating network …

A week ago I expressed the hope that President Donald Trump’s lamentable performance after the Charlottesville protests would hurt his standing in the polls. This didn’t happen. If there was a blip, it was in the other direction. I’d be pleased if Trump’s regrettable decision to pardon former sheriff Joe Arpaio dented his popularity, too, but I’m not holding my …

William Cline is going against the grain. Cline, a well-known economist, isn’t convinced that the stock market is wildly overvalued. That’s an increasingly lonely view. “Warning Signs Mount as Stocks Stumble,” The Wall Street Journal headlined earlier this week. “Investors are running out of reasons to keep buying US stocks, exposing a growing number of warning signs,” the Journal wrote. …

Want some good news? Illinois has become the 10th state with some form of automatic voter registration. Most of those are Democratic states, but in Illinois a Republican governor signed the bill, and Georgia, Alaska and West Virginia have adopted this reform as well. (An 11th state, North Dakota, doesn’t have voter registration at all.) So it’s not entirely partisan. …

Britain’s exit talks with the European Union resume—following the release of position papers on what the UK government intends, and a notable change of approach by the opposition Labour Party. Up to a point, these developments are encouraging, but the basic problem remains: Prime Minister Theresa May’s government is moving far too slowly. The UK has now officially embraced the …

As summer reached the high Himalayas this past June, one corner of the mountains turned hotter than expected. On a small plateau called Doklam, close to where the India-China border meets the tiny kingdom of Bhutan, two of the largest armies in the world faced off against each other. Chinese soldiers, convinced they were on Chinese territory, had brought equipment …

Symbolic struggles over the Confederacy are uniquely American. But fierce battles over public spaces and monuments, and the values they elevate and enshrine, are not. “The French have their own versions of these battles,” said Peter Brooks, a professor of literature who has taught at Yale and Princeton. In such battles for cultural and political supremacy, history is a weapon. …

In the affluent nations of northwestern Europe, people with university educations have taken over politics. Cabinet ministers with fancy degrees are nothing new, but more and more parliamentary seats have been going to college graduates. In some countries, the highly educated’s share of seats is completely unprecedented. In others, it hasn’t been this high since the 1800s, when politics was …