Opinion

President Donald Trump likes to tweet about the performance of stocks this year, most recently noting at the start of the month that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was on the cusp of reaching 22,000 and another record high. The implication is that the gains are a direct result of Trump’s performance and policies. But do US presidents really drive …

The alt-right and neo-Nazi protesters seem to have chosen Charlottesville, Virginia, as a gathering point this past weekend because of the controversy over the town’s Confederate statues and memorials. Whether they knew it or not, there is another reason the state is important: If Virginia can be shown to look like a hotbed of conflict and prejudicial discontent, the message …

After weeks of belligerent rhetoric, North Korea took a pause. But where is the mercurial Kim Jong Un headed next? US officials are debating whether he may want direct talks with Washington about a formal treaty to replace the 1953 armistice agreement that ended the Korean War. The US has been pursuing a dual path, threatening military conflict (semi-believably because …

Last Tuesday Donald Trump said that some of the people marching with neo-Nazis were “very fine people.” By Thursday, Trump shifted to talking more about monuments to the Confederacy—and so did many Democrats. And that drove a whole lot of people nuts, including several Republican anti-Trumpers who I think were quite sincere about it. Why, they wanted to know, were …

Britain’s labor market is powering ahead, and inflation exceeds the Bank of England’s target. Is it hot in here? Don’t expect Governor Mark Carney to cool things off. Here’s a major economy where price increases have not only picked up, but at 2.6 percent easily top the 2 percent target. Unlike in the US, the euro zone and Japan, a …

If one scorpion is removed from a bag that’s busy with them, does Donald Trump begin to look like a president? Steve Bannon, who was jettisoned from the bag today, has always been the most mysterious member of Trump’s lumpen B-Team. Most of the other scorpions have readily identified portfolios. They work in the Department of Nepotism or the Ministry …

There is no question that President Donald Trump’s shifting reactions to the domestic terrorism in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been odious. While he condemned the murder of Heather Heyer, his equivocations, hedges and moral equivalency in the last three days signal a quiet approval of white supremacists. “What about the alt-left?” This is particularly odious because of America’s shameful history of …

One of the greatest responsibilities of US financial regulators is to preserve confidence in the market for our federal debt, the world’s deepest and most liquid financial market. There are $19.8 trillion dollars of federal debt outstanding today, of which the public holds $14.4 trillion. This debt finances the federal government, and it plays an irreplaceable role in financial markets—facilitating …

Why aren’t there more female software developers in Silicon Valley? James Damore, the Google engineer fired for criticizing the company’s diversity program, believes that it’s all about “innate dispositional differences” that leave women trailing men. He’s wrong. In fact, at the dawn of the computing revolution women, not men, dominated software programming. The story of how software became reconstructed as …

A persisting puzzle about the US economy is how it can seem both strong and weak. On the one hand, it remains a citadel of innovation, producing new companies like Uber. On the other, the economy is expanding at a snail’s pace of 2 percent annually since 2010. How could both be true? Why isn’t innovation translating into faster growth? …