Opinion

The “spoils society” is a phrase I coined some years ago to illustrate a basic problem of wealthy societies, including, of course, the United States. After all, our annual GDP (gross domestic product) is approaching $20 trillion. The problem is that, as societies become richer, so does the temptation for people to advance their economic interests by grabbing someone else’s ...

My thoughts tend to go to dark places these days. And so when I watched Google on Wednesday trot out one after another of its homegrown computing devices for every task and every nook of our homes, I went straight to dystopia: R.I.P. digital competition. Today most people experience computing through devices controlled by a handful of companies: principally Microsoft ...

Central bankers are increasingly concerned about the possibility of low inflation expectations. But will those worries have an impact on the Federal Reserve’s December meeting? With the bank seemingly on autopilot for the rest of 2017, odds still favor a rate hike, yet if fears of falling inflation expectations gain more traction, look for policy makers to start downgrading rate-increase ...

The National Rifle Association has finally found a device it will not unequivocally defend. The bump stock, which essentially turns a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun and helped Stephen Paddock turn Sunday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas into the deadliest in modern US history, should be subject to “additional regulations,” the group said on Thursday. If congratulations are not ...

Forget Twitter trolls, Facebook ads and multilingual propaganda websites: The biggest Russian threat to Western democracies comes from the massive amounts of cash Russians have exported and parked in the West. That money’s corrupting potential is all but limitless, but both the increasingly isolationist Russia and the increasingly anti-Russian West do little to stem the flow. In a recent paper, ...

India’s company boards are due for another shakeup, and this time around investors should see some real change. The reason to place a higher burden of expectation on the Uday Kotak committee, which submitted its report to the stock-market regulator, is that it’s at least attempting to break away from a 20-year tradition of trying to fashion a modern corporate ...

“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street,” Donald Trump told Geraldo Rivera. “We’re going to have to wipe that out. That’s going to have to be—you know, you can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is, you can wave goodbye to that.” Bond markets didn’t appreciate the ...

Various cultures have different phrases for expressing the idea of having it both ways at once. “To take a swim and not get wet” is an Albanian proverb. Poles talk about “having the cookie and eating it.” Iranians want “both God and the sugar dates.” The Trump administration has been weighing a contemporary geopolitical version of this straddle. Hard liners ...

Many Americans are worried that the US is becoming a class society. The country’s founding mythology holds that it began as an egalitarian alternative to the hidebound, class cultures of Europe—a place where even the lowliest of birth rise through hard work and ingenuity. Of course, that rosy image was never quite accurate, but in the mid-20th century the US ...

In selecting a chairman of the Federal Reserve, President Donald Trump should not be looking for a hawk or a dove. He should be looking for someone who is willing to play either role as circumstances warrant. One of the top contenders for the appointment, Kevin Warsh, has proved he is right for only half the job. He has leaned ...