Opinion

The 1997 Asian crisis forced Indonesia to replace a 93-year-old relic with something resembling a modern bankruptcy code. India took another 20 years—and its own $191 billion bad-debt crisis—to get to the same point. With the country’s top court backing the new insolvency code, a warped power equation between debtors and creditors is heading for a big shift. It remains ...

Even more than before, President Donald Trump now has the chance to entirely reshape the Federal Reserve. Janet Yellen’s term as chair ends early next year, and her deputy, Stanley Fischer, has just resigned, citing personal reasons. Soon Trump will be able to appoint a new person to the top job and three other positions on the seven-member board — ...

Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s iconic leader, is sacrificing her moral authority for political expediency. By failing to speak out against repression — and, more broadly, by not doing enough to help her country grow and prosper — she risks losing both her power and her reputation. Suu Kyi, whose years leading the resistance to the Burmese junta earned her ...

I recently had a discussion with my Bloomberg View colleagues Conor Sen and Justin Fox about whether cities or suburbs are the future in the US, this turns out to be a very popular and contentious topic. Richard Florida, the noted urbanist, recently bemoaned the death of the great urban revival that saw young Americans flocking to city centers during ...

Imagine buying a home when the previous owner continues to live in it and call the shots, indefinitely. Imagine running a market that matched such sellers with buyers. That’s the dilemma facing Hong Kong and other financial hubs such as Singapore and London as they consider accepting the dual-class shareholding structure used by US-listed tech giants like Facebook Inc. and ...

There are objective reasons why some of Apple’s new smartphones, which were unveiled on Tuesday, will sell for more than $1,000. The iPhones, including the top-of-the line X model — the 10th anniversary edition — have some cutting-edge components, which are expensive and rare. Prices are increasing for all leading smartphones that come ever closer to combining computer and camera ...

“Congress has been dropping in relative power along a descending curve of 60 years’ duration, with the rate of fall markedly increased since 1933. … The fall of the American Congress seems to be correlated with a more general historical transformation toward political and social forms within which the representative assembly — the major political organism of post-Renaissance Western civilization ...

The Trump administration is looking to ease financial-strength requirements for big banks, on the grounds that they’ve already done enough to avert another crisis. But how much safer have they really become? In recent posts, I’ve offered some less-than-encouraging evidence. Levels of loss-absorbing equity, although higher than before the crisis, still fall far short of what’s needed. And despite the ...

In a sharp and welcome rebuke to President Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy, a Senate committee voted last week in favor of more diplomacy. Support was unanimous. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved $51.2 billion for the State Department, the US Agency for International Development and other overseas assistance — more than a third greater than the $37.6 billion the ...

Almost a year on, India’s ban on large-denomination bills has been deemed a “total failure.” That’s not quite fair. True, the primary goal of flushing out tax cheats has been a flop. But a secondary goal — “to move toward the cashless society,” as India’s finance minister put it — still has real promise. The rest of the world, in ...