Opinion

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? ...

It’s time for Australian legislators and jurists to end a juvenile tussle about citizenship and who can serve in government. Their future depends on it. There is almost daily hysteria in Australia over a formerly obscure clause in the constitution that bars dual nationals from sitting in the federal parliament. The question is which legislators are now disqualified because they ...

American voters are obligated to pass judgment on President Donald Trump. Increasingly, American corporations may find that they, too, have little choice. After Trump failed to call out the racists responsible for the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend, Merck & Co. chief executive officer Kenneth Frazier made an announcement: He was resigning, he said via Twitter, from Trump’s ...

The most important thing to know about Steve Bannon, the departing White House “chief strategist,” is that he was an amateur. And just as Richard Neustadt tells us that the presidency is no place for amateurs, the same is true for White House senior staffers. The most important thing to know about Donald Trump’s first staff is that the actor ...

“Whose streets? Our streets!” If you found it disturbing to hear white supremacists chanting these words as they marched last weekend through Charlottesville, Virginia, I’m about to make you feel worse. This blueprint for political rise comes directly from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” where the would-be dictator advised his followers that “the road can be cleared for the movement … ...

The S&P 500 Index has recorded more than 150 new all-time highs since eclipsing its previous peak in late-March of 2013. In 2017 alone there have been 30 new record highs through the end of last week. To put this into perspective, there were only 13 new highs for the entire decade of the 2000s. When you combine a stock ...