Opinion

`The Federal Reserve has an opportunity to test a hypothesis critical to the health of the US economy: Can persistently loose monetary policy boost the pace of productivity growth? Sadly, for now, an adherence to a strict Phillips curve framework for the economy and fear of financial instability will prevent the Fed from venturing down this path. Chair Janet Yellen ...

One by one, some of the most important people in corporate America lined up to criticize the president of the United States. Though many of them didn’t utter Donald Trump’s name, they didn’t need to. Everyone knew they were talking about Trump’s repugnant “both-sides-are-bad” response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend. “What we saw there was domestic ...

Morally, the only proper reaction to last weekend’s events in Charlottesville, Virginia, is outrage. Legally, the analysis has to be more nuanced. To help prevent further violence while preserving freedom of speech, we need to distinguish three categories, all of which seem to have been in play in Charlottesville: terrorism, peaceful protest and provocative action aimed at producing street violence. ...

Remember that Chinese pet food, laced with melamine, that caused kidney failure in the family European pooch? The horse meat passed off as beef burgers in Britain? Now tainted Dutch eggs are making diners uneasy. There’s something especially creepy about recurring food scandals, even the ones that don’t pose a huge threat to public health. The latest, involving millions of ...

The exodus of chief executive officers from two of President Donald Trump’s advisory councils led him to disband the panels. That’s no great loss: The councils mostly served political rather than policy purposes. But for those who serve in the highest ranks of government, the issue is different, and quitting is not the answer. It’s hard to fault anyone for ...

On April 6, Israeli army Sargent Elchai Taharlev, 20, was standing by a bus stop in the West Bank, when a car driven by a Palestinian purposely veered off the road and killed him. Two months later, Hadas Malka, 23, was standing guard with the border police outside the Old City of Jerusalem when she was killed by three Palestinians ...

It’s vacation time in France, and the fleets of buses plying the nation’s highways suggest President Emmanuel Macron’s earliest effort to shake up the economy is catching on. Cheaper and less glamorous than France’s celebrated high-speed trains, buses are hauling ever more travellers. That’s after Macron, then the economy minister, pushed through a law two years ago allowing passenger buses ...

In 2003, when a number of former intelligence professionals formed a group to protest the way intelligence was bent to accuse Iraq of producing weapons of mass destruction, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a sympathetic column quoting the group’s members. In 2017, you won’t read about this same group’s latest campaign in the big US newspapers. The Veteran ...

Generals, the old saying goes, always fight the last war. A similar (though less pithy) principle is that politicians always propose solutions to the last decade’s problems. In the US, there are two main areas where we see this principle at work. The first is immigration—net illegal immigration stopped a decade ago, but President Donald Trump and his supporters are ...

Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident-turned-president, wrote a famous essay about the life of the mind under a system of totalitarian control. He invoked the example of a greengrocer who puts a sign in his window saying, “Workers of the world, unite!”— not believing in it and perhaps not even knowing what it meant, but ritually accepting it as the officially ...