Opinion

Traveling through Macedonia this week led me to ponder the importance of a hegemon. More generally, many small, vulnerable countries—including Macedonia—will require an outside benefactor to secure their futures. A summary of Macedonian history doesn’t sound entirely promising. In the late 14th century, the region was absorbed by the Ottoman Empire. That boosted Macedonian development in some regards, but it ...

The 10th anniversary of the financial crisis has prompted a lot of analysis about what we’ve learned and whether we’re ready for the next one. Pretty much everything you need to know, though, can be found in one chart: the capital ratios of the largest US banks. Capital, also known as equity, is the money that banks get from shareholders ...

The Brexit deadline of March 2019 creeps ever closer, and exit talks are under way—but Britain’s government still doesn’t know what it wants. This failure to set a clear goal, much less devise a strategy for achieving it, isn’t all that surprising, given the political mess caused by Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to call an early election. It’s nonetheless ...

In just a few years, Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party have managed to ensure that they have practically no political rivals of consequence left. Four years ago, the map of India was a patchwork, with the BJP, its national rival the Congress, and multiple regional parties vying for supremacy at the state and federal level. Today, the BJP ...

The firing of a Google employee for writing a memo that suggested women are biologically less equipped for engineering and management jobs has triggered a whole range of reactions, from those who strongly support the company’s action to those who see it as repression of free speech. Where you come out on this is partly a function of your assessment ...

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the global financial crisis that set off the Great Recession. What the then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had characterized as a mere “$50 billion problem” morphed into a plunge in equity values with investors losing trillions of dollars, and a recession that caused unemployment to peak at 10 percent in ...

The latest round of congressional sanctions against Russia garnered much attention for the message they sent to President Donald Trump: We don’t trust you to decide when to lift or ease sanctions on Moscow. True, it was an important signal to the American people, the president and the rest of the world that nearly all of America’s legislators felt Russia ...

In politics, holding the center ground might be a useful strategy for winning elections, but rarely for generating enthusiasm. Emmanuel Macron’s favorability ratings just dropped seven points, to a low 36 percent, according to a recent poll for the HuffPost and CNews. If he’s not careful, Macron may repeat the mistakes of Francois Hollande, his mentor and predecessor. Macron’s victory ...

July was another month of very low inflation, we learned it. That’s too bad. Economists had anticipated a small but respectable gain in the US consumer price index. That would have relieved some pressure on the US Federal Reserve to delay interest-rate increases in the name of economic growth. The increase was indeed small at 0.1 percent in July from ...

During a recent White House meeting with President Donald Trump, Apple CEO Tim Cook remarked that “coding should be a requirement in every public school.” He’s right. But turning an aspiration into a reality—whether in the classroom or in the Apple store—takes time, money and concentrated effort. The economic argument for upgrading computer science education in the US is strong. ...