Opinion

Things only seem to get worse for India’s farmers. They’d barely recovered from two years of drought when they were hit by the government’s decision last fall to declare 86% of India’s currency illegal. They struggled through that, and the consequent crash in prices, in hopes that this year’s monsoon would be healthy. And, although forecasters insisted enough rain would ...

Citigroup Inc.’s risk takers are once again leading the charge. So far, it’s been all rewards. The bank reported second-quarter results that were better-than-expected, including revenue for the period of $17.9 billion, or nearly $450 million more than analysts were anticipating. The results are the latest in a string of good news for Citi. Just last month, it flew through ...

Our story thus far: After decades of expensive and often underperforming active fund management, the public has embraced low-cost, passive-index investing with a vengeance. The old chin-rubbing-this-company-looks-good school of stock picking has been hit with enormous asset outflows. Vanguard Group Inc. and BlackRock Inc. have captured trillions of dollars in new assets, tied to broad indexes, to the collective detriment ...

What lessons can we take from the IS’s defeat in Mosul and its coming eviction from Raqqa? The collapse of the ‘caliphate’ tells us that the US can succeed militarily in the Middle East if — and probably only if — it works with local forces who are prepared to do the fighting and dying. Where the massive US ground ...

There’s a green bubble in India, with investors flocking to fund a planned tripling of renewable energy capacity over the next five years. Luckily for Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, one of the more gung-ho backers of solar, wind and hydroelectric power in the country, there’s a bigger bubble out there — in global bond markets — that’s allowing the green ...

Donald Trump won the US presidency in large part on a promise to help American workers displaced by trade and technology. That’s a worthy goal — but if he wants to deliver, he’ll have to rethink his approach. Above all, he’ll need to recognize that the modern economy is not just about digging holes and bashing metal. To date, Trump ...

The International Monetary Fund just pointed out that “South Africa’s vulnerabilities have become more pronounced.” That’s one way of putting it. A potentially prosperous and dynamic economy is on the fast track to ruin. Altering its course will take real political reform. Unemployment has risen five percentage points since 2008, to a hope-crushing 28 percent. The country’s population is expanding ...

Will China ever become democratic? That question has been a staple of geopolitical discussion since the 1990s, and at times many commentators thought a democratic China was not so far away. Today, as restrictions on political speech and opposition increase, hardly anyone thinks this is a realistic scenario. Yet it’s still worth asking why China might never democratize, and what ...

The reason for the stock market’s vanishing volatility may not be what many people think. It may have more to do with local community boards or town reps than the Federal Reserve. Volatility, which has slumped this year, has been a big topic of discussion among market participants, and not all of it has been positive. Low volatility is usually ...

A new report by Bloomberg News about Russia being suspected of recently hacking a dozen US power plants, including a nuclear one, is far more serious than any possible attempt to influence an election. It could be a sign of something even scarier: two military superpowers stepping up a cyberwar in the shadows and without rules of engagement that protect ...