Opinion

After years of horrific fighting in Syria — including several failed cease-fires — it’s hard to get too excited about a limited agreement to stop hostilities in a tiny corner of the country. Yet the modest ‘de-escalation’ deal in Syria’s southwest is a promising sign. IS is not yet defeated. But the cease-fire, reached by Jordan, Russia and the US, …

At this point, blanket critiques of the economics (or “econ”)discipline have been standardized to the point where it’s pretty easy to predict how they’ll proceed. Economists will be castigated for their failure to foresee the Great Recession. Some unrealistic assumptions in mainstream macroeconomic models will be mentioned. Economists will be cast as priests of free-market ideology, whose shortcomings will be …

Britain’s commercial property market is at the epicenter of the Brexit tremor. One of the industry’s titans, British Land Co., is fed up with investors’ reluctance to buy its shares. The company plans to buy back as much as 300 million pounds ($390 million) of its own stock, about 5 percent of its equity value. It’s a bet that the …

If it looks as though Europe is clutching at straws to stop hundreds, sometimes thousands, of migrants from crossing the Mediterranean into Italy every day, that’s exactly what’s happening. On Monday, the European Union’s foreign ministers approved restrictions on the supply of inflatable boats and outboard motors to Libya. The boats that bring the migrants, mostly Africans these days, have …

The Great Recession, and the financial crisis that preceded it, were such enormous and terrible events that they occupied most of our economic thinking for a decade. But now that the smoke has cleared and the economy has returned to a semblance of normality, we’re starting to think more about long-term trends. And evidence is mounting that the Great Recession …

Oh no, no, no. That old time fire is gone. It’s not so much things you say, love. It’s what you don’t say I’m afraid of —Neil Diamond (I Got the Feelin’) Infosys Ltd. struck a cheery note with its June quarterly results. But then, what option did it have? The management of the Indian software exporter is buffeted by …

In President Donald Trump’s latest effort to wall the U.S. off from the rest of the world, his administration has ditched a plan to make it easier for successful foreign entrepreneurs to come and work in America. The decision may play well with the president’s nationalist base, but it will not help the U.S. economy. The administration has delayed (and …

Almost overnight, it seems, the decade-long expansion of rooftop solar in the US has come to an end. Installations are set to fall by 2 percent this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Partly to blame is a widening campaign to end a key customer incentive, homeowners’ ability to sell their extra energy back to the grid at retail …

Paradigm shifts do not come often in economics. From Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes, there is only a handful of scholars who can claim to have radically changed the way we think about how markets should work and what governments can do to improve their functioning. One such moment came almost 50 years ago when Milton Friedman delivered his …

So much for Brexit triggering an immediate economic meltdown. While the pound has fallen 13 percent against the dollar since Britons voted to leave the European Union in June last year, the country’s economy has performed respectably, so far. A year later, however, signs the UK is approaching a tipping point are building. Britons are paring their spending on clothing, …