Opinion

  The European Council, which includes leaders of EU member states, normally issues a consensus document at the end of each meeting. On Thursday, it failed to do so because one member — Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo — refused to approve it. The spat tells us something about the rocky future of a multispeed Europe. Szydlo’s snub had nothing ...

  You knew it all along: Economists can’t forecast the economy worth a hoot. And now we have a scholarly study that confirms it. Better yet, the corroboration comes from an impeccable source: the Federal Reserve. The study compared predictions of important economic indicators — unemployment, inflation, interest rates, gross domestic product — with the actual outcomes. There were widespread ...

  The economist Kenneth Arrow, who died last month at age 95, was a model academic — brilliant, creative, precise, unfailingly modest. If only his fellow economists would stop misrepresenting his work. In the 1950s, Arrow and others proved a theorem that, many economists believe, put a rigorous mathematical foundation beneath Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand. The theorem ...

  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is just one of many federal agencies marked for drastic funding reductions to enable a big boost in military spending. But the cuts proposed for America’s center of weather and climate research reveal alarming pitfalls in President Donald Trump’s approach to budgeting: a reluctance to invest in the future, a disregard for ...

  At last, what South Koreans accomplished was least expected. The country’s Constitutional Court removed President Park Geun-hye from office in a unanimous 8 to 0 decision. The court’s decision marked the most stunning downfall for the South Korea’s first female leader. The ruling allows possible criminal proceedings against 65-year-old Park and makes her country’s first democratically elected leader to ...

  President Donald Trump’s economic adviser, Peter Navarro, has vowed to restore US manufacturing supremacy. This is no surprise — Trump’s election campaign emphasized the promise of a return to the industrial economy of the mid-20th century, before countries such as China supplanted the US as the workshop of the world. But this push is unlikely to succeed. Changes in ...

  France and South Korea are both members of the rich nations’ club that goes by the clunky name Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Measured by the participation of women in their banking and finance industries, they couldn’t be further apart. Among the 23 Korean companies for which Bloomberg has a breakdown of board and workforce composition, Samsung ...

  Like a lot of his plans, Donald Trump’s proposal for military spending is both abundantly clear and maddeningly vague. He wants to devote a whole lot more money to the Pentagon, as demonstrated by his budget outline and address to Congress. But the president’s plan is too ill-defined and arbitrary to make much sense. More military spending isn’t necessarily ...

  The trial of Jay Y Lee, the vice chairman of Samsung Electronics Co, in the bribery and influence scandal case began on Thursday. The prosecutors tried to prove Lee donated millions of dollars to charitable foundations controlled by Choi Soon Sil, a confidante of impeached South Korean President Park Geun hye, to help secure the control of Samsung Group. ...

  The new push for a “multi-speed Europe,” in which only those countries that want a closer union pursue it, will almost inevitably fuel resentment in Eastern Europe, where politicians are already up in arms about being treated as second-class Europeans. A battle over food quality has become a major proxy for that resentment. The Visegrad Four — Poland, the ...