Opinion

  When Walt Disney opened a monorail at his California Disneyland in 1959, he thought it would be the future of mass transit. For a long time, that seemed unlikely. Although a few cities have built successful monorails, for many people they remained synonymous with amusement parks, a notorious “Simpsons” episode and a future that never quite arrived. Thankfully, that’s ...

  Once upon a time, there was a lot of optimism that the blockchain — the technology underlying Bitcoin — would help the finance industry deal with a big headache: post-trade processing, the often long and arduous task of making sure money and securities change hands and everybody knows who owes what to whom. The problem might yet get solved, ...

  Any reporter who’s written about the federal budget knows that there’s a surefire solution to every problem. It’s called “fraud, waste and abuse.” You want to end budget deficits? Just eliminate all the “fraud, waste and abuse” in the $4 trillion budget. The same is true for cutting taxes or raising spending. Attacking fraud and waste is virtuous and ...

  What causes asset bubbles? This question is the great white whale of finance theory. We know that asset prices are given to spectacular rises and falls over short periods of time. Answering this question is hugely important, not just for people’s pensions and retirement, but for the whole economy, since crashes in asset prices can leave growth in the ...

  The impeachment of South Korean leader Park Geun-hye should herald the end of a painful and drawn-out political scandal. As they move forward, Koreans should be thinking about how to avoid another one. With Friday’s 234-to-56 vote in the National Assembly, Park’s powers as president have been suspended. For weeks, she tried to fend off public anger over influence-peddling ...

  Tens of thousands celebrated the impeachment of South Korean President Park Geun-Hye. The motion to impeach was adopted by 234 votes to 56, easily securing the required two-thirds majority in the 300-seat chamber. It triggered wild celebrations among hundreds of anti-Park activists gathered outside the National Assembly. The protesters called the impeachment a new beginning in South Korean politics. ...

  German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been designated the new leader of the Western world on the strength of her values. Now, watch her lift that mantle for a deft feint to the right. This week Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union re-elected her as its leader by an impressive 89.5 percent. That’s higher than the 88.6 percent Shavkat Mirziyoyev received in ...

  Unicredit Chief Executive Officer Jean-Pierre Mustier is scheduled to present his five-month review of the bank’s strategy. To salvage a bank that’s seen its market value drop to just 13 billion euros ($14 billion) from almost 40 billion euros in the space of just eighteen months, Mustier needs to become best-in-class — and that means aggressively shrinking his bank ...

  It looks like Gary Cohn will be leaving Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where he is president and chief operating officer, to become director of Donald Trump’s National Economic Council. This is not a unique career trajectory! The first director of the NEC, which President Bill Clinton created in 1993 to coordinate economic policy among the sometimes-warring government agencies responsible ...

  Our thinking about productivity is cockeyed, according to a new economic report. We’re ignoring the real productivity problem: surging costs for health care, housing and education. We need to understand this argument, because it just might be correct. Unless you’ve been vacationing on Mars, you know that productivity is the catchword for economic efficiency — and also that we’re ...