Opinion

  The curse of the rear-view mirror has struck again. The Bank of England’s stress tests of UK banks were the toughest yet, but didn’t model the impact of the Brexit negotiations or a withdrawal from the EU. Rather than bickering over whether such tests are too tough or too lenient, we should be questioning whether the process itself needs ...

  Richard Stengel, the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy, bluntly states the problem that has been worrying him, and should worry us all: “In a global information war, how does the truth win?” The very idea that the truth won’t be triumphant would, until recently, have been heresy to Stengel, a former managing editor of Time magazine. But in ...

  As this historic November ends, the message from the financial markets seems clear: For now, the outlook for the U.S. economy appears brighter, both in absolute terms and relative to other advanced economies. Very few predicted these developments, which speak to the enormous fluidity that has taken over markets and politics and that signal the gradual end of the ...

  Donald Trump’s tough talk on trade and immigration was a winning message in parts of the Midwest. If this talk is put into action, that could accelerate the economic decline of much of the region. One flaw in the conventional thinking about globalization is that it’s an international phenomenon. Manufacturing jobs move from the U.S. to China or Mexico. ...

  There are apocalyptic scenes in the streets of Syria’s Aleppo. As the bombs rain down on the besieged city, it causes horrible sufferings everywhere. More than 250 civilians have been killed in the government’s assault on east Aleppo since November 15, including nearly 30 children. And up to 20,000 people have fled the regime offensive in the past 72 ...

  Back in 2014, Narendra Modi’s landslide victory was hailed by columnists in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, who predicted that he would prove to be India’s Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, modernizing India’s economy with a revolutionary program of deregulation and privatization. Abruptly withdrawing more than 80 percent of the cash in circulation in India, Modi ...

  Oil forecasters no longer project a Hollywood ending for crude. These days, it’s more of a Bollywood ending. We wrote here about the torch of oil demand being passed from the industrialized world to emerging markets, especially China, in the past decade or so. Equally as important: The same trend can be seen in forecasts for future oil demand. ...

  Paul Kazarian says he’s spent “tens of millions of dollars” mobilizing a team of a hundred analysts to scrutinize Greece’s assets and liabilities. According to him, everyone else — including the International Monetary Fund, the credit-rating agencies, the European Union and the Greek government itself — is massively overstating the problem of the nation’s debt burden relative to economic ...

  Peak demand for oil is the big new thing. True, the International Energy Agency, in the annual World Energy Outlook it released earlier this month, didn’t envision a peak coming before 2040 barring a big acceleration in anti-climate-change efforts. But at least it’s talking about the possibility, and forecasting a slowdown in demand growth in the meantime. Others think ...

  With Trump’s election, there is suddenly a lot of question about the fate of Obamacare. Will it be repealed, in part or in whole? And if so, replaced with what? One place to look for answers is in a new article about Obamacare’s coverage expansion. Learning more about what has already happened with Obamacare turns out to provide some ...