Opinion

  New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, on most days simply a bore to pass through, descended into chaos last weekend. Waves of confusion rippled through its terminals when passengers, thinking a terrorist attack was underway, stampeded haphazardly in search of refuge. It was all for nothing. There was no attack, no “active shooter.” Evidently, a crowd watching the Olympics ...

  With plunging copper prices, weak currency, ballooning budget deficit and skyrocketing inflation, Zambia is grappling with an unprecedented economic challenge. And the newly re-elected President Edgar Lungu has an extremely tough job at hand — to remedy the various ills ailing the country’s economy. There was a time when the southern African nation had seen the GDP growing at ...

  Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, has written the best article I’ve read on Britain’s exit from the European Union. In an essay for the New York Review of Books he makes many excellent points, but one is of surpassing importance. It’s an obvious point, or ought to be, that nonetheless has been almost entirely ignored ...

  Of all living things, why do humans alone create advanced technology? Not long ago, scientists thought it was because we are the only intelligent life form on this planet. That explanation alone no longer suffices. Over the last decade, scientists have discovered that crows can use tools, hyenas can cooperate to solve complex problems, jays can plan for the ...

  “Communism would have worked, if the Soviet Union had only tried it for real.” I must have heard this argument a dozen times from die-hard leftist friends. Marxist economists such as Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick even wrote a book making exactly this claim. No doubt, true believers will be just as unwavering in the face of Venezuela’s collapse. ...

  The IS hasn’t had much success yet in recruiting militants among the vast Muslim populations in Southeast Asia. But what happens when the caliphate’s capitals in Syria and Iraq are destroyed, and hundreds of foreign fighters from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines try to go home? Experts here in Australia see the counterterrorism challenge as a regional problem, rather ...

  By now, almost every finance aficionado knows about the problems in the hedge-fund industry. With almost $3 trillion in assets under management, the industry has been bedeviled by complaints of underperformance and high fees. Large institutions that put money into hedge funds are now reversing course, led by endowments and pension funds. Redemptions totaled $20.7 billion in the three ...

  The U.S. Federal Reserve appears to be paying more attention to how its policies affect black Americans. This is a wise move, because blacks stand to gain a lot more than others from the Fed’s efforts to support economic growth. The minutes of the Fed’s July policy-making meeting noted that officials had discussed unemployment rates and other measures of ...

  An escalation of tension between Russia and Ukraine augurs bad for both. The two countries are going through throes of deplorable financial crisis and the diplomatic flareup will only worsen the already dismal situation. The hostilities have badly hit their economies and it is in the interest of both that the conflict is not allowed to intensify further. The ...

  Hillary Clinton thinks corporate taxes are too low. Donald Trump thinks corporate taxes are way too high. They’re both wrong, and the economic consequences could be huge if either nominee’s tax proposal becomes law. Trump would slash the rate to 15 percent and allow millions of partnerships and single-owner firms set up by hedge fund managers, lawyers and other ...