Opinion

  Birds of a feather flock together. It applies to Donald trump and his team of billionaires. The Republican presidential candidate has unveiled an economic team that’s a mirror image of the candidate. The 13-member team includes several billionaire bankers and investment managers. They are all men. And they have been in business with Donald before. Here lies the dichotomy. ...

  The global economy desperately needed some good news. That’s what it got in the latest US jobs report. Ahead of today’s release of the US employment report for July, the mood was decidedly gloomy, with economic activity slowing in most other advanced countries, the UK facing a real and present danger of an economic recession and the risk of ...

  The UK’s enormous soft power, painstakingly built in the post-imperial era, looks weakened following Brexit. In fact, negotiating acceptable divorce terms or preventing an economic decline may prove much easier than restoring British influence. Some early indications of how Brexit has damaged the UK’s international perception can be found in a recent Ipsos poll conducted in 16 countries. In ...

  Someone — the Russian military, say many cyber experts — broke into the computers of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, releasing emails and sensitive documents. Sounds bad, and is. But a worse danger looms: the possibility that hackers (whether Russians or others) will manipulate our voting machines, casting doubt on the election’s outcome. Imagine. ...

  The success of UAE’s economic diversification plan largely depends on how the non-oil sector performs. While it has been predicted that oil will contribute to merely 36% of the country’s GDP, the expanding economic footprint of tourism and hospitality sector is a happening reality. The UAE is investing heavily in the tourism sector. This capital investment is expected to ...

  Perhaps Donald Trump will come to America’s rescue after all. The past week leaves no doubt, at least, that the biggest threat to Trump’s campaign for the presidency is Trump. For days, quite unbelievably, he’s been criticizing the Muslim parents of a U.S. soldier who died a hero’s death in Iraq. Khizr Khan’s attack on Trump at the Democratic ...

  A bitcoin exchange in Hong Kong has been hit by hackers who stole $72 million worth of the cryptocurrency. Or at least, that’s what it was worth when the theft took place; once news of the hack broke, the market for bitcoins slumped, meaning that the hackers’ haul is now valued somewhat lower. The market slumped, quite understandably, because ...

  Japanese growth is still sluggish. Consumers aren’t consuming much, and businesses aren’t investing. The government doesn’t have many options to remedy this, and the Bank of Japan, which has sent both long-term and short-term interest rates into negative territory, has basically no more room to maneuver. The dreaded Zero Lower Bound is starting to bite. The BOJ is buying ...

  Mac Margolis Every four years, political leaders have tried to set aside feuds and celebrate the world’s best athletes as they compete for medals and glory — a tradition that harkens back to the first Olympic Games held in Greece some 3,000 years ago. Apparently, the Brazilians didn’t get the message. One day before the opening ceremonies for the ...

  In the 1870s, when Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall controlled New York City, and in the 1950s and 1960s, when Chicago’s Democratic machine was especially rampant, there was a phenomenon that can be called immunity through profusion: Fresh scandals arrived with metronomic regularity, so there was no time to concentrate on any of them. The public, bewildered by blitzkriegs of ...