Opinion

  Lawmakers in India’s upper house of parliament on Wednesday unanimously approved the creation of the landmark goods-and-services tax, or GST. It will pave the way for the introduction of a new national sales tax, creating a common market across the country for the first time. The tax, which has been kept in limbo for a decade, is seen benefiting ...

  Investors have been enthusiastic about the potential of online marketplace lenders in recent years, but the industry has hit some significant roadblocks. LendingClub’s stock has fallen almost 60 percent this year. Prosper Marketplace cut about 28 percent of its staff in May. Regulators are starting to circle. The question now is whether these technology-based firms will continue to lose ...

  Who does a better job of managing money, Republicans or Democrats? Thanks to a new study, we finally have at least a partial answer. The paper, by Marian Moszoro and Michael Bykhovsky, uses Federal Election Commission data to identify equity fund managers by their political contributions. If the managers at a fund gave to only one of the two ...

  A lot’s been happening in the health-care markets. California announced that premiums would rise by an average of 13.2 percent on its exchanges, after years of being one of the standouts for low premium growth. Meanwhile, Anthem, a large insurer, said it would expand its presence in the Obamacare exchanges — but only if its merger with Cigna is ...

  Francis Wilkinson Melania Trump’s husband says she is a 10. Would Donald Trump marry a woman who wasn’t? The question answers itself. But when she was younger, apparently working as a model in New York, the question is whether the former Melania Knauss was associated with another number — an H-1B or a B1 or B2 visa, or perhaps ...

  As Russian intelligence agencies escalate their use of the US-created internet as a tool of political sabotage, it’s haunting to recall the famous communist dictum: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Against this menacing background, the subject of internet governance — long an arcane topic of discussion among geeks and technologists — ...

  The saying goes like this: counting other people’s sins does not make you a saint. And it defines Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate. Trump, a political neophyte, has attacked anything and everything during his primary campaign preceding nomination. He is uncouth, impulsive and belligerent. And he does not mince words. And yes, he shoots from the hip. Many ...

  One of the most famous and incisive critics of the banking industry has now taken a job as an adviser to a bank. The outcry that has followed is not only unjustified but also bewildering. Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, has stirred controversy with his new job at Citigroup. Critics say such moves create a ...

  The collapse of China’s stock markets a year ago was eye-catching, but in the end, hardly earth-shattering. Despite the pain for millions of retail investors, the fact is that stocks remain a small part of the financial system in China. Their brief, giddy rise and spectacular collapse never really threatened the wider Chinese economy, let alone the global financial ...

  The US is running out of places for people to live. Rent is a bigger and bigger part of our cost of living. Here is an index of rental prices divided by median household income: Lots of people have been wondering what to do about this problem. One proposed solution is to deregulate housing and encourage denser development. This ...