The global economy is gathering momentum, the International Monetary Fund has declared. That’s probably correct and undeniably encouraging, but there’s an ominous discord between this economic expansion and what’s euphemistically called “political uncertainty” — that is, the stresses caused by surging anti-trade, anti-market, anti-immigrant populism. This “uncertainty” could be the prelude to some seriously bad policies, enough to derail ...

  For centuries, Afghanistan has been a cauldron of chaos, conflict and anarchy. But the chaos has not been created or opted by Afghans. It has been engineered, exported to, and planted in the country. The foreign invasions in past decades, insurgency and civil war have totally destroyed Afghanistan, which has been haunted by great game between big powers jostling ...

  When it emerged last week that China Minsheng Banking Corp. had sold $436 million in suspect wealth-management products, fears rose of a collapse in the loosely regulated market for such products. It now looks like a more mundane case of forgery involving a branch manager. But that’s not exactly reassuring: In fact, it suggests a different kind of systemic ...