Bloomberg The US posted its biggest monthly budget deficit on record last month, amid a 20 percent drop in corporate tax revenue and a boost in spending so far this fiscal year. The budget gap widened to $234 billion in February, compared with a fiscal gap of $215.2 billion a year earlier. That gap surpassed the previous monthly record of ...

We Americans are all socialists now. That’s news. Since at least 1906, scholars have contended just the opposite. What happened in 1906 was that Werner Sombart, a now-obscure German sociologist, published a book titled “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” Unlike Europe, America was hostile to socialism, Sombart argued. Prosperity was one cause; it weakened revolutionary consciousness. ...

Oh, come on, it’s not that bad. Okay, so maybe Tencent Holdings Ltd. did post its biggest net-income miss in, like, forever. And operating profit fell off a cliff. And revenue at its largest division (value-added services) climbed an anemic 9 percent. But still, the situation at China’s games and social-networking powerhouse really isn’t so terrible. Even if things are ...