During his campaign and even since becoming president-elect, Donald Trump has said a lot of things and cited a lot of figures that appear to be completely made up. When he has talked about the economy, though, Trump has often relied on actual government statistics. For example, there was Trump’s charge that Barack Obama has been “the first president …

  Here’s a maxim for life as a famous economist: If your theory wins a Nobel Prize, look out — it might already be running into big problems. When the Black-Scholes-Merton option-pricing model won the prize in 1997, it had already required some major tweaks to fit new data; a decade later, it was being blamed for the financial crisis. …

  A month after it ended, the 2016 US presidential election is only getting stranger. Intelligence agencies and private researchers now largely agree that Russia conducted a pervasive online campaign — through hacking, theft and propaganda — to disrupt the electoral process. The question is what to do about it. The first priority should be conducting a formal investigation. Yet …