Originally appeared in The New York Times. HAVING long fretted over the state of our retirement system, I was delighted that the Department of Labor is vigorously defending its new rule requiring brokers to recommend only investments that are in the best interests of holders of retirement accounts. Hats off to the Obama administration for […]
Originally appeared in the New York Times. TYPE “Trump system rigged” into the Google search bar and you’ll get more than 500,000 hits. I didn’t inspect all of them but the first 50 were variants of Donald Trump complaining that the Republican primary process was tilted against him. That’s beyond ironic. Mr. Trump and his […]
Originally appeared in The New York Times. MEMO to Republican legislators biting your nails over the New York primary, wondering if you can finally derail Donald J. Trump’s candidacy with, gulp, Ted Cruz: You brought it on yourselves. Not just by failing for too long to take Mr. Trump seriously or by lacking an effective […]
Originally appeared in the New York Times. ECONOMIC alarm bells are ringing: Financial markets have wilted. Forecasters have been slicing their projections for future growth. And some leading wise men — including the megabillionaire George Soros — are predicting a return to disastrous 2008 conditions. That’s almost certainly an overly pessimistic view. But without a […]
Originally appeared in the New York Times. THANKS disproportionately to their mother, my kids have a gratifyingly acute sense of the urgency of addressing the dire straits in which far too much of the world’s population lives. For my part, I wanted them to understand the key role that capitalism, which has brought more people […]
Originally appeared in the New York Times Even more than income inequality, slow growth sits firmly atop the leader board of global economic worries. Among the most prosperous countries — the Group of 7 — not a single nation is achieving an acceptable rate of expansion. Once formidable emerging countries are in disarray: Brazil and […]
Originally appeared in the New York Times A FEW days ago, I visited the shiny headquarters of the Peterson Institute for International Economics on “think tank row” in Washington — basically, the locker room of the Team Globalization and Free Trade cheering squad. I was there to take part in a discussion of an old […]
Originally published in The New York Times By the end of 2015, the economy — still leaving too many Americans behind — has regrettably almost disappeared from the news, overshadowed by the twin evils of Donald J. Trump and the Islamic State. Meanwhile, Congress continued to burnish its record of doing little that was constructive, […]
Originally appeared in The New York Times IF Ben S. Bernanke were to write a sequel to his recently published memoir, “The Courage to Act,” he might well want to call it “The Courage Not to Act.” For that’s what the Federal Reserve needs at its rate-setting meeting today and at least some of those […]
Originally published in the New York Times. HER silver tongue honed by decades in corporate marketing, Carly Fiorina has used two debates, and a steely determination on the campaign trail, to climb near the top of the polls for the Republican nomination. But Americans should pause on her biggest professional credential for our highest office: […]
