As Cairo erupted in jubilation on Friday over the announcement that Hosni Mubarak had stepped down, I remembered another celebration of revolution I witnessed in 1979.I was visiting some Syrian leftists in a rickety wooden house in the heart of the old city of Damascus as they gathered around a crackly short-wave radio set and broke out the whiskey. They were celebrating the return of Ayatollah Ru

Is this 1989 in the Arab world?Twenty-two years ago, the Soviet Union’s police state began collapsing under its own weight ― leading to democracy and capitalism throughout Eastern Europe.A striking parallel is developing in the Mideast.Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, protesting peacefully, forced President Hosni Mubarak, 82, to resign last week after 30 years of autocratic rule.The Egyptian ma

As the nation struggles to revive a stalled economy, the Obama administration and House Republicans are on a collision course over whether to lift the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling before it expires on March 4. The two sides must reach agreement within days to avoid stifling the economic recovery that is barely under way.The administration insists that there is no alternative to raising the debt cei

The U.S. is about to have the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world because our competitors have noticed that revenue goes up as rates go down. Multinational corporations today nimbly move their profits to the friendliest environment, rewarding tax havens like never before.It looks as if President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are going to miss out on the single biggest poli

NEW YORK ― We live in a world where, in theory, global economic and political governance is in the hands of the G20. In practice, however, there is no global leadership and severe disarray and disagreement among G20 members about monetary and fiscal policy, exchange rates and global imbalances, climate change, trade, financial stability, the international monetary system, and energy, food and glob

Forget Egypt for a moment. Skip the water crisis in China. Look past angst on the streets of Bangladesh. If you want to see how extreme the effects of surging food prices are becoming, look to wealthy Japan.So big are the increases that economists are buzzing about them pushing deflationary Japan toward inflation. Yes, rising costs for commodities such as wheat, corn and coffee might do what trill

Ben Bernanke arrived at his office a week ago and came face to face with his worst nightmare.Staring out at the Federal Reserve chairman from page C1 of the Feb. 3 edition of the Wall Street Journal was a photo of a man and his boxes. The man was John Anton, founder and president of Anton Sports. The boxes contained his inventory of T-shirts. Because the price was right, Anton borrowed $300,000 at

For years it was a bogeyman for those discomfited by immigration, particularly from Mexico: The United States was evolving into two nations, only one of which would speak English. If it was ever true, which is doubtful, it isn’t now. A 2007 report by the Pew Foundation found that, though only 23 percent of Latino immigrants spoke English very well, the figure rose to 88 percent for their adult chi

NEW YORK ― As Egypt’s revolution hangs in the balance, what factors are most likely to determine the outcome? While all eyes seem to be focused on the army, watching to see which way it will jump, other key questions are being overlooked.Of course, what the army does is hugely important. Splits in a military-supported authoritarian regime can create gaps between the temporary interests of the smal

Steel company mergers are a little below Timothy Geithner’s radar. Yet the U.S. Treasury secretary should think long and hard about a recent one in Japan.On the surface, Nippon Steel Corp. and Sumitomo Metal Industries Ltd. joining forces to become the world’s second-largest producer isn’t wildly interesting. It’s the “why” below it that’s important: Such deals are now the official policy of a gov

NEW DELHI ― The seizure by police of large sums of Chinese currency from the Indian monastery of the Karmapa Lama ― one of the most-important figures in Tibetan Buddhism ― has revived old suspicions about his continuing links with China and forced him to deny that he is an “agent of Beijing.”The Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama, and the Karmapa Lama are the three highest figures in Tibetan Buddhism, r

NEW YORK ― Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is in the news again, this time after former Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer turned over to him confidential records on roughly 2,000 wealthy individuals that Elmer claims contain evidence of money laundering and tax evasion. Elmer was quickly convicted of violating Switzerland’s bank-secrecy law, but few journalists have demanded that Assange be pros

The broad strokes of the “2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans” report released last week are elegantly simple:Eating is and should be as pleasurable as it is necessary, but we also need to eat less, eat smarter and get more exercise. If we do, we’ll feel better and weigh less, we’ll enhance the development of our children, everybody will be less likely to get chronic, diet-related diseases such

While much attention focuses on how gracefully to dislodge President Hosni Mubarak from his 30-year reign, the Obama administration should be asking how U.S. policies helped him remain in office that long to begin with. The United States has grown far too comfortable with an Arab world dominated by unmovable, abusive rulers while assuming that the Arab people couldn’t be trusted with democracy.U.S

WASHINGTON ― Wael Ghonim, the charismatic young Google executive who helped launch the protests in Tahrir Square, sounded the trumpet in a first Twitter message Thursday afternoon: “Mission accomplished. Thanks to all the brave young Egyptians.” But he soon sent another message urging protesters to wait for official news ― and when President Hosni Mubarak finally made his speech late Thursday, it

DAVOS ― The whole world celebrates Tunisia’s democratic revolution, which has set off a cascade of events elsewhere in the region ― particularly in Egypt ― with untold consequences. The eyes of the world are now set on this small country of 10 million, to learn the lessons of its recent experience and to see if the young people who overthrew a corrupt autocrat can create a stable, functioning demo

When the Capital Market Consolidation Act went into effect in February 2009, the government expected a “big bang” in the domestic financial industry. As the new law lowered barriers separating financial services, policymakers anticipated financial companies would actively pursue mergers and acquisitions among themselves to grow into large, multifunctional investment banks.The much expected big ban

North Korea’s military said Thursday that it would not engage in dialogue with its South Korean counterpart any longer, laying the blame for the collapse on Wednesday of the two-day working-level military talks between the two Koreas on the South. The North’s state media quoted its delegation to the failed talks as saying that “the South do not wish for improvement of inter-Korean relations and ar

The “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortions Act” introduced Jan. 20 in the U.S. House of Representatives is a broad attack on women’s reproductive health care. The talk for the last couple of days has been the bill’s supposed attempt to redefine rape ― limiting a “rape” exemption to “forcible rape” ― but the potential harm to women is larger.The bill would prevent the use of taxpayer funds for abortion

Remember all that stuff about how the credit crunch was going to usher in a new age of austerity? The financial industry would shrink; the gulf between the haves and the have-nots would close; and taxes would rise for the top earners, forcing them to contribute more to society.Well, guess what? It didn’t happen.In fact, we just had a “rich-get-richer” recession. U.K. data suggest the gap between t