It’s time India’s policymakers acknowledged the real problem facing the country’s shadow banks. What they are experiencing is no longer a vanilla liquidity shortage; the entire industry has crashed against a wall of mistrust.On the other side of that wall are a clutch of wealthy property developers and their middle-class customers, as well as teeming multitudes of poor. Everyone is at risk.A crisis of confidence has made financiers’ own borrowing costs jump. The excess yield over government secu

The political crisis in Venezuela has pitted the US against a dictator who refuses to leave office. But the crisis has a broader significance: It shows that Latin America has again become an arena in which rival great powers struggle for influence and advantage. As the US faces surging geopolitical rivalry around the world, its position is also coming under pressure in its own backyard.The region has been the focus of global competition before, of course, from the Spanish-Portuguese rivalry of t

When it comes to the trade talks with China, President Donald Trump and his negotiators have more leverage than any US administration has ever had. Chinese policymakers are desperate for a trade truce with the US in order to avoid more damage to China’s economy by further pressuring its trade surplus and export industries.There is speculation that Trump has told his negotiators to “get a deal done” in order to put an end to recent market volatility, but that would mean forgoing a historic opport

Close on the heels of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to tax top income at 70 percent, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has released her own big idea -- a tax of 2 percent a year on all wealth above $50 million, rising to 3 percent for those fortunes of more than $1 billion. The proposal, which would affect about 75,000 of the country’s wealthiest people, also comes with a set of measures designed to reduce avoidance and evasion.　The motivation for taxing wealth directly undoubtedly come

Every White House in the modern era has sought to be prepared in case a vacancy arises on the Supreme Court. President Donald Trump’s legal advisers don’t know much more than anyone else about the likelihood of a vacancy this year, but they are making contingency plans. Those plans center on the possibility that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at 85 the oldest justice, will leave the court.At the moment, there appear to be seven leading contenders, who can be loosely grouped into a first and second tier ba

Transparency International, the Berlin-based global authority on graft, accompanied its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2018 with a warning that corruption gains where authoritarian and populist leaders erode democratic institutions. A comparison of Transparency’s data with studies by Freedom House, which scores countries on the state of democracy and liberty, reveals a more complex story but leads to the same conclusion.Putting the two organizations’ country scores side by side shows that the

If Britain‘s Parliament were the final arbiter of Brexit, Tuesday night’s vote would have been historic. It would have been a crowning achievement for Prime Minister Theresa May: Leavers and Remainers, Conservatives and Labour Party members debated for six hours and voted seven times before a majority finally said what they want to happen.It wasn‘t any of that. The European Union has already said “no” -- in more languages and ways than is reasonable to count -- to the one demand the majority vot

Dan Coats, the US director of national intelligence, appeared to undermine two premises of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy on Tuesday. First he said that North Korea was not likely to give up its nuclear weapons. Then he said that Iran was still complying with the international agreement to pause its own nuclear program.This was the instant headline for most news organizations. Yet again, Trump’s rhetoric is disconnected from the facts presented by the professionals serving in his admini

Ten years ago, I wrote a column about Howard Schultz that was, well, not very nice. Schultz had earlier stepped aside as the chief executive of Starbucks Corp., but with the company in a deep slump, he decided to retake control, and reinstalled himself as CEO. My column, written as a snarky open letter, suggested that his comeback would fail.Schultz responded in an unusual way: The next time he was in New York, he invited me to breakfast. He made no effort to tell me why my column was wrong. Ins

As another European Commission megafine on Alphabet nears, it prompts the question: can the Google parent ever free itself from the specter of penalties from the region’s regulators? The same goes for Amazon and Facebook, each of which is facing scrutiny for how it handles data. They could do a lot worse than looking to a fellow West Coast tech giant for a playbook.It wasn’t all that long ago that Microsoft was the European Commission’s nemesis. For most of the first decade of the millennium, th

Now that the government shutdown is over, perhaps it is appropriate to consider a delicate question: Is it still OK to tell people they need to save more money?It’s an issue that came to the fore during the last five weeks, when hundreds of thousands of federal government workers, and many contractors, didn’t get paid, leaving many of them illiquid. I sympathize with the frustrated, laid-off workers -- my wife was one of them -- and consider the government shutdown to have been flat-out stupid.

In the past decade, China has relied primarily on credit growth to fund its economic ambitions. The country’s banks are now feeling the constraints of this lending binge and need to raise a lot of capital over the next couple of years.The way China handles this challenge will determine its economic health. With 267 trillion yuan ($39.4 trillion) of total assets, and home to the world’s four largest banks by this measure, the country’s financial system doesn’t operate in isolation. Whatever happe

Give Donald Trump credit. On Wednesday the US president recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country’s interim president. At least a dozen other countries in the Western Hemisphere have since followed suit.There were signs that such a move was in the works. Senior US officials had declared as illegitimate the 2018 election that gave President Nicolas Maduro a second term. On Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence released a video pledging US support for popular protests against

We are in the midst of a new Cold War, with the United States and China carving out separate economic and political orders. Let’s consider how it might look in a few years.There will be two separate internets, with the US and China as the two dominant players. American tech companies still will be kept out of China, and Chinese tech companies will find it hard to get Western contracts or sales, as Huawei is discovering with its plans to build 5G networks. National security and surveillance consi

Who says the government can’t innovate? In one Chinese city, the local court system recently launched a smartphone-based map that displays the location and identity of anyone within 500 meters who’s landed on a government creditworthiness blacklist. Worried the person seated next to you at Starbucks might not have paid a court-approved fine? The Deadbeat Map, as it’s known, provides pinpoint confirmation, the ability to share that information via social media and -- if so inclined -- a reporting

If Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s regime falls, Russian President Vladimir Putin will have to write off yet another costly geopolitical bet. Just don’t expect Moscow to stop taking such gambles as it tries to counter US influence across the globe.Russia is Venezuela’s most important foreign sponsor after China. China’s investment has been estimated to be as much as $70 billion, most of it to be paid back in oil. Russia and its state-owned companies have lent and injected more than $17 bil

Can the yellow vest, that symbol of French anti-elite protest, travel? Well, it’s clearly not as internationally ubiquitous as the red flag of class struggle was some 100 years ago, but most of the 700 people who demonstrated in Stuttgart on Saturday were wearing yellow security vests.　Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chosen successor, has said she sees no room in Germany for a “yellow vest” movement like the French one. In reality, however, Germans have some of the

David Autor, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a record of attacking the biggest and most important issues. He has raised alarms about disappearing middle-skilled jobs, pointed to the downsides of trade with China, warned about increasing industrial concentration, and attacked the question of whether automation will kill jobs.　In a recent lecture at the American Economic Association meeting in Atlanta, Autor attempted to weave many of those threads together into

For the past year, the US and China have been engaged in a wide-ranging trade war. Nominally, the dispute concerns intellectual property violations, forced technology transfers and other unfair practices. In reality, though, this clash is a symptom of a much larger strategic showdown -- one in which Chinese President Xi Jinping seeks “decisive victory.”Aided by technology, China is embarking on a new kind of geopolitical strategy. As the Chinese Academy of Sciences explained, the goal is to buil

Ten years ago, the Davos conference asked the question: “What must industry do to prevent a broad social backlash?” The answer probably wasn’t “Double, triple or sextuple the wealth of the most prominent conference attendees, while letting median household incomes stagnate back home.” Yet that’s what happened. Make no mistake: The backlash is coming.　There has always been a whiff of hypocrisy at Davos, where elites expand their carbon footprint, eat $43 hot dogs and throw lavish parties in the n