In September 2018, we argued that China’s economic and foreign policies were defying the “laws” of economics and geopolitics, and warned that the situation could not last. Since then, our assessment has been borne out, and our concerns have deepened.Until recently, China had been able to pursue a unique development path, owing to the government’s far-reaching control over the economy (and society more generally). But those days are over. The country’s internal debts are mounting to unsustainable

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

After slamming his intelligence chiefs as “passive and naive” and telling them to “go back to school,” US President Donald Trump tried to paper over his Twitter tantrum Wednesday.　Facing sharp criticism for such a public attack -- unprecedented for a US president -- Trump now claims “the media” distorted the testimony of top US intelligence chiefs before the Senate Intelligence Committee -- where they sharply diverged from Trump on the ranking and nature of the most urgent security threats.　Ther

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

Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro. Sen. Kamala Harris. Every day, it seems, another candidate enters the Democratic race. Every week, there’s a new poll, most showing former Vice President Joe Biden as the party’s early presidential leader.The highly respected Cook Political Report even put out its first estimate of the 2020 Electoral College map, showing the Democrats with 232, the Republicans with 220 and the remaining 86 as

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

Whoever explained to then-President-elect Donald Trump what it meant to be president -- if anyone did -- neglected to tell him that on occasion a president loses a policy fight. That person also forgot to explain to the US president-in-waiting that making a big promise he might be unable to keep required him to figure out how to prevent his most ardent followers from turning against him when he failed to fulfill it.Sloppy job preparation, together with Trump’s distorted personality, led to the n

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

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