Last week marked 10 years since the harrowing descent into the financial crisis -- when the huge investment bank Lehman Bros. went into bankruptcy, with the country’s largest insurer, AIG, about to follow. No one was sure which financial institution might be next to fall.　The banking system started to freeze up. Banks typically extend short-term credit to one another for a few hundredths of a percentage point more than the cost of borrowing from the federal government. This gap exploded to 4 or

Only a man who is deeply worried about his own strength would talk as much as Donald Trump does about the danger of appearing weak.That’s my biggest takeaway from reading “Fear,” Bob Woodward’s new book about the Trump presidency. The scoops were mostly revealed last week. What’s fresh is Trump’s repeated, obsessive talk about weakness during his first year in office. Woodward’s recounting of Trump’s conversations is a study in character, or lack of it. The president’s vanity, pettiness and mean

How many company warnings will it take to convince President Donald Trump that his trade war is backfiring?　In the months since Trump ratcheted up trade tensions with both China and erstwhile US allies such as Canada and Europe, there’s been no stampede of manufacturers back to America’s shores. There has, however, been a growing chorus of complaints about the profit pinch wrought by US and retaliatory tariffs as well as some early warnings about price increases and job cuts. Ford Motor, Apple a

“Sweat in peacetime saves blood in war,” drill sergeants shouted to us young recruits many years ago. Maybe they still use those same words, but compulsory military service in the 1960s really meant a lot of sweat, from both physical and mental hardships. Instead of romantic adventures, my memories largely consist of loneliness and the boredom of nighttime guard duty, endless fortification work in and around camp, food hardly satisfying the stomach and horrible corporal discipline. Strangely, ho

September is moving time in university cities and college towns across Europe and North America as students get settled for the new academic year. For many young people, the move from home to university housing is a rite of passage.A look at the universities that students are moving to reveals the great diversity of universities. The media, particularly in Korea, focuses on old elite universities such as Harvard or Oxford, but only a tiny percentage of universities fit this category. Europe has

Stephen King is undisputedly the most prominent horror fiction writer of our times, and his stories are undeniably bone-chilling and hair-raising. Nevertheless, there is much more to his stories and novels than we might at first expect.Indeed, King’s novels are always saturated with social and political implications. For example, “Salem’s Lot,” which was published in 1975, is ostensibly a vampire story set in a small town in Maine. However, it is in fact both a product and a critique of the Wate