By Robert Samuelson   We’ve seen this movie before. The top economists at the International Monetary Fund — the global agency created after World War II to promote stability and growth in the world economy — unveil their latest forecast, which is almost always weaker than its previous forecast. The economists hold out the possibility…

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By Kathleen Parker   So let me get this straight: President Trump ordered the removal of American troops from northern Syria, knowing that Turkey would invade, seize and occupy Kurd-occupied land. But now, after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did just that, killing Kurds who had been U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic…

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By Kathleen Parker   COLUMBIA, S.C. — As the world seems consumed by all things Ukraine, it’s time once again to dust off the ever-popular, evergreen headline: Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. As in, what happened to the nation’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani? He held so much promise. He was the prosecutor and leader who cleaned up New…

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By Kathleen Parker   Dictators. Always so humorous. Take China’s communist officialdom. You’ve probably heard about the “South Park” episode last week that the Chinese government didn’t find amusing. And the fake apology from the comedy show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. No? Well, then, you must live in China, where free speech isn’t…

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By Kathleen Parker   It’s fair to say at this juncture that America’s Quid and Ukraine’s Quo have been caught in bed together. The fevered search for a damning quid pro quo since the White House released a readout of Donald Trump’s July 25 telephone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — in which Trump…

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By Kathleen Parker   We long ago established that Donald Trump is a bad guy. We’ve multiple times said, “This is it. They’ve got to get rid of him.” So what’s so new and awful that the president of the United States must now be impeached? Maybe a lot; maybe not so much. The Department of…

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By Robert Samuelson   The battle to control the Federal Reserve is being waged on many fronts. There’s President Trump’s relentless tirades against Fed Chairman Jerome Powell — and Powell’s low-key rejoinders. There’s the clamor from investors (aka Wall Street) for easy credit to prop up stock prices. Some economists favor cheap credit to sustain…

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By Kathleen Parker   Every good story needs a hero, and the saga of Brett Kavanaugh’s rise to the Supreme Court has provided one: Leland Keyser. She also became a victim when her longtime friend, Christine Blasey Ford, decided to hit refresh on a decades-old high school incident that apparently only Ford remembers. Keyser is…

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By Robert Samuelson   If ever there was a case of political miscalculation, it’s the collapsing relationship between President Trump and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Jerome (“Jay”) Powell. Trump seems to have believed that he could easily manipulate Powell into embracing an aggressively easy monetary policy whose main objective was Trump’s reelection.…

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By Robert Samuelson   As a case study in the workings of modern democracy, the handling of Social Security by successive presidents and Congress over recent decades is a deeply disturbing exercise. The facts are not in dispute. Congress and the White House have agreed to benefits for retirees and the disabled that are woefully…

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By Kathleen Parker   The recent fiasco at The New York Times, which last weekend published the latest uncorroborated sexual-assault accusation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was a monument to hearsay and a travesty of journalistic ethics. The story, since modified to include crucial information, was an adapted excerpt from a book — “The…

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By Robert Samuelson   The idea that interest rates could be “negative” seems so counterintuitive that it defies easy understanding. Yet, here we are. Some foreign central banks (among them, the European Central Bank and the central banks of Denmark and Sweden) have adopted them. No less a figure than former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan…

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By Kathleen Parker   Watching the Democratic presidential debate Thursday night left one clear impression: Donald Trump won. Please don’t shoot the messenger. My left index finger recoiled a bit as it reached for the “T” on the keyboard. But it’s true for this reason: Democrats are too earnest. They care too much. They’re too…

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By Robert Samuelson   It has always been hard to measure poverty, because poverty is as much a state of mind as a condition of material well-being. Still, we seem to have made a bad situation worse. Consider the Census Bureau’s latest estimates. In 2018, the official poverty rate was 11.8%, down from 12.3% in…

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By Kathleen Parker   Once upon a time, Mark Sanford might have been a contender, but there’s too much water under the bridges that stretch from this city of steeples to his erstwhile home on Sullivan’s Island. The disgraced former South Carolina governor and congressman announced Sunday that he’s running against Donald Trump for the…

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By Robert Samuelson   The verdict of history is that the trade war that’s now raging between the United States and China will lead to no good — with consequences that could go well beyond trade and threaten the world’s geopolitical and economic stability. How this plays out is anyone’s guess, but we should not…

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By Robert Samuelson   “To the barricades.” That’s one way of characterizing Bill Dudley’s recent proposal that the Federal Reserve fight back against President Trump’s unrelenting attacks. Although it’s a phenomenally bad idea, it has the curious and paradoxical effect of revealing the primary defects of Trump’s economic policies. First, some background. Dudley — a…

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By Kathleen Parker   For the Eastern Seaboard, Dorian has become the Godot of hurricanes. Barely moving after hovering over the Bahamas for what seemed an eternity, the former Category 5 storm has occupied weather watchers and coastal observers for several days now. It has potentially forever altered the topography and shape of some Bahamian…

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By Robert Samuelson   On this Labor Day, the American economy — the source of jobs for almost all of us — is full of promise and peril. It is hard not to be impressed with its job-creation capacity. Since the low point of the 2007-09 Great Recession, payroll employment has increased by 21.7 million…

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By Kathleen Parker   From a childhood laboring in China’s cotton and wheat fields to the presidency of the College of Charleston, Andrew Hsu’s story is anything but ordinary. His extraordinary vision for the college, including the addition of a top-notch engineering school, speaks to shifting demographics, job markets and the need for greater diversity,…

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By Kathleen Parker   A question for this moment: If the Earth’s lungs were on fire and the doctor refused to treat it, would there be cause for a third-party intervention? This is a rhetorical query for now, but it surely nags the conscience of an outraged international community as the Amazon rainforest is ablaze…

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By Robert Samuelson   It was probably inevitable that we would have a “retirement crisis” as hordes of baby boomers (people born between 1946 and 1964) sprint and stumble into their “golden years.” But it’s a fake crisis, even though it’s already becoming a staple of journalism and politics. It presumes that most Americans can’t…

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By Robert Samuelson   It’s getting harder and harder to write these budget columns, because it must be obvious to almost everyone by now that hardly anyone in Washington (or perhaps any place) cares about the budget deficits. The assumption is that we can raise spending and cut taxes forever — or until some crisis…

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By Robert Samuelson   We’ve been here before: one of those portentous moments when corporate America promises to be more socially “responsible.” These episodes are, it seems, a permanent feature of modern capitalism. Just this week, the Business Roundtable, a group representing the leaders of major corporations, issued a “statement on the purpose of a…

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By Robert Samuelson   What is striking about the latest bouts of financial turmoil — the recent wild swings in global stock and bond markets — is that they provide a sobering reminder of the potential hazards of economic instability. There are parallels between the present tumultuous situation and past episodes of economic disruption, including…

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By Robert Samuelson   I’ve written several columns this year on military spending, contending — against conventional wisdom — that we don’t spend more than the next eight countries combined, including China and Russia. That startling claim is often made, and if it’s untrue, we’ve been deluding ourselves for years. Rather than overspending on defense,…

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By Robert Samuelson   To have a recession or not — that is the question. It also encompassed last week’s most important political news, notwithstanding all the public attention understandably focused on the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. There is growing evidence of a possible recession. If one materializes, President Trump could lose…

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By Kathleen Parker   One of the everlasting social forces in directing human behavior — shame — has become part of the 2020 presidential race. And one of the most shameful things in these times is to be thought or labeled a racist. As it should be, if true. Thus, some Democrats and others hoping…

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By Robert Samuelson   Donald Trump sold himself to the American public as an expert deal-maker. At the top of his list was a promised trade bargain with China that would boost U.S. exports and remedy some of the more egregious examples of discrimination against American firms. It isn’t working as planned. To the contrary:…

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By Kathleen Parker   The more we learn, the more Jeffrey Epstein resembles an evil comic book character for the developmentally arrested intellectual — the charming-but-lurid mastermind with a plot to take over the world by impregnating scores of women on a remote desert estate. Last Wednesday, The New York Times reported that the financier/convicted…

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By Robert Samuelson   Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has not been shy about saying what he’s trying to do: prolong the economy’s expansion so that it creates more jobs for those who, in the past, have often felt left out. The Fed increasingly sees itself as a social agency dedicated to job creation. That…

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By Kathleen Parker   The idea of a race war has long animated white supremacists, who seem to think that such a conflict would result in a white victory, whatever that would mean. Dylann Roof — the white man-boy who murdered nine black parishioners during Bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church here four summers…

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By Robert Samuelson   It seems unavoidable. Like it or not, the U.S. welfare system is bound to play a big role in the 2020 election. The recent Democratic debate on health care is just a prelude to a broader discussion. The battle lines are clearly drawn. Democrats deplore rising inequality. They see a revitalized…

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By Kathleen Parker   The picture that spoke far more words than former special counsel Robert Mueller uttered during last week’s hearings was taken by renowned photographer David Hume Kennerly. The close-up of Mueller’s face was a portrait of rare depth, the sort one is more likely to find on a Leonardo da Vinci canvas…

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By Robert Samuelson   The military-industrial complex isn’t bankrupting us — though some on the left still cling nostalgically to the belief that it is. It’s fiction. We need to be clear about this. As I’ve written before, one of the great uncovered stories in Washington is the defense budget versus the welfare state. Defense…

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By Robert Samuelson   It’s a done deal. Almost everyone, or so it seems, believes the Federal Reserve will cut short-term interest rates next week when its main decision-making body meets. President Trump favors lower rates. So do many economists, including some fierce Trump critics. Similarly, Fed Chairman Jerome “Jay” Powell says the Fed wants…

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By Kathleen Parker   Sometimes big problems can be solved simply. At the moment, our biggest problem — climate change — can be ended by simply planting trees. OK, so a trillion trees, according to a Swiss study published earlier this month in the journal Science. But how hard is that, really? An equally serious and…

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By Robert Samuelson   I got hacked. It was scary. In this age of cybereverything, we all live in dread that we’re going to be somehow attacked by the internet. Nearly everyone seems vulnerable. The internet is changing how we work, play, socialize, shop — and what we love and fear. We’re all exposed to…

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By Kathleen Parker   Going out on a limb here: Donald Trump is a racist. And a sexist. And a xenophobic nationalist. Among other things. Not to name call or anything. And all of those observable facts seem to sit quite well with his base of supporters, most Republicans of Congress and, apparently, with the…

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By Robert Samuelson   Debt is the crux of the matter. If you want to understand what makes the world vulnerable to a global recession or, possibly, something much worse, you’ve got to come to grips with the worldwide debt buildup. It’s not the only candidate for calamity, but it ranks first among the possibilities.…

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By Kathleen Parker   Don’t breathe a word, but President Trump is up to something. His insulting, too-dumb-to-fail comments about four freshmen female members of Congress has the civilized world’s trousers in a twist, and it’s not a pretty sight. The president tweeted that the four women of color, ” … who originally came from…

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By Robert Samuelson   The conventional wisdom holds — with good reason — that the economy may well settle the 2020 election. If it remains strong, President Trump stands a good chance of winning re-election. If it weakens, Trump might well be the underdog. Take a look at the table below, which is drawn from…

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By Kathleen Parker   It helps to know people in high places, especially if you’re a sex offender and your name is Jeffrey Epstein. Some might say that Epstein, the multimillionaire financier, reached the summits of wealth and self-indulgence by his own volition. He is undeniably intelligent, a whiz kid at math and science in…

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By Robert Samuelson   It looks as if Vladimir Putin wants to be recalled as something besides being an aggressive autocrat. He yearns, it seems, to be seen as a leading political thinker, respected for his analysis as well as feared for his actions. This is a reasonable reading of Putin’s recent interview with the…

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By Kathleen Parker   The Democratic Party’s stampede to the presidency seems to be veering of late toward a racially charged contest. Between Joe Biden’s admitted friendliness with segregationists four decades ago and California Sen. Kamala Harris’ recent attack on his anti-busing stance from that same era, the pivotal issue at this juncture seems to…

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