WASHINGTON — Amid all the new government programs and tax cuts that have been proposed by the various presidential candidates — or will be as the campaign unfolds — there lurks a nasty statistic that suggests how difficult they will be to achieve. The statistic is 0.5 percent. That’s how much U.S. productivity increased in […]

WASHINGTON — The questions that now face China are whether it can maintain its own internal stability and contribute to the vitality of the wider global economy. Like many economic juggernauts before it — Japan springs to mind — China seemed unstoppable. Its economy hummed along at the almost unimaginable annual growth rate of about […]

WASHINGTON — The wage-price spiral is dead — or at least dormant. As the Federal Reserve debates when to raise short-term interest rates, this is good news. Fed Chair Janet Yellen has indicated she’d like to begin the rate increases sometime in 2015, though she says that weak economic data (and presumably the recent stock […]

WASHINGTON — Globalization lives. A fascinating but little-noted aspect of the recent financial turmoil is how much it’s been an international event. It started with doubts about China’s economy, symbolized by a tumbling stock market and a surprise devaluation of the renminbi (RMB). But the worry quickly spread to all major stock markets, along with […]

WASHINGTON — First was the dot-com bubble, then the housing bubble. Now comes the commodities bubble. We don’t fully understand the stock market’s current turmoil, but we do know it’s driven at least in part by a bubble of raw material prices. Their collapse weighs on world stock markets through fears of slower economic growth […]

WASHINGTON — Are we ready for the “Internet of Things”? Probably not. The phrase — coined in 1999 by researcher Kevin Ashton while working for Procter & Gamble — refers to things (cars, homes, factories, hospitals) whose performance is monitored and guided by digital networks. We already have one wildly successful example: GPS navigation that […]

WASHINGTON — We can learn from Europe about job creation, but many Americans may reject the underlying lesson. It is: If you price labor too high — pay workers more than they produce — businesses will slow or stop hiring. They won’t sponsor their own bankruptcy. Everyone knows that Europe’s economy is in the doldrums. […]