WASHINGTON — The recent meeting of OPEC provides an opportunity to understand the mysteries of the global oil market. As expected, OPEC decided not to cut its oil production. Barring unanticipated developments, prices will drop, says oil analyst Larry Goldstein. Potential oil supply, including drawdowns from bloated inventories, exceeds demand. Goldstein rightly cautions, however, that […]

WASHINGTON — The latest hacking of U.S. government data files, capturing personal information on about 4 million past and present government workers, has predictably stirred outrage. The allegation that the hacking came from China (no published evidence either confirms or refutes this widespread belief) has compounded the anger. We are incensed at the brazenness of […]

WASHINGTON — Among the economic and social trends worth worrying about is the fate of the NEETs. Never heard of the NEETs? I hadn’t either. It’s one of those clumsy terms concocted by government bureaucrats and social scientists to designate a group, social condition or political problem — and then to make it obscure by […]

WASHINGTON — Was the Federal Reserve’s massive bond-buying program an engine of economic inequality? It’s easy to think so. The Fed bought more than $3 trillion of U.S. Treasury securities and mortgage bonds to prop up financial markets. The idea was that investors who sold to the Fed would reinvest their cash, raising stock and […]

WASHINGTON — It’s time to worry about China. On any list of calamities threatening the world economy, a China crash ranks at or near the top. Just what would constitute a “crash” is murky. Already, China’s sizzling rate of economic growth has declined from 10 percent annually — the average from the late 1970s until […]

WASHINGTON — Guess what? This isn’t a low-wage job recovery. Listen to the media, and you might think that the only kind of jobs being created are in fast-food restaurants and retail chains. It turns out that this is wildly misleading and that the economy’s employment profile — the split between high- and low-paying jobs […]

WASHINGTON — In 1975, the Brookings Institution — perhaps Washington’s best known think tank — published an elegant essay by Arthur Okun, who had been one of the leading economists of the Johnson administration. The essay was called “Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff.” Its premise, as the title suggests, was that government faced a […]