To borrow a joke from the movie “Shrek,” money management is like a parfait -- it has a lot of layers. There’s the person who recommends investments for you -- a financial adviser, a wealth manager, a pension-fund manager or a private banker. Then there are the managers of the funds they invest in, or which you invest in on their recommendation. Finally, there are brokers, dealers, exchanges and other intermediaries that handle the actual trading of the assets the fund managers buy. Each layer t

Aug. 29, 2017

On Wednesday night, Mavis Wanczyk, a resident of Chicopee, Massachusetts, won the $759 million Powerball jackpot. Her first act was to call in to work to say she wouldn’t be coming in the next day. Or ever again.Before she starts celebrating beating those 292.2 million-to-1 odds, there are a few things Wanczyk needs to consider about her good fortune. If she learns these lessons quickly, then she and her heirs will be much happier and more satisfied with their lives.Lottery winnings are not what

Aug. 29, 2017

Why does the US allow white supremacists to spew their bile? Why not arrest them for their hate speech? Why not lock them up before another person is poisoned by their ideas?Those are fair questions. Indeed, similar reasoning has prompted many liberal democracies to outlaw hate speech.So why, then, do we permit hate speech?It’s too simplistic to say that the First Amendment forbids us to punish hate speech. Yes, it’s true that the amendment says that “no law” shall abridge the freedom of speech.

Aug. 28, 2017

For all the angst about America falling behind China, Dallas Fed Chairman Robert Kaplan offers a powerful and timely reminder of an American competitive advantage. One of the biggest things the US has going for it is immigration. Try making a case for that in, say, China or Japan, and you will quickly run into a brick wall. Japan’s demographic challenges have been well documented. And far from being a bottomless pool of cheap labor, China’s workforce is starting to shrink -- and become more expe

Aug. 28, 2017

For decades in Japan, the world’s fourth-largest electricity market, just 10 utilities met the country’s power demand. Today these “vertically integrated regional utilities” -- each one owns its own construction firms and even equipment manufacturers -- face significant and growing competition.A bit of context: Power demand from Japan’s 10 big utilities peaked a decade ago, as it did in the US and many other developed markets. Today’s demand is down 15 percent from 2007.Part of that decline is d

Aug. 28, 2017

Former National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper Jr. may have put it best when — appearing on CNN after Donald Trump’s dyspeptic, disjointed, disgraceful pep rally Tuesday evening at the Phoenix Convention Center — he questioned the president’s fitness for office and whether he’s “looking for a way out.” What if, Clapper wondered in his most sobering assessment, a president capable of such a “downright scary and disturbing” performance before cheering supporters decides to use nuclear weap

Aug. 27, 2017

This past weekend, the economics world was roiled by a controversy over sexism in the profession. A new paper by an undergraduate econ major revealed that an anonymous online forum called Economics Job Market Rumors is a hostile environment for women.The paper, by Alice Wu of the University of California-Berkeley, was a clever one. First it used text mining to identify which forum posts talked about women and which talked about men. Then, using cutting-edge statistical techniques, it found which

Aug. 27, 2017

The sense of unease on many Latin American city streets is palpable. Fear and uncertainty affect people’s day-to-day decisions — whether to take public transport, where to buy groceries, when to go out at night. Pervasive insecurity also influences long-term plans — what neighborhood to move to, whether to save or spend and, finally, whether to emigrate or stay put.Latin Americans have good reason to feel unsafe. Mexico’s soaring homicide rates have reached 20-year highs. The Central American ci

Aug. 27, 2017

In 2007, an up-and-coming Chinese leader by the name of Xi Jinping was having dinner with the US ambassador. As the evening wound down, the ambassador asked Xi if he’d seen any good movies lately. Xi said he had a DVD of “Flags of Our Fathers” that he meant to watch. He added that he liked Hollywood’s World War II films because they’re “grand and truthful” in their moral outlook. By contrast, he thought Chinese films were too concerned with “talking about bad things in imperial palaces.”If that’

Aug. 25, 2017

Will President Trump’s new Afghanistan strategy alter the dynamics of America’s longest and most frustrating war? Do commanders really have any better chance of succeeding now than when this conflict began 16 years ago?I put those questions by phone Tuesday to Gen. John “Mick” Nicholson Jr., who for more than 18 months has commanded US forces in Kabul. This is his fourth tour in Afghanistan and his sixth year of service there. He probably knows as much about this difficult and costly war as any

Aug. 24, 2017

Japan’s next boom may be at hand, driven by the very thing that is supposed to be bad for its economy. Japan’s aging and shrinking population has been partly blamed for the on-again, off-again nature of growth and deflation the past three decades. Lately, it’s been driving a different and just as powerful idea: In the absence of large-scale immigration, the only viable solution for many domestic industries is to plow money into robots and information technology more generally.Humans will still b

Aug. 24, 2017

David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, could safely be called a minimum-wage skeptic. Neumark has written a number of papers on the topic, all of which have found that minimum wages reduce employment by substantial amounts. This makes him a bit of an outlier in terms of the overall research consensus, which tends to find modest or no employment effects.But unlike many researchers, who maintain a laser-like focus on the question of whether minimum wage cuts jobs in th

Aug. 24, 2017