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A century ago, Frank Knight wrote a book that put uncertainty in its rightful place at the heart of economics and entrepreneurship. I love that his last name was a [...]

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are the perfect partners for a president-elect whose signature phrase before his time in the White House was, “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crmvHJpCkfM.” About https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/technology/layoffs-tech-industry.html of Twitter’s employees were [...]

People get just 70 percent of their full Social Security benefit if they claim at 62, the full benefit at 67 and 124 percent of the benefit if they claim [...]

People get just 70 percent of their full Social Security benefit if they claim at 62, the full benefit at 67 and 124 percent of the benefit if they claim [...]

Byline: Peter Coy Twenty-three Nobel laureates warned last month that Donald Trump's agenda would 'lead to higher prices, larger deficits and greater inequality.' I think they were right. But voters [...]

The https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/05/business/election-stock-markets.html in the value of the dollar on Wednesday looks like a vote of confidence in Donald Trump, who won the presidential election. But it’s not that simple. There’s [...]

Byline: Peter Coy Tariffs made America great, Donald Trump likes to argue. Is it true? Tariffs were high during America's Gilded Age - roughly 1870 to 1900 - because tariff [...]

A century ago, arbitration was a hot item. President Calvin Coolidge signed the Federal Arbitration Act on Feb. 12, 1925. It recognized private dispute resolution as a valid alternative to […]

Byline: Peter Coy To understand the present, immerse yourself in the past. Everything about today seems more contingent and less obvious when compared with how things used to be. 'The [...]

Byline: Peter Coy The economist Richard Koo built pianos in Hong Kong for his father-in-law for a year and a half between college and graduate school. Now he is the [...]

Byline: Peter Coy It's not an easy time to be an American multinational company that sells to or buys from China. As the governments of the United States and China [...]

Byline: Peter Coy Mateo Jaramillo was giving me his spiel about his battery company when he mentioned, in passing, that the battery was 'not super efficient.' Oh. So that's bad, [...]

Are the world’s most powerful corporations buying the brains of economists and legal scholars? It certainly sounds that way if you listen to the chief antitrust enforcer at the Department [...]

Byline: Peter Coy At first nobody stood up when Donald Trump stepped out from the wings to speak. There was an ovation, but a sitting one, from the well-heeled attendees [...]

Gauti Eggertsson is an Icelandic-born economist at Brown University who has a knack for describing interesting economic phenomena. He https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr433.html and named the “paradox of toil,” which says that there [...]

This week I interviewed Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, about her https://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2024/2/klobuchar-colleagues-introduce-antitrust-legislation-to-prevent-algorithmic-price-fixing. If you don’t know what algorithmic collusion is, it’s time to get educated, because you could be [...]

Byline: Peter Coy The United States needs a strategy for dealing with China as an economic and national security threat, and Donald Trump's blustery 'America First' approach ain't it. Kamala [...]

Old joke: If you teach a parrot to say “supply” and “demand,” you’ve got yourself a fine economist. I imagined I had a parrot economist on my shoulder when I [...]

Let’s say you’re an armchair economist and you think the U.S. economy is already in a recession (as https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/poll-economy-recession-biden people https://investors.affirm.com/news-releases/news-release-details/new-research-reveals-why-3-5-americans-think-economy-recession). Or maybe you’re sure it’s still growing. Either way, [...]

In Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, Kamala Harris did a pretty smooth job of reframing one of her biggest negatives — high prices — into a potential positive. If she can [...]

I understand why Vice President Kamala Harris is going hard against inflation. Politically, it’s the right thing to do. Economically, though, she’s like a general fighting the last war. Prices [...]

Byline: Peter Coy The chaos theorist Doyne Farmer has led an eventful life. He and fellow schemers beat the casinos by inventing a concealable computer that could predict (albeit with [...]

China and the United States tied for gold medals at 40 apiece, and the United States had more medals overall, but the most successful nation at the Paris Olympics was [...]

Look out for the Social Security tax torpedo. It may be heading toward the hull of your retirement accounts as we speak. And if it hits, you may not even [...]

Donald Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/business/economy/trump-tax-cuts.html to eliminate taxation of Social Security benefits. That may be a political winner, but it’s bad idea economically for at least four reasons. First, those taxes support [...]

The secret to making money in the stock market is to buy low and sell high. Right? Not buy high and sell low. So loading up on stocks when the [...]

The economist and market strategist David Rosenberg took a lot of heat for predicting that the Federal Reserve’s big increase in interest rates would tip the U.S. economy into recession. [...]

There’s a story going around Wall Street that the Treasury Department is trying to help Democratic candidates in November by how it issues debt. I don’t buy it. Scott Bessent, [...]

Byline: Peter Coy As the Republican Party repositions itself as the party of working men and women, William McKinley is having a moment. (I'm surprised, too.) McKinley, who served as [...]

No nation officially wins the Olympics, but that doesn’t stop journalists and others from trying to keep score by counting gold, silver and bronze medals. Unfortunately, the two main approaches [...]

Byline: Peter Coy Emmanuel Frimpong, 32, is a cocoa farmer in Ghana, mostly by default. He has a university education but couldn't find another job so he works on the [...]

Byline: Peter Coy 'To modern eyes, 19th-century wars protected commerce and finance to a degree that is almost unbelievably generous,' the Cornell historian Nicholas Mulder wrote in his 2022 book, [...]

Byline: Peter Coy In the long run, consistency and skill tend to win out over luck. Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland, one of the greatest golfers of his generation, suffered [...]

Byline: Peter Coy We crave knowledge. Only ostriches stick their heads in the sand. Right? Well, then, how can we explain the following? 'Don't tell me how the movie ends.' [...]

Byline: Peter Coy Pope Francis told entertainers at the Vatican last week that he has been saying the Prayer for Good Humor for the past 40 years. He highly recommended [...]

Byline: Peter Coy You don't hear so much about effective altruism now that one of its most famous exponents, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from customers [...]

Byline: Peter Coy Restaurants in Tel Aviv are full. High-tech exports remain strong. The shekel is holding its value. By some measures, Israel's economy seems unscathed by the war in [...]

It’s become conventional wisdom in some circles that sometime in the 1970s, the link between pay and productivity broke. Workers’ productivity kept rising, but their inflation-adjusted pay did not. “The [...]

Is it possible that the Democrats were hurt by a strong economy? Is it possible that the Democrats were hurt by a strong economy? There’s an intriguing theory that the [...]

Frank McCourt hopes to make TikTok safer to use. He’ll have to buy it first. Frank McCourt wants to make TikTok safer to use TikTok will be a little bit [...]

Many new college graduates are having an awful time finding jobs, as I wrote in https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/opinion/college-graduates-job-market.html and in early https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/opinion/college-graduates-job-market.html. I’ve been trying to understand why, and I think I’m [...]

Byline: Peter Coy The great economist George Stigler wrote a paper called 'The Cost of Subsistence' that calculated the minimum cost of food that would satisfy the nutritional requirements of [...]

Mary Kay Henry had one big success and one big disappointment in her 14 years as president of the Service Employees International Union, which is one of the biggest and [...]

I understand why parents are unhappy with the proliferation of computers in school, as my Opinion colleague Jessica Grose documented in a recent series of newsletters. “One way or another,” [...]

At a May 1 rally in Waukesha, Wis., Donald Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnah6ruqkHw that when he was president “we had no inflation,” and that now “we have record horrible inflation” that is [...]

When I https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/opinion/college-graduates-job-market.html new college graduates last month to tell me about their job searches, I got back a ton of heartache. Unanswered applications. Lowered expectations. For some, a sense [...]

Scientists have figured out an easier way to turn carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide. That might seem like a dubious achievement, since carbon dioxide is something we exhale and carbon [...]

What if you could move to a new home but keep the mortgage that you took out on the old one, with the same balance, interest rate and time remaining? [...]

Byline: Peter Coy Financially speaking, the United States has been a Teflon nation. Bad things happen - near defaults, giant budget deficits, a Capitol invasion - but nothing sticks for [...]

Michael Ohlrogge has a theory about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the agency that makes sure ordinary depositors don’t lose their money when their bank goes bust. Ohlrogge, an associate [...]