By James Surowiecki

In the run-up to last year’s Presidential election, pundits, economists, and Wall Street analysts agreed on one thing: a Donald Trump Presidency would be a disaster for the stock market. The common wisdom is that markets hate uncertainty. They’re all about prediction, and Trump is unpredictability personified. Citigroup said that a Trump win would send […]

No American President has ever had such huge conflicts of interest as Donald Trump. Ever since his election, Democrats and the press have hammered him for it. Trump will use the Presidency to enrich himself, they’ve said, and foreign governments will curry favor by offering his companies handouts. They’ve pointed to the hundreds of millions […]

On New Year’s Eve, at a party to celebrate the opening of the long-awaited Second Avenue subway, Governor Andrew Cuomo said the project showed that government “can still do big things and great things.” What he didn’t say is that the project also shows that government can do really expensive things. The line, which so […]

We’re always hearing about “firestorms of protest,” but they seldom involve actual fire. In November, though, people who owned New Balance sneakers began setting them alight, posting videos of flaming footware to social media, and calling for a boycott of the company. Like so much else these days, it’s because of Trump. The night that […]

Going into Election Day, few industries seemed in worse shape than America’s private prisons. Prison populations, which had been rising for decades, were falling. In 2014, Corrections Corporation of America, the biggest private-prison company in the US, lost its contract to run Idaho’s largest prison, after lawsuits relating to understaffing and violence that had earned […]

  The revelation that Donald Trump’s business losses in the mid-nineties may have enabled him to avoid paying federal income tax for nearly two decades may be the biggest “October surprise” of any recent Presidential campaign. But the substance of it was no surprise at all. When, in the first debate, Hillary Clinton challenged him […]

‘Race still determines too much,” Hillary Clinton said, in last week’s debate with Donald Trump. It “often determines where people live, determines what kind of education in their public schools they can get, and, yes, it determines how they’re treated in the criminal-justice system.” She could have added that it has a profound effect on […]

On August 26th, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand for the national anthem, as a protest against police brutality. Since then, he’s been attacked by just about everyone-politicians, coaches, players, talk-radio hosts, veterans’ groups. But the harshest criticism has come from Bay Area police unions. The head of the […]

If you listened only to speeches from the Presidential campaign trail, you’d come away with the strong impression that, eight years after the financial crisis, Wall Street reform has been a bust. Every Republican candidate called Dodd-Frank, the centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s reform effort, a dismal failure. Donald Trump called it “terrible”; Ted Cruz […]

  Few falls in business history have been as sudden and as steep as that of Michael Pearson, the C.E.O. of the drugmaker Valeant. Not long ago, he was heading a company whose stock price had risen more than four thousand per cent during his tenure. A former McKinsey consultant, he had developed a strategy […]