By Robert J. Samuelson

  Could online lending cause the next financial crisis? While the odds seem overwhelmingly against it, the recent turmoil at LendingClub – a leading online lender – makes it hard not to ask the question. There are some disquieting parallels with subprime mortgages, which seemed beneficial until sloppy and fraudulent lending practices triggered a wider […]

It’s time to cut the GDP some slack. Overhauling the GDP – as some critics would – threatens to politicize one of our most useful economic indicators. It could be twisted to advance or retard political agendas. This is a bad idea. First, some background. “GDP” stands for “gross domestic product,” and it’s our standard […]

American consumers aren’t what they used to be – and that helps explain the plodding economic recovery. It gets no respect despite creating 14 million jobs and lasting almost seven years. The great gripe is that economic growth has been held to about 2 percent a year, well below historical standards. This sluggishness reflects a […]

Countries usually don’t knowingly commit economic suicide, but in Britain, millions seem ready to give it a try. On June 23, the United Kingdom will vote to decide whether to quit the European Union, the 28-nation economic bloc with a population of 508 million and a gross domestic product of almost $17 trillion. Let’s not […]

The Internal Revenue Service has just released its latest estimate of the “tax gap” — the difference between what Americans pay in taxes and what they actually owe. For the years 2008 to 2010 (the IRS’s latest data), the annual gap averaged a huge $458 billion. It’s surely higher now. Gulp. If everyone religiously paid […]

The gender pay gap is back in the news – and it may become a major issue in the presidential campaign. It seems an open-and-shut case of job discrimination. Women earn only 79 percent of men’s average hourly wages. Who could favor that? Actually, the comparison is bogus. A more accurate ratio, after adjusting for […]

The Obama administration has a new economic worry: competition or, allegedly, the lack of it. America’s businesses, the indictment goes, merge too often, innovate too little and bilk consumers too much. The open question is whether this argument is shrewd politics, shrewd economics – or both. No doubt, the politics are enticing. In this election […]

A paradox of our time concerns productivity. We are awash in transformative technologies – smartphones, tablets, big data – and yet the growth in labor productivity, which should benefit from all the technology, is dismal. This matters. Productivity is economic lingo for efficiency, and it’s the wellspring of higher living standards. If productivity lags, so […]