The Fed should ask Milton Friedman. When growth of the money supply slows, so does the increase in prices. The Federal Open Market Committee faces a momentous decision this week, with markets fully expecting a history-making second-in-a-row 0.75-point hike to the federal-funds rate. The hike at the prior meeting brought the key policy rate ...

Some big companies rose to the occasion during the pandemic and did well. But there were losers too. Now that its debt-funded relief program has become law, the Biden administration is looking to bankroll even bigger spending programs—the American Jobs Act, announced Wednesday, calls for higher taxes on corporations, and another bill is ...

New data suggest that social distancing and reopening haven’t determined the spread. Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health—first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the ...

They’re good for ordinary investors and for economic growth. Democrats insist that any government aid to businesses laid low by the Covid-19 crisis be conditioned on compliance with a laundry list of progressive demands. Sen. Elizabeth Warren would require, among other things, that to receive aid firms must institute a $15 minimum wage, set ...

Central bankers insist on promoting inflation. What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. It isn’t every day that representatives of elite bureaucratic institutions walk among the ordinary people they govern and ask: “What do you really think of us?” The Federal Reserve did just that last year, through 13 “Fed Listens” events, in ...

OPEC would have had to cut output anyway, given the dramatic increase in American production. The attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure last weekend took out about half of the kingdom’s production capacity. Yet the market reaction was muted, with global oil prices rising only to where they were in May. Markets seem to recognize that ...

Sure, the size of the balance sheet is holding steady, but leaving riskier assets in the market will slow growth. It must be annoying for Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell when President Trump berates him on Twitter—especially when Mr. Trump insists he take policy steps he’s already taken. This seemed to happen last week when the ...

The chairman made the case last year for easing if the yield curve inverts—as it did in March. It’s time for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. Not because the economy is falling apart, and not because the president is demanding it—but because it’s the right thing to do, based on a compelling policy vision put forth last year by ...

Misery for oil incumbents from the fracking boom is spilling into the global economy. But there is cause for optimism. The global economy is slipping into recession. The evidence is showing up in all the usual ways: slowing output growth, slumping purchasing-manager indexes, widening credit spreads, declining corporate earnings, falling ...

Oil production is becoming a modern manufacturing process, with frackers using the ‘just-in-time’ approach. Have the American entrepreneurs who developed horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing—“fracking”—done their jobs too well? The increase in domestic crude oil production of 3.6 million barrels a day in less than four years, ...

When is job security a bad thing? Right now.

Believe it or not, for all the scare-mongering about downsizing, outsourcing and Walmartizing, job security has never been stronger. But all it really indicates is that the U.S. labor market is the least dynamic it's ever been. ...

The banking crisis in Cyprus prompted an overdue financial reckoning that, with luck, will spell the end of 'too big to fail.' A revolution in science began on the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific, where Charles Darwin conceived his theory of natural selection. Now, on an island halfway around the globe, we're watching Darwin's theory ...