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That was when Trump supporters descended on a polling location in Fairfax, Va., and sought to disrupt early voting there by forming a line that voters had to circumvent and chanting, “Four more years!”This was no rogue group. This was no random occurrence. This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.

Republicans are planning to have tens of thousands of volunteers fan out to voting places in key states, ostensibly to guard against fraud but effectively to create a climate of menace.

bragged to Sean Hannity about all the “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor the polls on his behalf. At a rally in North Carolina, he told supporters: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.”

For years, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.

It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion.

Hadn’t we repeatedly lived through previous alarms about other, allegedly imminent, environmental catastrophes that didn’t come to pass, like the belief, widespread in the 1970s, that overpopulation would inevitably lead to mass starvation? And if the Green Revolution had spared us from that Malthusian nightmare, why should we not have confidence that human ingenuity wouldn’t also prevent the parade of horribles that climate change was supposed to bring about?

A Commonwealth in Crisis

On Sunday, Puerto Rico will likely default again on some of its debts, which now total over $70 billion.

It is an entity that is often almost completely at the whim of Congress, the most dysfunctional body in national politics today.

DuPont is a pretty well-run company. Under the leadership of Ellen Kullman, a company veteran who became its chief executive in 2009, this once unwieldy conglomerate has undergone a great deal of change, with more still to come. It has cut some $2 billion in costs, eliminating a third of its management; announced the spinoff of its performance chemicals business; and “refreshed” its board with such corporate stalwarts as Edward Breen, who is best known for turning around Tyco International in the early 2000s. Since Kullman took over, the company has delivered 266 percent in total shareholder returns, easily outpacing the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. It is in the middle of a major restructuring designed to boost earnings growth.

Have we really gotten to the point where the activist now gets the benefit of the doubt, no matter how well run the company?

In the DuPont/Trian fight, the hedge fund is on record as saying that the company is not getting a return on its research-and-development spending. Yet R.& D. — science — is at the very heart of DuPont’s business model and always has been. And it can take years to turn a scientific advance into a successful product. A DuPont stripped of much of its R.& D. doesn’t just hurt the company; it hurts the country.

It has been a busy week for Martin Shkreli, the flamboyant businessman at the center of the drug industry’s price-gouging scandals. From Our Advertisers quot;frameC

He said he would sharply increase the cost of a drug used to treat a potentially deadly parasitic infection. He called himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor” on Twitter and railed against critics in a live-streaming YouTube video. After reportedly paying $2 million for a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, he goaded a member of the hip-hop group to “show me some respect.”

Then, at 6 a.m. Thursday, F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Shkreli, 32, at his Murray Hill apartment. He was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.

Mr. Cuomo estimated on Monday that the state could raise $9 billion in bonds off that revenue that would help fund repairs for the city’s troubled subway system. But the philosophical and psychological impact might be even more profound, offering a concrete, almost classist, rebuke to ultra-wealthy apartment buyers who sojourn in the city, enjoying its services and amenities, but often pay few taxes.

“There’s a growing realization with Billionaires’ Row, and the super-talls, that a lot of these homes are vacant and viewed as sky-high security deposit boxes for very wealthy foreigners,” said State Senator Brad Hoylman, the Manhattan Democrat who has sponsored the tax legislation for several years. And, he said, “because of our system of laws, because of our fire and police, because we are a secure financial investment, they should be charged for that.”

The speed with which the pied-à-terre tax has become politically popular is also remarkable: The idea was floated by a liberal think tank and lawmakers in New York in 2014, but had repeatedly been shunted to death in committee by Republicans leading Albany’s upper chamber, and quietly ignored by Democrats leading the Assembly.

But then a most unexpected and weird thing happened. GameStop's stock has soared to unbelievable heights lately. Topping $400 per share earlier Thursday, it was up more than 2,000% so far in this young year, including a 134% jump on Wednesday alone.

Most of GameStop stock gyrations have to do with a tug of war between amateur day traders on Reddit, one of the world's largest online communities — who are betting on the stock to keep rising — and the professional managers of Wall Street hedge funds, who have bet that GameStop's stock will crater.

Melvin Capital and Citron were caught in what's known as a short squeeze, forcing the funds to buy more GameStop stock to cover their losses, which ended up driving the stock price even higher. This has happened before, most famously with Tesla stock.

On the other side of the world in Washington, two deep-pocketed organizations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, vowed to spare poor countries from desperation. Their economists warned that immense relief was required to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and profound damage to global prosperity. Emerging markets make up 60 percent of the world economy, by one I.M.F. measure. A blow to their fortunes inflicts pain around the planet.

The shutdown of tourism has punished many developing countries.

Billions of people have lost the wherewithal to buy food, increasing malnutrition. By next year, the pandemic could push 150 million people into extreme poverty, the World Bank has warned, in the first increase in more than two decades.

The cost of this year's federal elections will hit close to $14 billion, shattering records and doubling the amount of money spent to influence presidential and congressional contests four years ago, according to an estimate released Wednesday.

And the 2020 election also has seen a dramatic reversal in the financial fortunes of the two men vying for the White House

Donations to the Biden campaign alone through mid-October -- the most recent public filings -- already have topped $930 million.

As natural gas prices in Europe continue to hit record highs, utility companies in Germany are scrambling to secure millions of euros in extra liquidity to ensure they can meet future contracts.

Last week, another leading German utility, Uniper, announced that high energy prices had forced it to seek extra credit worth 10 billion euros ($11.4 billion). Most of the money, €8 billion, came from Uniper’s parent company, Fortum, based in Finland. The rest is from Germany’s state-owned development bank, KfW, and was secured as a backup to mitigate future price swings, the company said.

Other German energy companies, including RWE and EnBW, said that they had taken similar steps to ensure they had sufficient credit to weather the volatility in the European energy market, but declined to give details.

Over the week of March 16, markets experienced an enormous shock to what investors refer to as liquidity, a catchall term for the cost of quickly converting an asset into cash.

Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible.

They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.

you have a consolidation of power that is so overwhelming, not just in its ability to control resources and drive the economy and redistribute wealth upward, but basically to provide the most fraudulent definition of what a democracy should be. I mean, the notion that profit making is the essence of democracy, the notion that economics is divorced from ethics, the notion that the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism, the notion that the welfare state is a pathology, that any form of dependency basically is disreputable and needs to be attacked, I mean, this is a vicious set of assumptions.

The biggest lie of all is that capitalism is democracy. We have no way of understanding democracy outside of the market, just as we have no understanding of how to understand freedom outside of market values.

Metaphorically. Two things happened. 1) There was this assumption that the government was evil except when it regulated its power to benefit the rich. So it wasn't a matter of smashing the government as Reagan seemed to suggest, it was a matter of rearranging it and reconfiguring it so it served the wealthy, the elites and the corporate,

Explaining the origins of the financial crisis, Mr. Fuld avoided any mention of investment banks’ eagerness to issue subprime mortgages. (Lehman had an enormous portfolio of subprime loans.)“It’s not just one single thing,” Mr. Fuld said. “It’s all these things taken together. I refer to it as the perfect storm.”

At the root of the crisis, in his view, was the government’s push for homeownership. At the same time, hedge funds, private equity firms and sovereign wealth firms grew rapidly, supercharging the global financial system and driving up equity values, balance sheets, the volume of financial products and the need for financing, he said.“There was very little regulation or market supervision

Then in 2007, the Fed raised interest rates, essentially ending the housing boom it had encouraged, Mr. Fuld said.“The increased rates led to increased mortgage rates and payments, a huge number of residential foreclosures,” he said. “Banks wrote down and sold assets.”In the wake of this, companies began cutting costs and jobs, Mr. Fuld said, and it became “a self-fulfilling economic loop.”

the Donald, for all his proud ignorance about policy detail, is actually running an ideologically distinctive campaign: He’s a populist and nationalist, a critic of open immigration and free trade and a backer of Social Security and progressive taxation, and he’s drawing support from working-class Republicans who tend to share those views.

It’s a class revolt, driven by a sadly-justifiable sense that Republican elites don’t have working-class interests close enough to heart. And it’s already won some (very) modest victories for populism — by prodding Scott Walker to make an economic case against low-skilled immigration, for instance, or by encouraging Jeb Bush to go after hedge fund managers in his tax plan.

unrealistic ideas are hardly unique to the religious right. But evangelical culture, as James Davison Hunter notes in “To Change the World,” his magisterial account of recent Christian engagement with American politics, has a particular fondness for the idea of the history-altering individual, the hope that “one person can stand at the crossroads and change things for good.”

Historically, inequality was not something that academic economists, at least in the dominant neoclassical tradition, worried much about. Economics was about production and allocation, and the efficient use of scarce resources. It was about increasing the size of the pie, not figuring out how it should be divided.

“Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and…the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.”

Stiglitz argues, what we’re stuck with isn’t really capitalism at all, but rather an “ersatz” version of the system.

The truth is that Latin America has matured and become more equal in recent decades, even as the distribution in the United States has become steadily more unequal.

Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent? Oops! That’s already us. The top 1 percent of Americans owns 34 percent of America’s private net worth, according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The bottom 90 percent owns just 29 percent.

for most of American history, income distribution was significantly more equal than today. And other capitalist countries do not suffer disparities as great as ours.

Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.

“The deal became largely worthless within months of its creation,” The Journal added. “As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits.”

the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case demanded that the S.E.C. explain how such serious securities fraud could end with the defendant neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing

Tuna and Moskovitz were in their mid-20s in 2010 when they became the youngest couple ever to sign on to the Giving Pledge, the campaign started by Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett to encourage the world’s billionaires to commit to giving away most of their wealth.

They had little experience with philanthropy, but they believed that the bulk of the money Moskovitz had made — estimated to be $8.1 billion by Forbes — should be returned to society in their lifetimes.

they have narrowed their interests to four major “buckets”: U.S. policy, global catastrophic risks, international aid and science. They plan to announce their first major gifts in early 2015 and eventually hope to scale up to give away hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

The years between 2008 and late 2013 were — relatively speaking — a rather benign period of big power politics and geopolitics. This allowed the major economic powers — the United States, the European Union, China, India, Russia, Brazil and Japan — to focus almost exclusively on economic rehabilitation

now there are strong indications that our vacation from geo-instability is over.

The last time the world witnessed such a steep and sustained drop in oil prices — from 1986 to 1999 — it had some profound political consequences for oil-dependent states and those who depended on their largess. The Soviet empire collapsed; Iran elected a reformist president; Iraq invaded Kuwait; and Yasir Arafat, having lost his Soviet backer and Arab bankers, recognized Israel — to name but a few

He also describes the dynamics between power and wealth in Russia, claiming that during “the first eight or 10 years of Putin's reign over Russia, it was about stealing as much money as he could.

“I believe that it's $200 billion. After 14 years in power of Russia, and the amount of money that the country has made, and the amount of money that hasn't been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on, all that money is in property, bank - Swiss bank accounts, shares, hedge funds, managed for Putin and his cronies.”

The power is very simple in Russia - whoever has the power to arrest people is the person in power.