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Half of the group’s entire worth consists of five buildings: Trump Tower and two other Manhattan buildings, and passive stakes in two offices in New York and San Francisco that are controlled by Vornado, a real-estate trust that is entirely separate.

Trump Inc is worth perhaps $4bn, with $490m of annual revenue. Were it listed it would be the 833rd-largest firm in America by market value and 1,925th by sales

If Trump family members are to make a second fortune in the next four years, they will have to reinvent a mediocre firm.

The Trump Organisation could now profit from the presidency in two ways. First, the profits of existing assets could rise

What has risen fast is the volume of rooms sold in the group’s hotels, which is up by an average of 40% in 2016.

Mr Trump owed over $120m to Deutsche Bank according to his 2015 filing. If new Trump projects are subject to claims of conflicts and cronyism, global banks that are exposed to litigation and congressional hearings in America may not stump up.

But it is less clear that his firm’s value will soar.

Trump Inc’s value could stagnate or fall.

People tend to forget the extent to which the last Republican administration was also characterized by cronyism, the appointment of unqualified but well-connected people to key positions

In particular, if you want some notion of what Trump governance is likely to look like, consider the botched occupation of Iraq. People who knew anything about nation-building weren’t wanted; party loyalists — and corporate profiteers — took their place. There’s even a little-known connection: Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, founded Blackwater, the mercenary outfit that, among other things, helped destabilize Iraq by firing into a crowd of civilians.

Now the conditions that prevailed in Iraq — blind ideology, contempt for expertise, effective absence of any enforcement of ethics rules — have come to America, but in a far more acute form.

will happen when we face a crisis? Remember, Katrina was the event that finally revealed the costs of Bush-era cronyism to all.

Real crises need real solutions. They can’t be resolved with a killer tweet, or by having your friends in the F.B.I. or the Kremlin feed the media stories that take your problems off the front page. What the situation demands are knowledgeable, levelheaded people in positions of authority.

Second, and against her father’s wishes, Triana wanted a parallel career in politics. She was popular with senior PP officials and, since candidates for elections in Spain must find patrons to put them on the lists presented by each party, well-placed.

Rosa Seijas, who sued over the fixed exam system, sees a cowed society that has accepted cronyism as inevitable. “Everyone complains, but nobody does anything,” she said. “They just say that this is the way things work. In fact, all they want is to find a way to get their own offspring a civil service job.

Carrasco’s architect friend, Jesús Ramos, says that the poisoned atmosphere in León reflected what he calls Spain’s “familist” society – where a weak welfare state provides no real safety net. “Here, your family looks after you,” he said. That makes cronyism inevitable, even virtuous

The woman who pulled the trigger, however, acted out of revenge for her daughter, hurt pride and frustrated grandeur – not from moral or political indignation. After all, her daughter’s desire to land a job for life, funded by taxpayers, through rigged exams was a further example of corruption.

An assassin who drives a Mercedes and wears Hugo Boss does not represent the jobless rage of Spain’s new poor. If anything, she represents a society where the corrupt distribution of public wealth is so widespread that some feel they have a right to demand their share – and, in this case, if they do not get it, a right to kill for it

Going to school in Spain is a pretty deadly business. The emphasis is all on learning by rote. Creativity and curiosity are not part of the package. School is not, remotely, fun. Work, the idea is instilled ominously early on, cannot be much fun either.

For my cousin, as for so many Spaniards, work is a necessary evil, a nuisance to be dispensed with as briskly as possible before turning to the serious business of life – drinking, nibbling tapas, hanging out with friends until the small hours.

Now that the bubble has burst, people's approach to work matters a great deal. The brightest, the boldest or the most restless young people go abroad for money and fulfilment; the rest, half of whom are unemployed, stay at home – baffled, desperate, increasingly angry, kicking out at government and being kicked back.

What's needed if Spain is not to sink gradually back into a sort of bucolic, early 20th-century Mediterranean poverty is a revolution across the board in attitudes to work. Like it or not, the system has to be overhauled and replaced by one where the rules are fair and merit is rewarded. Everywhere.

With the pretense of defending free markets, the Republican Party consistently supported big business. When did any Republican presidential candidate — other than Mr. Trump — speak in favor of some antitrust enforcement? When did he campaign for tougher enforcement against white-collar crime? When did anyone call for free trade in pharmaceuticals? Or for more competitive pricing of drugs bought by Medicare?

It is an indication of a country’s institutional corruption when inside a main party the only alternative to the prevailing crony capitalism is a tycoon with a long history of shady deals.

At a surprise press conference in February, Jean-Claude Juncker announced he had been keeping a secret: the commission's top civil servant, the secretary-general, was retiring. Martin Selmayr would take his place.It emerged that Mr Selmayr had applied for the role of deputy secretary-general, got that job and was then instantly promoted.

It has been suggested that the only other candidate in the race to become deputy withdrew their application, meaning Mr Selmayr had a clear run to the top. It has been alleged that members of the European Commission were offered more generous severance packages as inducements to smooth Mr Selmayr's path, which is vigorously denied.It is claimed that he even plans to knock down walls in the commission's management suite to cement his power.

The European Parliament is to hold a debate about it. A motion calls for a formal inquiry into the appointment and more transparency in the recruitment process in general."The way Martin Selmayr was appointed puts the European institutions into disrespect. If this procedure was corresponding to the rules, the rules have to be changed," said Green MEP Sven Giegold.

To MEPs outside the most powerful parliamentary groups it looks like jobs for the boys.To campaigning reporters it smells bad. To less zealous journalists it is great gossip.To Brexiteers it is a "coup" that proves the EU's structures are opaque and undemocratic.To me, it is the latest twist in a long-running tussle over where power lies in Europe: with the member states or with an increasingly political commission that seeks to protect the very idea of the EU.

Census Bureau data show that from 2009 through 2014, only about the top fifth of the population saw any income growth while the bottom 80 percent have averaged no income growth at all.

Trade and immigration are the lightning rods, but these issues are not the real triggers of our political moment. The illegal immigrant population was 8 percent lower in 2014 than in 2007, and our trade deficit was lower in 2015 than before the Great Recession.

They found that, after a financial crisis, nationalistic populist parties and politicians, using language that often attributes blame to minorities and foreigners, typically increase their vote share by about 30 percent. There is no such effect after ordinary recessions.

German economists look at the effect of financial crises on politics, reviewing 800 elections over 140 years across 20 advanced economies.

The real issue is weak, unevenly shared growth. If we addressed this issue, and if people felt their lives improving, the appetite for invective on secondary issues such as trade and immigration would dissipate.

walking away from free enterprise principles on trade and immigration is not the solution.

Conservatives love to emphasize the need for higher economic growth, but have often missed the importance of more widely distributed growth. Leaders should set their focus on a system with more opportunity in the middle and bottom of the economy. Write A Comment

This requires a generational strategy to build an education system based on innovation, school choice and an emphasis on vocational training.

It means rewriting tax and regulatory law to stop discouraging domestic investment and squelching job creation, while also attacking the corporate cronyism that gives special treatment to wealthy and entrenched interests.

It demands authentic compassion for people on the periphery of society.

More than 600,000 migrants have made the treacherous journey from Libya across the Mediterranean to reach Italy since 2013.The huge number of arrivals has upset many Italians - with politicians, including from the mainstream, toughening their rhetoric as a result.

Italy's economy has started to expand once again. But nearly 10 years on from the global financial crisis, Italy's gross domestic product - or total economic output - remains 5.7% lower than pre-crisis levels.

Italy is the EU's fourth-largest economy and the gains by populist and far-right parties are a major concern in some European capitals and in Brussels.Contenders have lined up to blame EU budget rules for hampering economic recovery. Five Star and the League had promised to hold a referendum to leave the euro but later dropped that rhetoric.

This kind of weakness, failure to speak out publicly and lack of legislative action on substantive policy matters created a political vacuum for extreme voices like Reps. Gaetz and Greene, who have gained a foothold in the GOP with their politics of grievance, conspiracy theories, nativism, nihilism and dishonesty

Owning the libs, whining about the transgendered in women's sports, promoting the discredited stolen election lie, and above all else, pledging fidelity to Trump have emboldened the extremists and given voice to their crackpottery.

To some, it might sound harmless, even amusing. But it made me deeply uneasy. Although the #MeToo movement has helped to raise awareness of the lack of diversity in publishing, biography is a genre in which the voices of women and people of color are still starkly underrepresented. According to a study done by Slate in 2015, 71.7 percent of the biographies the magazine surveyed that year were written about a male subject, and 87 percent of those were by male authors. The study did not consider race, but in the last 20 years, only two books with a person of color as both author and subject have won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.

The question of access — to materials, to family members and sometimes to the subject — has major repercussions for the work of scholars. Authorized biographers tend to be fiercely protective of their privileged status, which is often the basis for a book contract. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene’s authorized biographer, argued that a comma in his agreement with Greene allowed him sole access to Greene’s papers for more than a decade while he labored over his three-volume biography, delaying other researchers’ work in the process.

As critics pointed out even before the allegations surfaced, the biography’s accounts of some of Mr. Roth’s relationships contain biases and sexist characterizations that appear to parrot Mr. Roth’s opinions, including an uncomplimentary description of one woman’s genitalia. (Nearly five years ago, Mr. Bailey wrote a review of my own biography of Shirley Jackson that was perceived by many, including myself, as sexist.)

Critics like to speak of biographies as “definitive,” but in reality there’s no such thing. Biographers aren’t stenographers; we’re more akin to novelists, constructing a narrative of a person’s life and making editorial choices at every turn. An anecdote whose importance I might overlook could be seized on by someone else as a revealing detail.

Publishers should explicitly encourage a diversity of perspectives on a person worthy of biography, and biographers who care about improving representation would do well to rethink their own roles in the system. They might begin by pledging to keep the papers of subjects where they belong: in public archives, open to any scholar prepared to devote the time and energy to working with them.

The result would bring an infusion of new perspectives on literary giants, giving renewed relevance to an often conservative industry. It would also help to generate a more inclusive roster of authors considered worthy of chronicling, remaking and expanding the American literary canon.

Putin also has options to be speaker of the Duma (parliament) or leader of its main party, United Russia, thereby exercising power behind the scenes in the manner of Jaroslaw Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party.

The accompanying, enforced resignation of the entire government, including the prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, is Putin’s attempt to reset his administration before Duma elections next year. Analysts say he feared Medvedev’s unpopularity – he has been accused of corruption – was beginning to rub off on him.

Although these changes are dressed up as desirable constitutional reforms, they clearly serve one common purpose: establishing Putinism in perpetuity. By showing he has no intention of retiring, Putin hopes to nip a possible succession battle in the bud.

Putin’s supposedly transformative national spending projects worth an eye-watering $390bn have largely failed to materialise. His promises of economic modernisation and raised living standards must be set against a consecutive five-year fall in real wages and cuts to state pensions.

The continuing drag on Russia’s development caused by western sanctions, imposed after the illegal annexation of Crimea, symbolises the broader, negative aspects of perpetual Putinism.

Putin is in cahoots with Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and his campaign against pro-western Kurds in north-east Syria. More recently, he has inserted Russian mercenaries into the war in Libya, backing rebels against the UN-recognised government in Tripoli.

And speaking of poison, who doubts that Putin and his henchmen were behind the unpunished attempt to assassinate Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury and last year’s murder of a Chechen separatist in Berlin?

The prospect of Putin prolonging and strengthening his nihilistic reign is a terrible one. Putin’s is the face of the enemy. Henceforth he must be recognised as such.

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