Economics & Business Archive

ALGIERS—The chanting groups of protesters quickly swelled into a massive stream, moving downwards along Rue Didouche Mourad, one of the city’s main boulevards. In the summer heat, they wore Algerian flags as cloaks and carried hats and water bottles. Some walked with children on their shoulders, their young faces painted the green, white and red of the national flag. Homemade protest signs written in Arabic and French appeared to float above the slow-moving crowd. The signs and rallying cries called for a civilian state instead of a military one, and for the liberation of political prisoners. They praised the country’s […]

The truce in the U.S.-China trade war didn’t last long. Just a month after agreeing to restart negotiations on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, President Donald Trump announced another escalation last week. Unless something happens, or Trump changes his mind—which is always a possibility—U.S. Customs and Border Protection will begin collecting an additional 10 percent tariff on the remaining $300 billion in imports from China on Sept. 1. And this time, consumers would feel the pain because the tariffs will hit clothing, shoes, electronics and other everyday items that had previously been spared. To top it […]

In a significant escalation, President Donald Trump announced a total economic embargo on Venezuela yesterday, issuing an executive order that would block all transactions with the government and its officials and freeze their property and assets in the United States. The move came on the eve of a meeting in Peru held by the Lima Group, a multilateral body of Latin American countries that supports opposition leader Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, rather than Nicolas Maduro. Fifty-nine countries, including the United States, are attending. The Venezuelan government and its few remaining partners, such as Russia, are not. […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Neil Bhatiya is filling in for Stewart Patrick this week.After a long delay, the Trump administration finally took the first steps in a legally mandated effort to punish Russia for its use of chemical weapons in the 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the former Russian spy living in the United Kingdom. On Aug. 1, the administration issued an executive order outlining the nature of sanctions it could impose on Russia, focused on restrictions on lending to Russian government or government-affiliated entities. Because Moscow continues to deny its role in the attack and has taken no steps […]

Latin America is experiencing the largest migration crisis in its modern history, with millions of people fleeing desperate conditions in Central America and Venezuela in search of refuge elsewhere in the hemisphere. Nowhere has the human drama translated into a more acute political battle than in the United States, where President Donald Trump has placed immigration at the center of his administration’s agenda, making it a prominent issue in the nation’s political debate in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Last week, Judah Grunstein, WPR’s editor-in-chief and a longtime friend, offered a thoughtful analysis of the reasons triggering the […]