The economic backdrop is a much more reliable guide to the holiday shopping season than sales on Black Friday. With employment rising rapidly, real incomes being boosted by falling gasoline prices and...

Russian activity data for last month suggest that the economy withstood the initial sharp drop in the price of oil better than some had feared. But even so, the big picture is that growth is still...

Regardless of what happens on Black Friday, other more useful indicators suggest that this holiday shopping season could be the best in nine years.

Although the Fed recently concluded its quantitative easing (QE), the Bank of Japan has announced an expansion in the pace of its own asset purchases and the ECB is edging closer to full-blown QE. We...