What about the Canadian banking system allowed it to survive the recent worldwide slowdown without a single bank failure? What can the United States learn from Canada about sound banking?

We simply have to face the fact that banking is fundamentally risky. As I decided long ago when working in banks, the reason we needed to wear dark suits and have classic buildings was to look conservative in order to offset the real riskiness of what we were doing. 

Instead of placing undue reliance on all-too-fallible bank supervisors and regulators, should we not now be considering doing something serious about the perverse incentives to overly risky bank lending, as well as to the ‘too big to fail’ problem in the US and global banking systems.

Ever since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has maintained an aggressive and bellicose international security posture. Today, fully two decades after the end of the Cold War, North Korea's external defense and security policies look arguably more extreme and anomalous than ever.

If we hope to have a viable banking industry in the future, the Volcker Rule - among many other provisions of the Dodd-Frank should be revisited now.

Financial markets around the world experienced tumultuous swings following Standard & Poor's first-ever downgrade of the U.S. credit rating on Aug. 5. An ongoing European debt crisis and forecasts for sluggish economic growth worldwide are also rattling investors.

Last year's repeal of the final remaining vestige of Regulation Q, the prohibition of payment of interest on business demand deposits, at long last completed a pro-competitive process which began with the Monetary Control Act of 1980.  The repeal was and is a good idea.  We can easily see this by asking and answering half a dozen simple questions, to make the matter clear.

Can policymakers and private investors reprivatize American finance? Should they? If so, how?