Judging by the financial market's renewed unease about Italy and Spain over the past week it would seem that all that the European Central Bank's €1 trillion liquidity injection in the European banking system bought was around four months of relative market calm.

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.

Panel discussion on what kinds of financial systems, banking, mortgage securitization, central banking, and related economic effects can we expect in the post-bubble world and if we find something new or just business as usual.

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.

These days, billions of dollars is spoken of as pocket change. A by-product of massive government debt burdens and decades of cheap cash from central banks is the notion that, while solvency might be important, liquidity should be easy to find. Particularly for financial institutions, the official state position appears...

A central bank in a democratic society is a magnet for many of the tensions that such a society confronts.

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In the months ahead, there will be a renewed intensification of the European debt crisis that could have major implications for the US economy.

If financial stability was at the top of the central banks' agenda by 1999, one can reasonably wonder what they were doing about it from 1999 to 2007.