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. 

There should not be an Americas currency bloc

The rescue offers Greece the opportunity for an extended struggle to settle for slow economic growth for an extended period. This debt crisis is not over...

At this AEI event, Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff discuss their new book, which probes an array of crises to show why the four most dangerous words in finance are "this time is different."

There are many reasons to fear that 2012 will be a highly challenging year for the US economy. This is not only because the economic recovery will face considerable headwinds and could be hit by a European financial shock, but also because the US appears to have run out of fiscal and monetary policy space to counter any renewed economic downturn with an additional stimulus.

The US economy continues to disappoint and performs more poorly than original forecasts that were made by the more optimistic economists, who also tended to be supporters of the idea that our economy needs a big Keynesian stimulus. Sadly, this does not come as a surprise to many.

The fat years of the housing bubble lasted from 1999 to 2006 - seven years. The bubble was deflating by the beginning of 2007 and collapsed into the panics of 2007-09. Since then we have been struggling in its deflated wake. If we get the Biblical sum of seven lean years, the housing and related debt markets will bottom in 2013 - not a bad forecast. 

After many years of false starts, the Japanese economy may finally be set to boom—or at least to enter a period of sustained growth with a sharply rising stock market.