With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that our leaders, in both the Bush and the Obama administrations, responded to crises and challenges all too often with measures that attempted to revive the old pre-financial crisis economy rather than with policies that would allow a new economy to grow.

How to deal with China’s ever-growing trade surplus has become one of the key economic policy challenges confronting the United States. The importance of this issue was highlighted by the recent high-level visit to Beijing of U.S. Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.

At this event,...

Long after Henry Paulson is gone from the Treasury, Washington will be wrestling with the problem of what to do about Fannie and Freddie.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan alleviates concerns about the potential failure of Fannie and Freddie but does not address the underlying problem with the GSEs.

Henry Paulsonnow has the unenviable task of picking up the pieces from the bursting of the largest housing and credit market bubbles in memory.

The expansion of agency debt not only imposes risk and realized losses on taxpayers, it also increases the cost of Treasury's direct financing, by creating a huge pool of alternate government-backed securities to compete with Treasury securities, and thus increases the interest cost to taxpayers.

Hank Paulson's tenure as Treasury secretary has been highly unfortunate for both the U.S. and global economies.

Treasury Secretary Paulson has asked Congress for $700 billion without a clear description of how it would be disbursed or a mechanism for effective oversight.