It has been reported that the Obama campaign this year, as in 2008, has disabled or chosen not to use AVS in screening contributions made by credit card. That doesn't sound very important. But it's evidence of a modus operandi that strikes me as thuggish.

For several weeks now it’s been clear that Putin won’t attend this month’s NATO summit in Chicago. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently spoke with Russia’s new/old president and explained that it’s “not possible and not practical” for Putin to participate because of his “busy domestic calendar.”

Little is known about the characteristics or behavior of individual commercial paper issuers, or about the reasons for the countercyclical issuance of commercial paper in the aggregate.

"The choice in this election is between an economy that produces a growing middle class and that gives people a chance to get ahead and their kids a chance to get ahead, and an economy that continues down the road we are on, where a fewer and fewer number of people do very well and everybody else is running faster and faster just to keep pace."

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. 

To make financial markets less vulnerable to their inevitable cycles, it is an essential responsibility of both private financial actors and government officials to study, develop and implement countercyclical approaches.

Voters seem to be rejecting the Obama Democrats' vast expansion of government, saying to leave the private sector alone so it can recover from the financial crisis recession and once again create bounteous and unscripted growth.

For years, the threat of instability in North Korea and Pakistan has haunted US foreign policy, challenging the United States to develop an effective plan for confronting and reforming these unstable regimes. And until the US changes course, North Korea and Pakistan--kindred spirits in diplomatic deception--will be happy to continue business as usual.