Corporations built up an extraordinary level of cash reserves during the current expansion. Firms have only recently started to draw down their substantial cash holdings through accelerated shareholder payouts, cash-financed mergers and acquisitions, and increased investment. These developments highlight the strong interest that economists and policymakers have in the interaction...

Nebraska's CB plans are innovative and could be a model for other states to follow as they try and bring their budgets and pensions under control. Yet there are other, more transparent and taxpayer-friendly ways Nebraska could construct the pension system.

It’s clear that microfinance has tremendous potential to help tackle unemployment and poverty in Indonesia. By instituting a wise and prudent regulatory structure that balances lender profits and borrower protections, Indonesia can continue to extend credit to the poor, while maintaining financial soundness.

The current economic outlook is unnerving as inflation is low and falling in the U.S. and Europe and cutting rates is no longer an option. Policymakers must recognize that, while the acute phase of the financial crisis may be over, the chronic trend toward deflation that has followed it is not.

In less than twenty-five years, government “affordable housing” and other housing policies have turned a healthy market into a financial ruin. Until Fannie and Freddie’s market dominance and the government’s role in the housing finance system are substantially reduced or eliminated, the United States will continue to have an inferior and unstable housing market.

Without the dodgy accounting of "off balance sheet borrowing," the Reid Senate bill actually increases the non-Social Security/Medicare deficit by almost $250 billion.

As we enter the fall of 2011, three years after the Lehman Brothers crisis, Europe and the United States are teetering on the brink of another, potentially more serious, systemic crisis.