Larry Lindsey, with his profound knowledge of Washington ways, has absolutely nailed the principal guiding motto of all regulatory bureaucracies: "Cross us and we will make you pay."

Hires, quits, and layoffs exhibit strong, highly nonlinear relationships to employer growth rates in the cross section. Simple statistical models of these relationships greatly improve our ability to account for fluctuations in aggregate worker flows and enable us to construct synthetic measures of hires, separations, quits, and layoffs back to 1990.

2012 looks to be an interesting year for the already complex political triangle among the United States, Taiwan and China, what with each country undergoing political transitions. Should we expect policy continuity from President Ma Ying-jeou and the likely new Chinese leader Xi Jinping? What about continuity in the United States?

Minister Shin-Yuan Lai addressed the unresolved questions centering around the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed by Taipei and Beijing.

The Lehman bankruptcy shows how a territorial system can destroy value and create arbitrary and unnecessary risks and losses for creditors, problems which could have been avoided with a Debtor Selection System.

When the G8 major economies convened at Camp David last weekend, the continuing crisis of the euro, common currency of 17 European Union (EU) members, dominated the economic discussions. The agonies of Greece, badly divided in recent parliamentary elections, and forced to vote again on 17 June, were at the forefront.