The Obama administration is suing to block the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile USA. Lawyers at the Department of Justice argue that the marriage of the second and fourth largest wireless carriers will reduce competition. It is clear from the complaint filed by the government that the lawyers at DOJ do not fully understand the present state of wireless competition.

Republicans will live to fight another day, but let there be no mistake, they took a beating last week.

By allowing their well-reasoned and often well-founded critiques of government action to metastasize into a categorical rejection of all prospective government action, while continuing to deny the basic political economy of the welfare state, conservatives increasingly find themselves in an ideological and practical straightjacket.

The Solyndra story includes Obama campaign donors and everybody's favorite Wall Street whipping boy, Goldman Sachs, in the middle of the whole sorry mess. Yet it would be a mistake to mark the story down as merely another excrescence of crony capitalism. It is much worse.

South Korea'sdecade-longexperiment in economic diplomacy with North Korea has proved to be a failure.

The year began with substantial optimism and rising equity markets worldwide, but since late January, risk appetite has faded as uncertainties increased even more quickly than expected.

This is a status quo election with a number of interesting individual contests, a few fascinating subplots and some meaningful implications for the next two years.

Heading off future corrosive conflicts between the United Statesand the EU will necessitate reform of the international trading rules that have enmeshed--and entrapped--both trading superpowers.