Everybody now agrees that Treasury guarantees should be both explicit and explicitly paid for.

Under the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law, large nonbank firms may be declared systemically important because their failure will cause a systemic breakdown. In effect, this amounts to a government statement that these firms are too big to fail.

Can policymakers and private investors reprivatize American finance? Should they? If so, how?

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, the most common way U.S. buyers finance a home purchase, isn’t the ideal instrument its supporters claim it to be.

Government housing policies and the toxic mortgages they spawned were the sine qua non of the financial crisis.

Does a pension plan that takes more investment risk become better funded? Both the current accounting standards and the proposed revisions answer yes, while economic theory and real-world financial markets say no. Until and unless this central question is answered correctly, both the size of pension liabilities and the steps that could address them will be misunderstood.

Plans to evaluate teachers based on student performance and offer merit pay for teachers have gained attention, but they don't go nearly far enough. Today's teaching profession is the product of a mid-20th-century labor model.

Last week, the Administration released its eagerly awaited report on reforming the housing finance market. The Dodd-Frank Act had omitted consideration of the government sponsored enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) because they were perceived to be sufficiently important to warrant separate consideration.