From the perspective of the corporate profit and loss statement, a trading loss is one expense item in the context of all revenues and expenses. So $2 billion should be compared to the bank's $26.7 billion in pretax profits for 2011, suggesting a reduction of something less than 10 percent in annual profit.

While a line-item veto would enable a president willing to take the political heat to excise the wasteful spending of pork-addled lawmakers, it is less fulfilling than it appears and would bring a major cost to the constitutional balance.

Ever since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has maintained an aggressive and bellicose international security posture. Today, fully two decades after the end of the Cold War, North Korea's external defense and security policies look arguably more extreme and anomalous than ever.

Editor’s note: Jim Manzi is the author of “Uncontrolled: the Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society.” He is the founder and chairman of Applied Predictive Technologies, a global provider of predictive analytics software. Manzi is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at...

While markets are again correctly obsessing over Italy and Spain’s poor economic growth prospects, as reflected in markedly higher government bond yields for those two countries, they seem to have taken their eye off two upcoming political events that could usher in a new and more serious phase of the...

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg likes the Indian Health Care Improvement Act and other ingredients of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.” Why, she asked toward the end of three days of hearings, shouldn’t the court keep the good stuff in Obamacare and just dump the unconstitutional bits?

We're about to enter a very long campaign in which where an apparently squeaky clean Mitt Romney is going to be demonized for his success and dragged through the gutter. Meanwhile, Obama took cash from a true denizen of the gutter.

It is all too clear that the holiday's diversion of general revenue from the Social Security trust fund has undermined historical practices and distorted federal budgetary priorities.