With the economy once again teetering on the edge of recession, policymakers will inevitably propose another round of stimulus spending. You can bet on it--just as you can bet that any such spending won't help the economy.

The worsening of the global economic environment is fueling the rally in emerging market debt prices.

Scruton makes a counterintuitive yet persuasive case that optimists and idealists--with their ignorance about the truths of human nature and human society, and their naive hopes about what can be changed--have wrought havoc for centuries.

Robert Novak, in his half-century of Washington reporting, found that the fondest hopes of optimists usually turned out to be unrealistic and that the astringent analysis of pessimists often turned out to be accurate.

The consumption pattern of Chinese households does not correspond to the output that China's export industries produce.

Historical experience suggests that the majority of economic forecasters is mistaken in predicting a V-shaped U.S. economic recovery in 2010.

It is old news that the S&P rating agency downgraded the US foreign-credit rating from the coveted AAA to the less impressive AA+ on August 5. But as Republicans look ahead to the possibility that they might defeat Obama, they will inevitably seek ways to recover the exalted AAA status. If history is any guide, repairing the damage done to the U.S. bond rating will be a long, hard slog.

While there is widespread agreement that the substantive results of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Hong Kong Ministerial meeting were meager, there is no agreement on where the Doha Round negotiations go from here. Optimists still hold that breakthroughs are possible over the next few months and that the round...