It’s the beauty part of free-market capitalism: To successfully pursue happiness, you must help others do likewise.

This statement is available here as an Adobe PDF.  

To win just under 40 percent of the vote in a primary with five active candidates is pretty impressive, even for a candidate like Mitt Romney, who started off with significant advantages in New Hampshire.

The tale is generously sprinkled with facts debunking common misperceptions, and Mr. Yergin sagely analyzes how well the energy industry really works. What he does not do—despite what some readers may long for-is draw many conclusions.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR), which pushed Congress to give FHA yet more responsibilities, is now trying to show that the agency is not really insolvent. But the slippery "facts" they are using show how tenuous their argument is.

FHA Watch, a new monthly online publication, will focus on the government’s 100 percent taxpayer-backed Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage guarantee program and the risks it poses for taxpayers, families, and communities. 

You can have arguments this way and that about deposit insurance premiums, but for price discovery, such arguments are a pretty worthless substitute for market transactions.

Reform focused on sustainable lending would have FHA target a projected average claim rate of 5 per 100 insured loans under normal circumstances and 10 per 100 insured loans under stress circumstances.  This rate is about five times the normal default level for prime loans and about half the FHA's traditional default level under normal circumstances.