Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.
Central banks need to be able to buy bonds if there are short-term malfunctions of the markets. But buying bonds without differentiation and without limits would be very problematic.
It was wrong to allow Stalin to shape the European landscape of the 20th century. It would be even more wrong to let him shape the landscape of the 21st century.
But then in April of 1985 the dollar began a sharp decline. The dollar's trade weighted value fell 23 percent in just 12 months and by a total of 37 percent by the beginning of 1988.
An increase in the relative price of products from the low wage manufacturers in Asia and Latin America will also make those products less attractive to American consumers.
So just as I want pilots on the planes that I fly, when it comes to monetary policy, I want to think that there is someone with sound judgement at the controls.
As an economics undergraduate, I also worked on a part-time basis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a company that was advising customers about portfolio decisions, writing reports.
What happened after publication of our paper was that, for the next 40 years, people said, all right, we now know the answer to the capital structure question under ideal conditions.
Most people might just as well buy a share of the whole market, which pools all the information, than delude themselves into thinking they know something the market doesn't.
Even if there's no way to stop U.S. corporations from shedding their U.S. identities and becoming foreign corporations, there's no reason they should retain the privileges of U.S. citizenship.
News and images move so easily across borders that attitudes and aspirations are no longer especially national. Cyber-weapons, no longer the exclusive province of national governments, can originate in a hacker's garage.
If we want corporations to act differently, we have to force them to do so through laws that are fully enforced and through penalties higher than the economic benefits of thwarting the laws.
America spends a fortune on drugs: more per person than any other nation on earth, even though Americans are no healthier than the citizens of other advanced nations.
A Democratic president should propose a major permanent tax reduction on the middle class and working class. I suspect most of the public would find this attractive.
Yes, the rich will find ways to avoid paying more taxes, courtesy of clever accountants and tax attorneys. But this has always been the case, regardless of where the tax rate is set.
During three decades from 1947 to 1977, the nation implemented what might be called a basic bargain with American workers. Employers paid them enough to buy what they produced.
The generosity of the super-rich is sometimes proffered as evidence they're contributing as much to the nation's well-being as they did decades ago when they paid a much larger share of their earnings in taxes.
To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.
More people are killed by stray bullets every day in America than have been killed by Ebola here. More are dying because of poverty and hunger.
Instead of worrying about who's American and who's not, here's a better idea: Create incentives for any global company to do what we'd like it to do in the United States.
Some argue shareholder capitalism has proven more efficient. It has moved economic resources to where they're most productive, and thereby enabled the economy to grow faster.
