If the preposterous piece by Mr. Joel Jankowsky in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal had been published in any other newspaper, we'd guess it was a spoof. Mr. Jankowsky, a lobbyist and partner at Akin Gump, bemoans the limits being placed on lobbying activities, even though those limits remain weak...

Health care reform hangs in the balance at the same time we learn from the Cuomo Report that nine banks, all recipients of federal bailout support, paid an astounding $33 billion in bonuses in 2008, including more than 4,700 bonuses of at least $1 million. Though seemingly unrelated, health...

Bill Easterly takes a complex problem, African poverty, and tries to reduce it to a single factor: "the consensus among most academic economists is that destructive governments rather than destructive geography explain the poverty of nations." This is a strange assertion. Geography and government policies both matter.

Ms. Dambisa Moyo's recent Huffington Post article exposes the confusions that underlie her slashing attacks on aid. Most importantly, she seems to believe that sub-Saharan Africa was economically prosperous and then was pushed into poverty by aid. She makes the following statement: "No surprise, then, that Africa is on...

The debate about foreign aid has become farcical. The big opponents of aid today are Dambisa Moyo, an African-born economist who reportedly received scholarships so that she could go to Harvard and Oxford but sees nothing wrong with denying $10 in aid to an African child for an anti-malaria bed...

Two weeks ago, I posted an article showing how the Geithner-Summers banking plan could potentially and unnecessarily transfer hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from taxpayers to banks. The same basic arithmetic was later described by Joseph Stiglitz in the New York Times (April 1) and by

LONDON--The G-20 came through. What I witnessed as a member of Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon's delegation was deeply heartening. The leaders were serious, consequent, and - yes - even efficient in their work. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown ably chaired the conference, President Barack Obama brought America back to global...

In his review of the Geithner-Summers Plan to remove toxic assets from the banks, NY Times columnist Joe Nocera writes (March 28, p. B8), "As for the complaint that it will make rich guys richer, well, you can't win 'em all." If Nocera had looked at alternatives that many...

Geithner and Summers have now announced their plan to raid the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Federal Reserve (Fed) to subsidize investors to buy toxic assets from the banks at inflated prices. If carried out, the result will be a massive transfer of wealth -- of perhaps hundreds of...

In recent days, both Tom Friedman and David Brooks urged us to take our attention away from the trivialities of the AIG bonuses (just 0.001 percent of GDP, sniffed Brooks), to focus on truly weighty macroeconomic matters. Friedman bade us to look forward to, and support, the next mega-bailout of...

The Treasury is still without a plan to clean the banks. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told us yesterday that a new "Public-Private Investment Fund" would remove up to $1 trillion of toxic assets from the banks' balance sheets, but he didn't tell us how. In fact, they're still trying to...

Here is my general assessment of where we are from an economic point of view, putting the political dynamics mostly aside for the moment.

I believe that we should do much better on fiscal policy than we are doing as a nation.

(1) There is no room, nor case,...