If 1 trillion dollars would have been channeled through the 6,000 plus small banks we have in the US, these banks would have been strengthened and the dollars would have potentially reached millions of households, firms, and pension funds. It is also one way of beginning to build a distributed,...

The real challenge we face is how to switch out of the hyper-financial mode of the last two decades. It is not to rescue zombie banks.

The economy, even our continental-sized economy, functions in billions, not in trillions. This needs to be said at a time when the financial...

There is a basic economic perspective in Obama and Paul Volcker when they speak about the crisis and what we need to do. It is still somewhat inexplicable to me how Obama could chose Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner as his two top "economic" czars, they of the House of...

The Mumbai attacks are part of an emerging type of urban violence. These were organized, simultaneous frontal attacks with grenades and machine guns on at least ten high-end sites in the central business district.

Then there are the gangs in Rio de Janeiro that every now and then announce...

The Fed has lent $1.5 trillion in taxpayers' money to banks, including Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. This does not include the $700 billion bailout authorized by Congress. As collateral, the Fed is accepting a bunch of securities -- but it is not telling us what these securities are.

Traditional banking is about selling money you have. Finance, unlike traditional banking, is about the money that is not there. Thus finance is getting from whatever amount of money you have (10 thousand or ten billion) to its doubling, tripling. This means that pumping taxpayers money into the financial system...