William Harrison's defense harkens back to the age before 2008, when banks could simply declare their manifest strengths and their Olympian wisdom. Given what we've been through, you've got to try a little harder now.

This is a version of a rational-expectations hypothesis that has been pummeled of late more than a piñata. But OK, it's a political document in the midst of a presidential campaign.

Do we want big banks to be essentially utilities, tightly regulated so that it's (almost) impossible for them to get into serious trouble, and small enough if they do that they can't cause harm? Do we want the entire financial system to become utility-like?

Henry Kaufman, Dr. Gloom from a distant age when Salomon Brothers was still King of Wall Street, penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journa declaring that, sooner or later, the era of monstrous, too-big-to-fail banks will end.

If JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s big ugly trade managed to escape the bank's internal risk management operation -- not to say regulators -- how would that have found its reflection in the bank's overall risk number? It's a rule: It's the stuff we don't know, or don't want to know, that tends to kill us.

Private equity may not have been the prime mover, and at times it spawned uncertainty and job losses (or worse); but it also opened opportunities, not just for buyout mavens like Romney, but for owners and managers and, in some cases, workers of middle-market companies.

The "success" of private equity must mean that everyone must be an entrepreneur, an engineer or an M.B.A. "Change" that worked in the conditions of the '70s must be the solution in times that even Brooks admits are "radically different."

This isn't heading to the bestseller lists -- but so what? Schlefer is waving a flashlight beam in a musty attic. As Alan Greenspan's public persona suggests, economics takes a perverse pride in obscurity and opacity.

The pretense is that through some deliberative and democratic magic, the prize is bestowed correctly. In short, there's equilibrium out there at every moment that the market is reaching for. Unfortunately, for both markets and prizes, humanity makes the call.

Are we better or worse off economically, socially and politically with shareholders in that pre-eminent a role? Is there a balance point? Have we, in a world of activist hedge funds and high-frequency trading, overshot that point?

Has anyone not involved in a crime blown out of a major firm with a more devastating sendoff? Smith took no prisoners: "Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent." Exactly zero!

We're at a strange moment, trembling between optimism and pessimism. Much of this is economic; after a gloomy four years or so, there are signs that a more solid economic recovery may be in the works.

Playing catch-up here. MIT economics professor Andrew Lo has written a paper for the Journal of Economic Literature summarizing, with a few general po...

The popular response to 2008 and what has followed is to focus on the single cause -- subprime, deregulation, globalization, greed, compensation -- and fail to separate out precipitating factors from less satisfying, more complex and ambiguous causes.

By now seemingly everyone with access to a blog has contributed to the theory Joseph Stiglitz offers up in, of all places, the new Vanity Fair, about the causes not just of the Great Depression, but analogously, what he calls our own "Long Slump."

If you accept the research that higher socioeconomic status is the single greatest factor in academic performance, then Rivera is outlining a process that not only bakes in inequality, but deepens it over time.

Two months in, we've still got nothing but platitudes and slogans from OWS. And now that's getting annoying.

This week represents the 25th anniversary of London's Big Bang. Many beneath a certain age, particularly in the U.S., will wonder what this now-antique event in October 1986 was all about.

Fans still believe that Steve Jobs has the ability to transform material things -- electronic products -- to a higher, more idealistic level, which, along with his personal history and his health problems, gives him the faint nimbus of saintliness.