The Wall Street Journal's Kara Scannell and Susanne Craig take a long look today at the low-profile kept by Securities and Exchange Commissioner Christopher Cox during the Bear Stearns bailout. They lead with the amazing image of Cox ...

That’s what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues—that the so-called major announcement today by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is a ruse to keep financial institutions from being regulated. Krugman is less than impressed with the administration’s plan of re-arranging the regulatory bureaucracy. “To hide their lack of ...

The Los Angeles Time’s Janet Hook and Dan Morain speculate on how the millions Wall Street banks and financial firms have given to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will affect their regulation of the financial markets. Each has received just over six million from Wall ...

Recently the New York Times made a point that Understanding Government would like to second:  when you deprecate the role of government for years on end, government stops working, in every sense. 

The subprime mortgage loan and broader credit crisis have such a complex and varied range of causes and effects that for government agencies coming in after the fact, it can be challenging to figure out where to start -- or who's responsible.  As Carrie Johnson writes in the Washington Post, ...

Could America's superpower status be endangered by the country's thirst for ever greater profits from  complex investment products?  The strategic consequences of massive foreign investment in the U.S. economy are now emerging.

Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox announced that the SEC has launched a dozen or more new investigations, the Wall Street Journal has reported.  At issue are new methods of selling off debt that have driven leveraged buyouts in recent years, known as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and collateralized ...