In an event that many pundits hail as a silver lining of America's still-dark economic cloud, the U.S. current-account deficit fell during the first quarter of 2009 by 34.5 percent from its level in the fourth quarter of 2008. Is this news really all that good?

If innovation- and competition-spurring iPhones and BlackBerrys are seen as a problem, regulators in Washington are asking the wrong question.

There is a powerful magic in the president’s vision of fast, sleek trains carrying Americans at dazzling speeds.Yet the public must be wary every time our leaders decide to spend billions of our tax dollars.

Forget about a Shanghai stock bubble. The whole Chinese economy's getting ready to burst.

Ever since its founding 11 years ago, Google has seen itself as one of the Good Guys. But recently, Google's size and ambitions have begun to obscure its halo.

The Waxman-Markey bill's 'international offsets' amount to paying polluting countries not to pollute.

For a while "PC" stood for "personal computer." In the 1990s it stood for "political correctness," the uniformity of the progressive doctrine promulgated at colleges and elsewhere. This era brings yet another PC: "public choice" theory.

The plan we are most likely to adopt to address climate change will cost far too much and do next to nothing. The debate over the solution to global warming hasn't even begun.

Where should such a line be drawn? Does it send the wrong message to the banking sector when big banks are rescued when they engage in behavior that would otherwise be fatal for smaller institutions?

President Obama's climate change legislation, the so-called "clean energy" bill, has passed the House of Representatives and is now being debated in the Senate. The president claims the bill will "spark a clear energy transformation that will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and confront the carbon pollution that threatens our planet."

University students have the freedom to choose between private and public colleges—between the private and public sectors—and post-secondary education is the better for it.Will that work for health care?

China's tax and trade policies invite investment in ways that U.S. policy does not.

For all its left-wing rhetoric on economic matters, the Pope's new encyclical is not quite the "progressive" document that it has been trumpeted to be. The underlying assumption of the document is the continued reign of the status quo -- a globalized, wealth-creating market economy -- with some ethical adjustments. This is a fundamentally conservative piece of work.

The Obama Administration should stop bailing out corporate disasters and abandon plans to move health care onto the backs of taxpayers. Tough talk from Anna Schwartz, a financial sage who has seen it all, having lived through the crash of 1929 and co-authored with Nobel laureate Milton Friedman the highly acclaimed financial bible A Monetary History of the United States (Princeton University Press, 1963).

Congress gave the FDA the power to ensure drug safety in 1938. One can argue that the FDA should keep unsafe medicines off the shelves. But the efficacy argument is more of a stretch--because the market already does such a good job of determining if a drug works.

Precisely because banks have become adept at repackaging their loans into bonds for sale – and thus removing them from their balance sheets – they have been able to provide more credit than in earlier decades. Or, to put it another way, during the past decade it has been investors holding securitised bonds, not just banks, that have been acting as key lenders to the economy.

Despite the fiscal difficulties trains face in places like urban Boston, the Obama administration is pushing a new transportation agenda that promises high-speed rail in unlikely spots like Alabama and Oklahoma.

There is a serious danger that the international adoption of cap-and-trade legislation to limit carbon-dioxide emissions will trigger a new round of protectionist measures.

U.S. cities that for years lost residents to the suburbs are holding onto their populations with a mix of people trapped in homes they can't sell and those who prefer urban digs over more distant McMansions, according to Census data released Wednesday.

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine Monday signed a 2010 budget making his state the latest to squeeze the rich for extra cash. But New Jersey isn't likely to hold the No. 2 spot for long.