James K. Glassman is a writer, policy commentator, and former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs under President George W. Bush. He is known for his work on economics, financial markets, and public policy, and served as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He contributed articles to The Weekly Standard on topics including economic policy, energy, media, and the intersection of government and markets.
Top Senate Banking Committee members released plans this week to wind down mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and replace them with a complicated apparatus disturbingly similar to Obamacare.
TRADE TALKS in the Mexican beach resort of Cancun collapsed two weeks ago, after the United States and Europe failed to reach an agreement with a group of 22 developing countries that insisted on aggressive cuts in farm subsidies but refused to take small steps to liberalize trade in their own…
EVEN AFTER its 489-point rally last Wednesday, the stock market's recent performance remains dismal. What's wrong? The economic news is good, if not great. Earnings have been better than expected, with positive surprises outnumbering negative by four to one. Interest rates remain among the lowest…
SHEER PANIC. That's the only way to describe the reaction of green activists to a fact-filled 515-page book by a young Danish statistician, published in English late last year by Cambridge University Press. The statistician, a slim, laid-back former Greenpeace member named Bjorn Lomborg, dared to…
IN A YEAR OF RECESSION, unprecedented terror attacks, and the largest bankruptcy in history, there was good news from a surprising front. During 2001, the number of American homes and offices that hooked up to the Internet using fast broadband technologies like cable and digital phone lines roughly…
CLIMATE, RICHARD LINDZEN OF MIT fondly reminds us, always changes. It must. Over centuries, responding to stresses internal and external, the earth is either warming or cooling, just as the temperature from day to day heats or chills. It could stay the same, but not for very long. "Climate change,"…
Last Wednesday, investors, panicky over banking troubles in Japan, drove the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 300 points in the first few minutes of trading. Bloomberg Business News reported a worldwide "flight to quality" -- from stocks into U.S. Treasury securities. But imagine if there were no…
Maestro
At long last, the empire is striking back. The tobacco companies, which for months had acted like docile children in hopes that Congress would play nice with them and approve their June 20 settlement with states and plaintiffs' lawyers, came to their senses last week.
America's most interesting cultural phenomenon at present is a 49-year-old family therapist with a black belt in hapkido karate and a Ph.D. in physiology from Columbia. Laura Schlessinger hosts a three-hour radio show, five days a week, that originates at KFI in Los Angeles and is heard by 10…
John Updike is an odd duck among novelists: a bourgeois golfer, a non- dove during Vietnam, a conservative who writes beautifully about sex, and, most of all, a believer. "I was, by upbringing, a Lutheran," he wrote in his 1989 memoir, Self-Consciousness. "Faith alone, faith without any false…