I'm a plain soap kind of guy.

I love to play tennis and golf, listen to music, watch baseball and root for the Redskins.

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

Developing protectionism regarding trade and our reluctance to place fiscal policy on a more sustainable path are threatening what may well be our most valued policy asset: the increased flexibility of our economy, which has fostered our extraordinary resilience to shocks.

The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.

It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.

Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.