Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.

Besides great climates and lovely beaches, California and Greece share a fondness for dysfunctional politics and feckless budgeting.

If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less.

Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.

Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.

By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.

Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence.