Evidence and expertise have a well-known liberal bias.

Wealthy individuals bought themselves a radical right party, believing - correctly - that it would cut their taxes and remove regulations, but failed to realize that eventually the craziness would take on a life of its own, and that the monster they created would turn on its creators as well as the little people.

If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.

When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly.

There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama’s mistakes but the scorched-earth opposition of Republicans, who have done everything they can to get in his way - and who now, having blocked the president’s policies, hope to win the White House by claiming that his policies have failed.

America's political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas - beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity.

But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.