Financial Times

There is widespread recognition that the financial crisis, which triggered the Great Recession, was significantly due to financial excess, particularly in real estate lending. Now, policymakers are looking to reform the financial system in hope of avoiding future crises. But like the drunk who looks for his lost keys under the lamppost because that is where the light is, policymakers remain fixated on capital standards because that is what is already in place.

“My guess is that he'll announce something north of 20000 troops and hope that is enough,” says Peter Bergen, an expert on al-Qaeda, who is urging a ...

Over the past year the global economy has experienced a massive contraction, the deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But this spring, economists started talking of "green shoots" of recovery and that optimistic assessment quickly spread to Wall Street. More recently, on the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers crash, Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman, officially blessed this consensus by declaring the recession is "very likely over".

The political half of America's strategy in Afghanistan is now in ruins. This is not just due to the debacle of the Afghan presidential elections. Eight years after US troops arrived in the country, as General Stanley McChrystal conceded in his report to President Barack Obama, there is a "crisis of confidence" among the Afghan people in their government.

With official unemployment in the US hovering around 10 per cent, and actual levels much higher when the underemployed and discouraged are counted, the most urgent priority is job creation. But efforts to get America working again must be informed by the striking fact that most employment growth in the past decade has been concentrated in three sectors: healthcare, education and government, mostly state and local public services.

Following President Barack Obama's speech on healthcare last week, several pundits said it was a performance worthy of Harry "Give 'em Hell" Truman. After his election, he was likened to Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But for the coming battle over healthcare reform, Mr Obama needs to step into the shoes of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Especially when it comes to lining up votes from recalcitrant members of his own party, LBJ's brawling, southern style of trench politics is… more

... president when he says we can have all these good things without paying for it," said Michael Lind, a political analyst at the New America Foundation. ...

“It [the Saudi comments] is drawing a very clear line in the sand which could embarrass other Arab states that have suggested a willingness to move forward with confidence-building measures,” said Daniel Levy at the New America Foundation in Washington, referring to countries such as Morocco and Bahrain, which the US believes may be more inclined to make concessions.

From Mr Samuel Sherraden: "Sir, Richard Bernstein (“America is for now still blowing bubbles”, July 21) is correct that the US economy looks like a California roll: fundamentally Japanese but with American characteristics. But the answer to this bubble dependency is not to choose austerity. A better policy response would make the transition away from the Japanese-American “California roll” economy to the old-fashioned, productive, investment-based US casserole economy...

And Mr Obama dropped a hint that he understood the Arab world's concerns at Israel's nuclear weapons status. “I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not,” Mr Obama said. Daniel Levy, a former Israeli government ...