In the wake of the Great Recession and America's listless recovery from it, economists, policymakers, and media pundits have argued at length about what has gone wrong with the American capitalist system. Even so, few constructive remedies have emerged. This welcome book cuts through the chatter and offers a detailed, nonideological, and practical blueprint to restore the vigor of the American economy.Better Capitalism extends and significantly expands on the insights of the author...

Global Backlash is the first book to move beyond the monolithic portrayal of the globalization protests that have escalated since Seattle and are not likely to abate soon. With trenchant analysis and dozens of primary documents from a variety of popular and uncommon sources, Robin Broad explores proposals and initiatives coming from the backlash to answer the question, 'But what do they want?' A range of sophisticated propositions and a vibrant debate among segments of the backlash emerge....

International accounting standards tend to converge, as do auditing, enforcement and corporate governance, whereas trading of equity shares remains essentially national. The book provides a thorough analysis of what information investors really need, how financial accounting systems developed and their current requirements in major commercial countries, and examines current issues, particularly the benefits and costs a single or multiple accounting standards, the bases for accounting stand...

Once we paid for things with bills, coins, or checks. Today we pay with zeroes and ones-digital entries on credit and debit cards, or electronic messages sent over the Internet. In Moving Money, distinguished analysts explore this trend, its development and likely future, and the ramifications of this transformation.This is a book about money as a medium of exchange-in the past, in the present, but particularly in the future. What forms has money taken over the years? Moreo...

The information age technology revolution promises enormous benefits to the U.S. and global economies. Yet if those benefits are to be fully realized, policymakers in the U.S. and abroad must rethink some fundamental premises about how economic activity has traditionally been governed. Should we continue to regulate industries the way we have in the past? Does the digital age require a new approach to antitrust enforcement? To best facilitate global electronic commerce, what changes are ne...

For nearly two decades the U.S. economy has been plagued by two disturbing economic trends: the slowdown in the growth rates of productivity and average real wages and the increase in wage and income inequality. The federal budget is in chronic deficit. Imports have far exceeded exports for more than a decade. American competitiveness has been a source of concern for even longer. Many Americans worry that foreigners are buying up U.S. companies, that the economy is losing its manufacturing...

With the increasing integration of the major economies of the world, trade frictions have also increased. The Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, once scheduled for completion in December 1990, has been slowed over the issue of agricultural subsidies. The U.S.-Japanese trade relations have continued to be a source of friction between the two countries. At issue in all these disputes is whether the United States and other countries are playing ""fairly"" in the international t...

While the immediate dangers from the recent financial crisis have abated-much of the financial system has returned to profitability and the economy is growing, albeit slowly-the damage to the economy will linger for years. Among the many impacts is the problem that may be most acute in the United States: how state and local governments and private companies will honor their obligations under defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Institutional investors also confront new difficulties in the l...

The United States has recently witnessed an explosion of personal injury lawsuits involving medical malpractice, unsafe products, and widespread environmental hazards. Jury awards and out-of-court settlements have escalated in many cases to hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the same time, premiums for liability insurance have skyrocketed. As a result, physicians have cut back services and some municipalities and businesses have been denied liability coverage altogether.Some exper...

The right to a jury trial is a fundamental feature of the American justice system. In recent years, however, aspects of the civil jury system have increasingly come under attack. Many question the ability of lay jurors to decide complex scientific and technical questions that often arise in civil suits. Others debate the high and rising costs of litigation, the staggering delay in resolving disputes, and the quality of justice. Federal and state courts, crowded with growing numbers of crim...

The twenty-first-century telecommunications landscape is radically different from the one that prevailed as recently as the last decade of the twentieth century. Robert Litan and Hal Singer argue that given the speed of innovation in this sector, the Federal Communications Commission's outdated policies and rules are inhibiting investment in the telecom industry, specifically in fast broadband networks. This pithy handbook presents the kind of fundamental rethinking needed to bring communi...

The future of American banking is in doubt and the industry and the federal insurance fund that helps support it are in turmoil. The ingredients of the turmoil have been simmering in public view since at least the early 1980s when commercial bank loans to lesser developed countries (LDCs) began to default. The difficulties began to boil at the end of the decade when the prospect first arose that the banks' deposit insurer, the Bank Insurance Fund (BIF) that is administered by the Federal D...