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Why does Google even need a chief economist? The simplest reason is that the company is an economy unto itself. The ad auction, marinated in that special sauce, is a seething laboratory of fiduciary forensics, with customers ranging from giant multinationals to dorm-room entrepreneurs, all billed by the world’s largest micropayment system.

It was so frustrating. It was early May, 1989 and I was in Tokyo reporting the financial markets for Reuters, fiddling around journalistically with the peak of the Japanese bubble economy. Meanwhile in China, cataclysmic events were unfolding and I wasn’t there. I really wanted to get back to see it and live it.

We are sympathetic to the extraordinary challenge President Obama faces, but if we’ve learned anything at all two years into the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes, it is that a capital-markets system this dependent on public confidence is a shockingly inadequate foundation upon which to rest our economy.

Why fixing the banks will not revive the economy

Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy.

Busted budgets, failing schools, overcrowded prisons, gridlocked government—California no longer beckons as America’s promised land. Except, that is, in one area: creating a new energy economy. But is its path one the rest of the nation can follow?

The continuing job crisis is hitting young people especially hard—damaging both their future and the economy

Beyond the goofy games is a world of useful programs that’s making fortunes and changing the rules of business

So, can you make a living in the App Store? That’s what everyone really wants to know, right? Can a small indie team make some cool iPhone games and still pay their rent? The short answer is yes. The longer answer is, for two people, in western economies, with no kids or major health problems, […]

Bernanke is the 56-year-old chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the U.S., the most important and least understood force shaping the American — and global — economy. Those green bills featuring dead Presidents are labeled “Federal Reserve Note” for a reason: the Fed controls the money supply. It is an independent government […]