In Warren Buffett's annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, he made a pointed comment about the way business journalists tend to operate: They use sound bites to grab attention, even when that distorts the point of the full quote.

Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz says the U.S. government needs to borrow even more money for additional stimulus, and it needs to do so now. Stiglitz argues that additional spending would pay for itself over time if done prudently.

Bet you thought the financial world had learned a bit of prudence from the recent meltdown. But no. Citigroup has a clever new derivative for the markets, and this latest attempt at selling "end-of-the-world insurance" could be just as dangerous to the system as credit default swaps were.

International banking giants Banco Santander and Banco Bilbao, have gone on buying sprees abroad even as conditions at home declined sharply. But as their loan losses mount, the markets are finally looking past the banks' blithe optimism, seeing red -- and selling off.

Banks are not the enemy. Although many imperfections exist in our financial system, turning banks into a target or a tool for recovery will end poorly. Over time, things will work out in the absence of counterproductive, even if well-intentioned, meddling.

The viability of President Obama's proposals on bank reform remains to be seen as they pass through Congress, but they send an undoubtedly sharp signal about what the next battle after health care will be. The principles are difficult to argue against, since the financial system has become...

The opening last week in Dubai of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building at 2,717 feet, is a physical reminder of an underappreciated risk for 2010: the possibility that countries that rode the debt issuance boom of the mid-2000s will have trouble paying their creditors.

The growth stories in the BRIC countries appear in sharp contrast to the view in developed markets, which are struggling to stabilize and reignite wide swaths of their economies; leading indices in Brazil, Russia, India, and China have all handily outperformed the S&P 500 ($SPX) in 2009. But...

The financial crisis crystallized the realities of systemic risk -- the idea that in certain panic-stricken environments, no company reliant on functioning credit markets is safe, even if it is fundamentally sound on its own merits. No company may have been hurt more by guilt-by-association during...

Some critics of recently reappointed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke argue that he was too slow to realize that the financial system was teetering on the brink of collapse during 2008. But Bernanke might have had another, more personal banking issue on his mind at the time, Newsweek reports:...