This paper surveys the economic wreckage created by Wall Street's decision to manufacture and sell trillions of dollars of financial securities, which we now call toxic. And we call them toxic, not because they were risky, but because they were fraudulent. Rather than address the fundamental...

Notwithstanding its widespread use as a measure of fiscal policy, the government deficit is not a well-defined concept from the perspective of neoclassical macro economics. From the neoclassical perspective the deficit is an arbitrary accounting construct whose value depends on how the...