Chairman Ben Bernanke addressed critics today before the Senate Banking Committee, as he delivered the Federal Reserve’s Semiannual Monetary Policy Report.  Bernanke’s testimony comes on the heels of a prominent monetary policy conference last week, in which participants speculated about the political fallout that could ensue once the Federal Reserve begins to unwind the unconventional policies it put in place during and after the Great Recession. Because the Fed could incur losses when it eventually raises interest rates and sells off assets from its ballooned balance sheet, many expect that by the end of the decade the Fed might no longer generate sufficient earnings to return profits to the Treasury.  After a decade of rising profits remitted to Treasury (topping out at nearly $89 billion last year), many wonder whether Fed losses could trigger aggressive push back from Congress.

President Obama has recently announced his principal foreign policy nominees: for the State Department, Senator John Kerry; for the Defense Department, former Senator Chuck Hagel; and for the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, Obama's current counterterrorism adviser in the White House.

Map of major natural gas and oil pipelines in the United States. Hazardous liquid lines in red, gas transmission lines in blue. Source: Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

Movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg made what Obama campaign officials saw as an audacious request this spring, and they weren't happy about it.

Military budgets are only one gauge of military power. A given financial commitment may be adequate or inadequate depending on the number and capability of a nation's adversaries, how well it spends its investment, and what it seeks to accomplish, among other factors. Nevertheless, trends in military spending do reveal something about a country's capacity for coercion. The following charts present historical trends in U.S. military spending and analyze the forces that may drive it lower.

NEWPORT BEACH – The conventional wisdom about the November presidential election in the United States is only partly correct. Yes, economic issues will play a large role in determining the outcome. But the next step in the argument – that the winner of an increasingly ugly contest will have the luxury of pursuing significantly different policies from his opponent – is much more uncertain.

Millions of lives are prolonged or saved throughout the world, thanks to United States-supported health programs. But Americans aren't so lucky. For many, the best way to get affordable treatment at U.S. taxpayers' expense might be to move to a poor country that is committed to building universal coverage, backed by U.S. development aid.

The swelling middle class in emerging economies is transforming the economic balance of power across the globe. Measuring it, however, is no easy task. There is no widely accepted definition of what constitutes the middle class, and the most common ways of measuring its growth -- through looking at rises in income -- suffer from a number of flaws.

Political arithmetic is always suspect, and one should always examine carefully the claims of those seeking votes. Smart observers have learned to distinguish between the claims of political candidates and their advisers and proposals that have been evaluated by independent scorekeepers such as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Bibi was coming again, and the White House was determined: this visit would not play out like the last one. On Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's previous trip to Washington, Obama had proposed that Israel and the Palestinians negotiate a peace deal based on the armistice lines drawn after Israel’s birth. Netanyahu reacted badly, lecturing the president publicly that “we can’t go back to those indefensible lines.”