Taiwan has an “urgent” need for a new fleet of F-16s, at least according to Senator Richard Lugar. On April 1, he wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton warning that “Taiwan has legitimate defense needs and its existing capabilities are decaying.

Richard Koo, Chief Economist at the Nomura Research Institute, was one of the headliners at a significant conference organized this past weekend by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

After the horrific shooting tragedy in Tucson in January of this year, many folks across the political spectrum began asking whether the ease of access that people have to assault weapons capacity — or the ease of circumventing background checks by buying weapons at gun shows — was where it should be.

This is a guest note by Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine. Kuttner is also a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the think tank Demos. This piece originally appeared at “Tapped,” the blog of The American Prospect.

UK Financial Services Authority Chief Lord Adair Turner gave a thoughtful, long, but probing and reflective talk about what economic and financial regulation should be trying to achieve.

(Lord Adair Turner, Chief, UK Financial Services Authority; photo credit: Institute for New Economics) I’ve been spending a lot of time with a variety of economists — mainstream and dissident — at the Bretton Woods forum organized this week by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

This speech delivered at the 2011 Institute for New Economic Thinking Conference in Bretton Woods, NH by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was stunningly excellent. Both the substance of Brown’s comments and his delivery of them electrified the room.

I assure folks that the last thing I have a desire to do is to censor or monitor comments, but despite receiving a heartfelt plea from several commenters that their behavior would get an upgrade and that they would work to contribute to a more constructive atmosphere here, some have slipped into old habits —…

The Institute for New Economic Thinking conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire this weekend is a star-studded affair if you follow economic wonkery.