A few weeks back, at an event to celebrate the role of women in finance, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to get things started with a joke. He said he had recently come across a headline that asked, "What If Women Ran Wall Street?" "Now that's an excellent question, but it's kind of a low bar," Geithner continued, deadpan amid rising laughter. "How, you might ask, could women not have done better?" It is rarely noted that the financial ...

In January, The Bank of China quietly announced a startling new bank account available to U.S. citizens. At a Bank of China branch in New York City, an American can walk in, open an account and convert grubby dollars into renminbi , the currency of the hottest and perhaps most important economy in the world. To get a better sense of what this is all about, I went to the Bank of China's main branch in New York City at ...

When Iranian Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work as a lawyer and human-rights activist, the regime in Tehran faced a dilemma. The award infuriated the country's hard-liners, but the regime privately acknowledged that it had also earned Ebadi the admiration of most Iranians. Reluctant to arrest or openly target such a popular figure, the government tolerated Ebadi's activities and limited itself to low-level harassment of her legal office. That tacit policy has now ...