How would Barack Obama pay for the $800 billion that John McCain claimed in the first presidential debate Sept. 26 in Oxford, Miss., that his Democratic opponent would spend if he were elected president? Obama replied, by "closing tax loopholes."

As I perused Sunday's New York Times best-seller list, I wondered whether it might be topped by the newly published The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy -- The Mortgage Crisis Was Only the Beginning by David M. Smick, an international financial consultant who also is editor and publisher of the International Economy, a quarterly.