By Perry Mehrling

Look around and you’ll see that the economic problems facing us today are many. Even worse, the most pressing of these problems pose a daunting challenge even to analyze in their full complexity, let alone solve.

It may seem that implementing any credible solution within current political and economic institutions is at least implausible, if not impossible. So why am I hopeful about the future?

Because I’ve seen that the new economic thinking we so sorely need is being pursued with great enthusiasm by young people around the globe. These are the people who best understand the failures of the current system and possess the creativity to change it.

The good thing about youth is that it does not shy away from a challenge, but rather instinctively embraces it. Climb that peak or ski that backwoods slope, but also throw your mind into exploration of a new approach to unsolved intellectual problems and your energies into overcoming obstacles that have defeated all previous

For Coach (COH), big moves after earnings reports are becoming a habit. That trend was intact Tuesday when the high-end handbag seller topped analysts' earnings estimates and posted surprisingly bright North American numbers, lifting the shares 11%.

New York-based Coach was expected to earn 80 cents a share on sales of $1.18 billion in the fiscal third quarter, according to FactSet, but it exceeded both, turning a profit of 84 cents a share with revenue of $1.19 billion. However, it was the North American segment, its largest, that was the real standout.

While the China component of Coach's business remained strong, with sales rising around 40% year over year for the third consecutive quarter, domestic sales totaled $792 million, up 7% from the prior year. More impressively, same-store sales were much better than predicted, climbing 1%, compared with a decline of 1.4% that had been foreseen by Wall Street analysts.

Coming into the quarter, it would have been easy to imagine a drab