You can hardly turn on the television or open a newspaper without hearing about the nation’s impressive, much celebrated housing recovery. Home prices are rising! New construction has started! The crisis is over! Yet beneath the fanfare, a whole new get-rich-quick scheme is brewing. Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds […]

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(Source: Getty via NPR) Three years ago I set out traveling around America to chronicle the country’s modern-day poverty epidemic. Mostly, the people I met as I reported The American Way of Poverty didn’t fit the stereotypes, nor did they necessarily live in places historically associated with concentrated poverty. Some lived in large suburban houses, […]

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(Gary Gensler | Source: Getty via CNN) Remember credit-default swaps? Naked credit-default swaps? A $45 trillion credit-default swap market? The market collapse of 2007? The $45 trillion swaps market in 2007 was twice the size of the U.S. stock market ($22 trillion and plummeting at the time) and bigger than the U.S. mortgage market (then […]

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Budget cuts have lowered the nation’s average food stamp benefit to less than $1.40 per person per meal. Seventy percent of local agencies that service seniors have had to cut back on Meals on Wheels deliveries. “Sequestration” has also shut out 57,000 preschoolers from Head Start. Next in the cross-hairs? Maybe the biggest of them […]

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  (David Cote, right | Source: Bloomberg/Getty via CNN) David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell, has more than $134 million in his personal retirement fund. If I were sitting on a nest egg that big, I might feel a bit sheepish about telling ordinary grandmas and grandpas to take a cut in their Social Security […]

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