(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 […]

Read more

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 […]

Read more

  (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 […]

Read more

(Source: Getty) I was asked during a recent interview what happens to the tips we leave in restaurants. Do they actually go to the workers? I said they’re supposed to. Often they don’t. First, tips don’t only go to servers. They are typically shared—with bussers, runners, bartenders, floor captains, and more. These workers receive varying […]

Read more

Jack Metzgar argued recently that working-class grit has value for all of us. Perhaps the most talked about notion of grit is Angela Lee Duckworth’s. She defines grit as maintaining “effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.” Duckworth created a “grit scale” focusing on the individual’s ability to commit to […]

Read more