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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(Illustration by Edel Rodriguez for the Spectator) Around october 1, more than a quarter-million low-income Oregonians received a life-changing letter in the mail. The state’s Medicaid director wrote to tell them they were eligible for coverage, without having to apply. Through this “fast-track” letter, 56,000 people—one-tenth of the state’s uninsured population—were enrolled in the Oregon […]

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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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In 1990, Kevin Phillips, a former Nixon speechwriter, published The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath. His book was a prescient warning about accelerating income and wealth inequalities in the U.S. In the ensuing two decades, a genre of research has documented how extreme inequality is undermining […]

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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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