Media

For fans of conservatives’ favorite teller of “hard truths,” the Path to Prosperity budget proposal released by Rep. Paul Ryan this week must have been a disappointment.

Middle-income Americans age 50 and older are now carrying more credit card debt on average than younger people, according to a 2012 study released by Demos. This is a reversal of the findings from the Demos survey which took place in 2008.

Increasingly, states and municipalities are stepping in to fill the federal void on regulating and banning fracking. California has at least eight bills looking to regulate and/or tax fracking operations. Vermont became the first state to ban the practice.

The economy plummets. You lose your job. Soon, you start to find it hard to make ends meet. You start putting things on your credit card. Then you fall behind in your card payments. All the while you’ve been desperately looking for a new job. Little do you know that being behind on credit card payments may stand between you and a job – the very thing that could get you back on the road to financial health.

This morning the Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing on the nomination of Richard Corday  to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. On the merits, Cordray should breeze through.  The politics, however, are destined to be thornier.

When a crew that calls themselves the "Systemic Risk Council" speaks, it's a good idea to pay attention. After all, the last time people pooh-poohed deep seated problems within the financial system, trillions of dollars vanished into thin air and millions of people were thrown out of work. 

High Frequency Trading (HFT) is a method used by financial institutions wherebystocks are traded in fractions of a second. The traditional means of buying and selling required bankers to manually decide whether or not something was a good investment in the (semi) long run.

David Callahan's points about the inequality-widening effects of technological change add up to a strong argument that wealth taxes should play a bigger role in the progressive project of reducing inequality.