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As long as there have been markets, people have been driven by greed to make irrational investment decisions. When enough people get in on the action, valuations -- the prices of securities -- go haywire, soaring to obscene heights and then crashing in a shower of crushed dreams.

Chasing performance, taking on excessive risk and selling at inopportune times are all as old as capital markets themselves. What is new is the modern regulatory environment and financial innovations such as high-frequency trading. Is today's stock market the same beast it was 20 or 30 years ago? [...]

(NEW YORK, NY) – This morning, the White House announced that President Obama will sign a “Good Jobs” Executive Order requiring government contractors to raise the minimum wage for their lowest-paid workers to $10.10 for all new and renegotiated contracts. The president will include this announcement in his State of the Union Address tonight.

President Barack Obama will announce during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address that he's raising the minimum wage for workers under federal contracts to $10.10 per hour, an administration official told The Huffington Post.

If Congress won’t act on jobs and the economy, President Obama promises that he will—a message he’s expected to push in Tuesday’s State of the Union. The problem is, there’s not much the president can do his own. 

Imagine that it is late July 1966, and President Johnson's signature domestic initiative, Medicare, has been fully up and running for just a few weeks. But a think tank is so sure that it's a failure that it publishes a study saying that by "imposing a bureaucratic, centralized, top-down approach to health care reform, Medicare has created far more problems than it solved." 

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama will announce his intention to issue an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10.

Sometimes in America, when low-paid workers stand up and speak out, even the President of the United States takes notice. This is one of those moments.

President Obama plans to sign an executive order requiring that janitors, construction workers and others working for federal contractors be paid at least $10.10 an hour, using his own power to enact a more limited version of a policy that he has yet to push through Congress.

A spectre haunts us, the spectre of robots. The Economist writes, “it seems likely that this wave of technological disruption to the job market has only just started. From driverless cars to clever household gadgets, innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched.”