Media

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.

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.

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.

Proposals to raise the minimum wage are enormously popular with the American public, but there’s a reason they are successful only on occasion.

The powerful business lobby is quite effective at getting through to lawmakers with their message that higher wage requirements will lead to less employment. That’s a particularly potent argument in today’s environment, after four years of elevated unemployment levels.

In the latest anti-HFT salvo, a 12-year veteran of Goldman Sachs Monday applied a new definition to the essence of high frequency trading, seeing it as a purposeful distortion of the flow of market information rather than just a successful trading technique. With that he also prescribed a financial transaction tax as part of a cure.

“The very rich,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “are different from you and me.”

It turns out he was right. According to a new study by the think-tank Demos (PDF), the affluent tend to hold a different vision of a just society than the public at large, and it is that vision which tops the political agenda in Washington and in state houses across the country.

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.