Media

The weather may be cooling, but the summer of money laundering is far from over. There hasn’t really been an uptick in banks looking the other way on dirty money (they have for years), it’s that regulators are finally stepping up. 

It might as well be Harry Potter’s invisible Knight Bus, because no one can prove it exists.

Sick of investment advice from hacks like Warren Buffet and Donald Trump? Ask a congress member. Roll Call published their latest list of the “50 Richest Members of the 112th Congress” last week. Texan House Representative Mike McCaul took first place, reporting a minimum net worth of $305.46 million for 2011.

Four years ago today, Lehman Brothers collapsed as Hank Paulson and his colleagues made the fateful decision that free market principles demanded that at least one bank crippled by the deteriorating financial system had to be sacrificed at the altar of moral hazard. These “deciders” had no idea of the firestorm they were igniting. They did not foresee that the financial system that had evolved during 30 years of deregulation (based on specious economic theory and ideology) was so interconnected that it would collapse like a house of cards. Within a few weeks, the U.S.

For the magazine’s 20th Anniversary, the September issue of SmartMoney has a long section recapping changes in American personal finance -- and on what they got right and wrong -- over the last two decades. 

Their historical review starts with the blunt question:

Who’s responsible for your retirement? You are.

It’s time we change how we think about poverty. The newly released Census report on poverty received a lot of attention from the chattering class. But was it really deserved? 

There are many ways in which the rate understates poverty. The poverty line, individuals making $11,484 a year, has been used since 1964. A CBS report explores its inadequacy: 

How a Facebook get-out-the-vote campaign can have a tangible impact on voter turnout—but only when there’s a certain sort of social component to it.

Iowa’s Democratic attorney general and Republican secretary of state made a show of solidarity last month in announcing they were fighting a lawsuit that challenges the emergency powers the secretary of state has given himself to purge registered voters he isn’t convinced are U.S. citizens.

“We’re working together here to make sure that people who are not eligible to vote don’t vote,” said Attorney General Tom Miller.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing yesterday called "The Citizens United Court and the Continuing Importance of the Voting Rights Act." At first glance, this may seem a strange title. Citizens United, after all, was a (flawed) decision about the role of money in politics.