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New evidence from the New York Fed suggests that New York’s middle class has continued its slow and seemingly inexorable decline. Coauthors Jason Bram and the James Orr unwittingly reach this conclusion in their exploration of the tension between New York’s record number of jobs and its record unemployment rate. In their exploration, they reveal the inadequacy of our economic measures of well-being and expose the problem beneath the surface.

Investors who were paying attention got a cold slap of reality this spring when the progressive think tank Demos released a study showing that the median household could expect to pay more than $150,000 in 401(k) fees over the course of a working lifetime, or about a third of potential investment returns. What's more, about two-thirds of 401(k) investors had no idea that they were paying such fees.

Summertime in an election year in Colorado always has a certain excitement. Candidates marching in parades, petitioners gathering signatures at festivals ... some years we even get regular visits from the presidential candidates. Coloradans experience democracy in action well before Election Day.

Sixteen years ago, when Bill Clinton signed a harsh welfare reform law, one upside seemed to be that U.S. society could move past the endless, polarizing debate about welfare dependency.

Ben Protess made an interesting comparison today in a DealBook article on the rise of CFTC Chief Gary Gensler and the agency's successful work on the LIBOR rate fixing scandal: 

Things that you can blame President Obama and his administration for: not implementing stronger ozone rules, an overall attack on regulations, and promoting natural gas development while ignoring the extreme economic and environmental damage caused by fracking.

Here's one explanation for a yo-yoing stock market that leaves millions of 401(k) holders biting their nails on a regular basis: The cost for an investor to buy and then sell a stock has fallen by half in the past decade, to 3.5 cents, as the New York Times notes today. 

With costs this low, old fashioned speculation makes more sense than ever -- and so does new fangled high-frequency trading by powerful computers.

When I was a student, my English-major friends warned me that economists were people who didn’t have enough personality to become accountants. It seemed like a terrible accusation at the time. Today, I worry less about the personality than the efficacy of both professions.

It seems there is little real relief on the horizon.

“If you’re coming out of college with an average number of $20,000 to $25,000 in debt and there’s no job out there, you’ve got a real problem,” said John Quinterno, a researcher who has studied the consequences of student debt.