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When James Adams walked into Waffle House in 2009 and requested a job application, the manager asked if he'd been sacked because of the meltdown. "Yeah," Adams said. "Firms like mine caused it." The manager gave him a sympathetic look. She said he could start Monday as long as he had a pair of black pants and vowed not to steal anything. He took the job. Adams went from pulling in six figures a year as a hedge fund vice president to serving bacon and grits for $2.13 an hour (plus tips). The job came with a side of "humble...

They bounce back after terrorist attacks, pick themselves up after earthquakes and cope with pandemics such as Zika. They can even handle years of economic uncertainty, stagnant wages and sky-high unemployment. But no developed nation today could possibly tolerate another wholesale banking crisis and proper, blood and guts recession.

Here are a few that I believe all Americans want. Limit Congress from serving more than two terms. That is all that presidents are allowed. Stop Congress from voting for their own raises. How did that ever get started? Stop paying for lawmakers' high-priced insurance premiums. After all, they are only part-time employees. They might pass some law changes on the insurance companies, if they had to find one. Stop paying lawmakers their full salary after serving just one term, or at retirement. We need to get rid of that pension plan; they've let other companies get rid of theirs....

If The Big Short, Adam McKay’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book about the 2008 financial crisis and the subject of last month’s Vulture cover story, got you all worked up over the holidays, you’re probably wondering what Michael Burry, the economic soothsayer portrayed by Christian Bale who’s always just a few steps ahead of everyone else, is up to these days. In an email, which readers of the book will recognize as his preferred method of communication, the real-life head of Scion Asset Management answered some of our panicked questions about the state of the financial system, his ominous-sounding water...

Big banks better start looking under the couch cushions. They need to come up with $1.2 trillion to fortify themselves from the next financial meltdown. Global financial regulators Monday issued new rules that are designed to prevent a failing big bank from dragging down the entire financial system. That's what happened in 2008 when Lehman Brothers imploded, sparking the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. ... Wells Fargo (WFC) and JPMorgan are the U.S. banks most vulnerable to the new G20 rules, Morningstar's Baker said. He estimates Wells Fargo may need to raise up to $30 billion, while JPMorgan...

Two of the biggest global challenges of the past decade -- terrorism and the 2008 financial crisis -- have given rise to some well-intentioned legislation that has missed the mark. The U.S. Treasury Department is charged with maintaining the nation's financial health. Things like money laundering and terrorist financing jeopardize that health, but there's so much shady dealing that it's impossible for government bureaucrats to keep up. Nonetheless, rules are passed, and affected parties are expected to be able to show that they've paid some lip service to the new mandates. Compliance is accepted as a cheap substitute for due...

There has been so much attention on Greece in recent weeks, but the truth is that Greece represents only a very tiny fraction of an unprecedented global debt bomb which threatens to explode at any moment. As you are about to see, there are 24 nations that are currently facing a full-blown debt crisis, and there are 14 more that are rapidly heading toward one. Right now, the debt to GDP ratio for the entire planet is up to an all-time record high of 286 percent, and globally there is approximately 200 TRILLION dollars of debt on the books. That...

After years of warnings, financial reality is hitting home in Chicago, clouding Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s hope for a transformational legacy. In March, Moody’s downgraded the city’s credit rating to junk, but Chicago’s financial hole long predates its ratings slide. The trouble began emerging at least as far back as 2003, albeit under the radar. Then, as the Great Recession pummeled municipal budgets around the country, former Mayor Richard M. Daley engaged in dubious deals, such as the city’s parking-meter lease. In 2010, as Daley’s tenure neared its close, Crain’s Chicago Business published an exposé on the troubling levels of debt...

Barbarians at the gate usually don’t bring down once-successful civilizations. Nor does climate change. Even mass epidemics such as the plague that decimated sixth-century Byzantium do not necessarily destroy a culture. Far more dangerous are institutionalized corruption, a lack of transparency, and creeping neglect of existing laws. All the German euros in the world will not save Greece if Greeks continue to dodge taxes, featherbed government, and see corruption as a business model. Even obeying so-called minor laws counts. It is no coincidence that a country where drivers routinely flout traffic laws and throw trash out the window is also...

Greece may be dealing with a debt crisis, but the average U.S. household may have more to lose. The fate of debt-troubled Greece is now only days away from being decided. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras requested bailout funds on Wednesday, promising to submit reform proposals later this week. Either the country will agree to severe austerity measures in exchange for a reprieve from its lenders or will have to exit the eurozone and strike out on its own. Whatever happens, the average American may be worse off than Greece. Here are three ways to look at it: 1) Americans...

For almost six years Greece has been on the cusp of financial disaster. Its Northern European and international creditors have extended loans, suspended interest payments and forgiven some debt. But European lenders have also stubbornly kept to the old-fashioned principle that debtors freely borrowed their money from lenders, and therefore most borrowed money must be paid back, regardless of the current financial status of the debtors. Greece counters that after all sorts of austerity budgets, it simply can no longer inflict the necessary pain on its relatively tiny population to squeeze out enough cash to pay its well-off creditors. In...

One of every four retired workers from the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago and the Chicago Public Schools is getting a pension of more than $60,000 a year. That’s 80,365 people in all. For 13,240 of them, those checks provide a yearly income of $100,000 or more, a Chicago Sun-Times/Better Government Association analysis of pension records has found. An additional 20,004 have pension incomes totaling between $80,000 and $100,000 a year. ... the root of the problem is that government officials kept promising lifetime benefits to workers — and, in many cases, to their surviving spouses should they...

Ah: I see that there was a Twitter exchange among Brad DeLong, James Pethokoukis, and others over why Republicans don’t acknowledge that Ben Bernanke helped the economy, and claim credit. Pethokoukis — who presumably gets to talk to quite a few Republicans from his perch at AEI — offers a fairly amazing explanation: B/c many view BB as enabling Obama’s spending and artificially propping up debt-heavy economy in need of Mellon-esque liquidation Yep: that dastardly Bernanke was preventing us from having a financial crisis, curse him. Actually, there’s a lot of evidence that this was an important part of the...

Timeline proving that the mortgage industry crisis is the Democratic socialist experiment. Another socialist experiment failed, this time a massive federal effort, imperiling the whole US banking industry. Facing this economic disaster, can an informed American people put their trust Obama’s socialist ideology to bring remedy? Will they bring in an acetylene torch to put out the fire? http://eyesandearsweekly.blogspot.com/2008/10/narrative-for-change-proven-failure-of.html

Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004 1:09 p.m. EDT Billionaires Secretly Met in Aspen to Defeat Bush In the days following the Democratic National Convention in Boston this past August, several billionaire Democratic activists secretly met at the famed Aspen Institute in Colorado. The purpose of their clandestine meeting was "to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush," The New Yorker magazine reports in its most recent edition. Details of the meeting remain sketchy, but the magazine described the Aspen conference this way: "Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the...

Falling oil, rising dollar and fears over US rate increase present in 1997-98 Mark Twain reputedly stated that history does not repeat but it rhymed. In an eerie parallel to 1997-98, falling commodity — especially oil — prices, a rising US dollar and potential increases in US interest rates may presage a new financial crisis. Weak growth, high debt levels, disinflation or deflation, policy driven destructive competitive devaluations, inflated financial risk taking and mispricing compounds the problems. The impending crisis may develop as follows. First, US equity prices come under pressure from a stronger dollar. Given 40 per cent of...

A former member of a panel created to examine the causes of the financial crisis of 2007 says government policies that were really at the core of the crash are being quietly resurrected by the Obama administration, and that they are creating another housing bubble similar to the one that burst more than eight years ago. Appearing Friday on The Mark Levin Show, Peter Wallison, author of the new book “Hidden in Plain Sight,” and the Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said that the federal government “was the central player” in the...

If you do not believe that we are heading directly toward another major financial crisis, you need to read this article. So many of the exact same patterns that preceded the great financial collapse of 2008 are happening again right before our very eyes. History literally appears to be repeating, but most Americans seem absolutely oblivious to what is going on. The mainstream media and our politicians are promising them that everything is going to be okay somehow, and that seems to be good enough for most people. But the signs that another massive financial crisis is on the horizon...

Republicans are the adults in Congress while the Democrats, liberal to the core, will never admit we are being set up for another financial crisis It is a cliché, but true, that history repeats itself. This is largely due to the failure of each new generation to learn anything from the past as well as the human tendency toward the bad habits of greed and power-seeking. Only the names and faces change. That is why the next financial crisis is entirely predictable. On October 23, The Wall Street Journal had an article, “Relaxed Mortgage-Lending Rules Clear Final Hurdle.” The financial...

The Great Recession has lasted a lot longer for some than for others. A new survey from Rutgers University’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development found that “one in five workers - or nearly 30 million people - say they were laid off from a job in the past five years," dating back to the end of the recession in June 2009. "Nearly 4 in 10 of these laid-off workers say they searched for a job for more than seven months before finding another one; one in five workers laid off during the past five years never found another...