Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is on the way out the door, but the consequences of the bond bubble that he has helped to create will stay with us for a very, very long time.  During Bernanke's tenure, interest rates on U.S. Treasuries have fallen to record lows.  This has enabled the U.S. government to [...]

How would you feel if you donated money to help disaster victims or cancer patients and you later found out that more than 97 percent of the money that you gave never got into the hands of the people that needed it?  Sadly, that is happening all over America today.  In fact, in some [...]

Every night Americans prove that they are willing to do absolutely horrible things to their fellow human beings.  Most of the time, we never even hear about the sick and twisted things that happen on the side streets and dark alleys of America.  Once in a while a particularly twisted story will get picked up [...]

Bank of America is coming under scrutiny for allegedly shady mortgage practices yet again.

Employees of the mega-bank were rewarded for putting homes in foreclosure, and were encouraged to deny loan modifications under false pretenses, according to six former employees cited in a lawsuit filed last week in Massachusetts.

The purpose of the alleged practice was to string homeowners along with a promise of a loan modification that they were never actually going to receive — which eventually saved the bank a pile of money.

"We were told to lie to customers," declared former employee Simone...

The processes that create fossil fuels are complex, and take place over extremely long periods of time.

The oil and gas we use today began as plants and animals living millions of years ago. When the living things died, layers of sediment buried their bodies over millions of years, pushing large quantities of the organic material deeper into the Earth. At deeper depths, over thousands and thousands more years, greater levels of heat and pressure transformed the organic materials into fossil fuels.

That's how fossil fuels— which account for 85 percent of the world's energy use — were...

1. OBAMA HINTS BERNANKE MIGHT NOT SERVE A THIRD TERM
In a 45 minute interview that aired Monday night, Charlie Rose asked Obama if he would reappoint Ben Bernanke if the Fed chairman asked for a third term. Obama hesitated: "He has been an outstanding partner along with the White House in helping us recover much stronger than, for example, our European partners from what could have been an economic crisis of epic proportions," Obama said, adding, "He's already stayed a lot longer than he wanted, or he was supposed to." [CNN]
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What do 1929, 2000 and 2007 all have in common?  Those were all years in which we saw a dramatic spike in margin debt.  In all three instances, investors became highly leveraged in order to "take advantage" of a soaring stock market.  But of course we all know what happened each time.  The spike in [...]

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what the NSA is actually doing.  Are they reading our emails?  Are they listening to our telephone calls?  Do they target American citizens or is it only foreigners that they are targeting?  Unfortunately, the truth is that we aren’t going to get straight answers from our [...]

Associated Wholesale Grocers, a co-op that supplies more than 2,000 American grocers, is suing United Potato Growers of America, along with two dozen other defendants, for allegedly banding together to illegally manipulate potato prices.

The collusion by the so-called "Potato Cartel," which produces 75 percent of the nation's spuds, has supposedly driven up the prices of potatoes in the grocery section of the supermarket, as well as Tater Tots, curly fries, and other delicious snacks from the frozen food aisle.

AWG is claiming that for more than a decade, potato farmers have been using tactics...

All over the United States, frustrated homeowners are banding together, arming themselves and patrolling their own streets.  One of the primary reasons this is happening is because police budgets all over the nation are being slashed at a time when violent crime rates in the United States are increasing and many our our largest cities [...]

1. UNITED CONTINENTAL CEO SAYS THE AIRLINE IS FINALLY SHAPING UP
Last year was "awful" for United Continental, CEO Jeff Smisek told the Wall Street Journal, as the company struggled to work out kinks that followed the high-profile merger between United and Continental in 2010. Smisek cited lost profits, delayed flights, reservations snafus, and angry customers. However, Smisek claimed that the company's fortunes are turning around: Complaints are down, on-time performance is up, and the company is cutting costs on everything from luggage-handling to complimentary nuts. [The Wall Street Journal]...

Just two weeks after Chinese meat giant Shuanghui International agreed to buy American pork king Smithfield Foods for $4.7 billion ($34 a share), activist hedge fund Starboard Value has posed a different idea: Break the company into three pieces — U.S. pork production, hog farming, and international sales — and lift its value to a whopping $7.1 billion ($44 to $55 a share).

Starboard's suggestion (a pretty strong suggestion, since it owns 5.7 percent of Smithfield's shares) follows a growing trend in activist investing, where activists are targeting larger and larger companies. In...

In high school, I bought my own M&M's for marching band fundraisers rather than sell them to my neighbors. Not because I'm a huge fan of M&M's, but because I hated to sell anything.

I've never really negotiated for a raise... I've either waited until my boss gave me one or left for a better job.

I have generated countless ideas that I thought were brilliant at the time I came up with them, only to toss them out a short while later as rubbish.

I can be a world-class procrastinator.

According to Underearners Anonymous, these are all classic symptoms of being an underearner, and the...

Life insurance for students
It may make sense to take out a life-insurance policy for your child in college, says Stephanie AuWerter at CNN. The key question to ask yourself is whether the student's death "would create financial woes — say, if you had to pay debts incurred for her schooling." On the "sort-of" bright side, government-backed loans are forgiven when a student dies. But only one in six private lenders automatically forgives a student loan upon death, so read the fine print. If your loan contract doesn't have such a provision, or if you borrowed against your home to pay for school...

Eventually the money runs out.  Much of America was shocked when the city of Detroit defaulted on a $39.7 million debt payment and announced that it was suspending payments on $2.5 billion of unsecured debt, but those who visit my site on a regular basis were probably not too surprised.  Anyone with half a brain [...]

Optimism surrounding a solar energy boom seems to be hitting new highs: Game-changing technologies seem to hit the market nearly every week, and new government policies, like a series of solar mandates in Japan, has people and businesses all over the world installing solar panels at record rates.

Nonetheless, several challenges stand between us and a true solar revolution. Here are three:

Cost

The cost of solar is down to just 10 percent of what it was five years ago. But for solar to be viable without government subsidies (like the ones driving Japan's solar boom), the price per megawatt-hour...

It isn't just Internet and phone companies that are giving your personal information to the U.S. government.  According to an astounding report by Bloomberg, "four people familiar with the process" say that "makers of hardware and software, banks, Internet security providers, satellite telecommunications companies" and a whole host of other sources are handing over your [...]

1. NEW AIRBUS A350 MAKES ITS MAIDEN VOYAGE
The new Airbus A350, designed to be a more fuel-efficient competitor to Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, took off from a runway in Toulouse, France, on Friday, and landed safely back in Toulouse four hours later. The A350, powered by a Rolls-Royce Trent XWB engine, will use about 25 percent less fuel than similar aircrafts — a huge plus as the industry struggles with high fuel costs. Airbus has already gathered 600 orders for the A350. [BBC]

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Argentina, land of tender sirloin and cheating in soccer and then bragging about it, has recently given up its title of Biggest Beef Eater in the World.

In 2012, each person in the country consumed 129 pounds of beef, a far cry from Argentina's 1956 peak of 222 pounds per person, but way above the 57.5 pounds of beef eaten per capita in the U.S. Yet, over the past decade, Argentina has fallen from its perch, says The New York Times. Now its No. 2 in beef consumption, behind neighboring Uruguay. To make matters worse for proud beef-loving Argentines, the country has also fallen to 11th place in...

When your firm hosts personal data for millions of people, "privacy is a big selling point," said Hayley Tsukayama at The Washington Post. That's why AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have been so assiduous in denying that they have granted the government access to their servers as part of the National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program. Google this week asked the government to allow it to release information it believes would show that the scope and volume of surveillance orders are smaller than people have been led to believe. "There's no backdoor, there's no lockbox...