Have you ever wondered just what caused the deep recession that the United States is in? Many people believe it was the meltdown of Wall Street and the financial industry. That was the trigger that began the recession, but was it the true cause of it? Robert Reich has a very good article in The Nation that the folks over at Alternet have reprinted. Reich agrees that the Wall Street meltdown was the trigger to the recession, just as the Wall Street disaster in 1929 triggered the Great Depression. But the real cause of both ...

Our economy can't thrive when the richest 1% get an ever larger share of the nation's income and wealth, and everyone else's share shrinks.

Last night on the Charlie Rose Show, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said something that doubtless sent a shiver through financial markets. He said, "Capitalism will be different." It is the most elegant way of putting it that we've heard so far.

n the current issue of Hamburg’s highly respected weekly Die Zeit, economics editor Fabian Lindner takes a look at an important study of the U.S. economic downturn done by Kenneth Rogoff, the International Monetary Fund’s former chief economist who now teaches at Harvard, and Carmen Reinhardt, a well known capital markets expert at the University of Maryland.