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If you keep putting pressure on the middle class it will break, that would be disasters for this country, as its success or failure is directly mapped to that of the middle class.

$25M-plus insider trading case
“One of America’s wealthiest men was among six hedge fund managers and corporate executives arrested Friday in a hedge fund insider trading case that prosecutors say generated more than $25 million in illegal profits and should be a wake-up call for Wall Street.”
Breakdown: Raj Rajaratnam

Partner in Galleon Management
Portfolio manager for Galleon Group,
Hedge [...]

A letter was posted on NYTimes.com (contents are included below).  Please read it.  It is a letter from an AIG employee (now former) Jake DeSantis to Edward Liddy.
I know I have had the opinion that bonuses to the employees at AIG are absurd, especially in the amount specified.  I hadn’t thought the whole thing out [...]

by Laurence Greenberg, CEO, Jefferson National
In today’s environment, “fee transparency” is the mantra for all kinds of financial products. Unfortunately, it’s been slow in coming to variable annuities.�
Some real progress has been made with simple, transparent, low-cost products. But until greater consumer value is widespread, here’s a primer on how to peel away the layers [...]

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Part 2:

We think this speaks for itself.  Everyone knows the government, corporations, everyone manipulates numbers to make them seem better.  It’s scary when you look at the truth behind some of these numbers.  A very interesting image by mint, originally seen on Unemployment Rate: A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis.

Over the past few weeks, we all have been realizing that the major national pasttime nowadays is “find a way to screw the rich guy”. �
Whether it’s trying to figure out how he didn’t report a personal driver on his taxes, or which drug he had to take to keep his performance up to his [...]

At some point all of us have to ask, what the point of it all is. The scary part is that for a better part of a decade the answer has exclusively been, to make as much money as possible.
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As it turns out, when one part of our economy manages to grab the lion’s share [...]

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Deals on Flat Screen TV’s, New Cars, Furniture and other big ticket items have not brought the average US consumers back to the shopping mails. Consumer credit remaining blocked, together with job losses have started to have a real physiological effect on the average Joe. Seems companies can not continue to see exponential growth when [...]

The economy is not only about the facts and figures, most of the time it’s about the feeling that people have about the future that matters more. While we know that the 74,000 who got the pink-slip yesterday are not so happy today, the vast majority of Americans still have their jobs. But how do [...]

We’ve been following job cuts here quite a bit, here’s an amazing number:
693,000 jobs cut in December 2008
According to an article on Reuters, Private job losses mount in December — the job cuts in December were up sharply from November.  Added to the fact that most employers would want to avoid cuts during the holiday [...]

For those who don’t, below is a video of the type of credit card you may find yourself with after bankruptcy — the world’s worst credit card.

Another continued sign of weakness, housing numbers are in for November, and it does not look good.  In an article on ft.com, we look at the breakdown of what’s going on with housing.
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It seems that American are just not ready to jump back into housing, and as long as they worry about paychecks and [...]