America's Most Overrated Product?  The B.A. Of the high-school students from the bottom 40 percent of their classes whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. Four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year. Most leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. see  , see 

Credit Card Meltdown: Up next for financial firms might be the $950 billion in outstanding credit-card debt—much of it toxic. Bad news for players like J.P. Morgan Chase and B of A who have largely sidestepped the mortgage mess but have major credit-card operations. "The next meltdown will be in credit cards," says analyst Gregory Larkin. U.S. Treasury Dept.'s $700 billion bailout won't help credit-card issuers.  see , see

Alt A Mortgages — Next up: More toxic mortgages are set to reset in 2009 and 2010. The graph is worth studying. The next big problem is not “Sub-prime” but rather “Alt-A,” one step above subprime. Alt-A exploded to become 20% of the market in 2006.  see , see 

U.S. May Be Bankrupt: The United States is bankrupt, in the sense that it’s assets (housing stock, corporations and cash flow, plant and machinery) are now worth much less than its liabilities (in the form of mortgage-backed securities, other debt and loan instruments). In particular, large parts of the housing stock are now worth much less than the owners paid for them, and less than the outstanding value of the mortgages, or the collateralized bonds that have been issued against them. see

Canada Banks — The Best: The World Economic Forum named Canada as having the world's soundest banking system.  Placing next were Sweden, Luxembourg, Australia and Denmark in the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report, released in 2008 in Switzerland. Canada's banking industry, led by Royal Bank, CIBC, Scotiabank, TD Bank, Bank of Montreal and National Bank, was given a rating of 6.8, the top ranking. see  

Peter Schiff’s Book, Crash Proof, not only predicted that our consumer/mortgage credit-based economy would fall apart, but that the government would ineptly try to repair it. He says, “The magnitude of those potential policies formed the basis of my worst case scenario. My fears have now been confirmed, and the U.S. Government is now set to destroy all hope of economic recovery.” see

The Sugar Economy: The intersection of energy, environment, and the economy is also called "sugar economy," or the "carbohydrate economy." The trend involves industrial production based on biological feedstocks (agricultural crops, grasses, forest residues, plant oils, algae, etc.) whose sugars are extracted, fermented, and converted into high-value chemicals.  see

History — Learn It or Repeat It: You can’t understand the economy until you understand recent world history. The collapse of the USSR in 1990 helped pour money into the US, provided for a strong dollar, and made much US industry unprofitable. Exports began to drop and imports rose.  And the U.S. dollars eventually became a lead weight pulling the economies of the world down. see

Commercial Real Estate: The next real estate crisis could turn out the lights on malls, hotels and storefronts nationwide. Hotels in Tucson, Ariz., and Hilton Head, S.C., also are about to default on their mortgages. That pace is expected to quicken. The number of late payments and defaults will double, if not triple, by the end of next year, according to analysts from Fitch Ratings Ltd., which evaluates companies' credit. see

Paul Krugman’s Famous Baby Sitting Economics column for Slate. Perspectives on the U.S. economy, 1920 –2010. A column about what a failed baby-sitting cooperative in Washington, D.C. can teach  about a global economic crisis. see

Where Have All the Dollars Gone? Yale economist Robert Shiller says money lost when stock markets tank is imaginary.  The price of stock is not the same thing as money. The price of stock is only a “best guess” of what the stock is worth.  see

The Empire Has Run Out of Resources: Debt has outstripped the income so much that increasing consumer credit and bank lending is not possible. Consumers are overburdened with debt. Americans can no longer afford to borrow more. Cutting the budget deficit by halting pointless wars and unnecessary military spending and reducing the trade deficit by bringing jobs back to America are the answer.  see

Wal-Mart not All Bad says blogger who worked there to examine whether preconceived agendas might have biased reporting about employment at the retailer. “I was stunned to discover how benign the workplace turned out to be. My supervisor was friendly, decent, and treated me as an equal.”   see   

Sweat Shops Can Be Better than the alternative. Often, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough. For the world’s poorest, a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children. see

Iceland: Ground Zero – a penetrating look at the Icelandic economy and what lead to its collapse. Michael Lewis’ long Vanity Fair essay reveals as much about the modern financial mind as it does about Iceland. Thorough analysis of some of the assumptions, both national and global, that lead up to the economic crisis. The country is in bankruptcy—its currency is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., and its people are hoarding food and cash. see

Mandelbrot and Credit Default Swaps: A very good history of the Credit Default Swap market, 1998 to 2008 by CBS’s 60 Minutes. Twelve minutes summary of how Credit Default Swap legislation permitted the financial industry to grow beyond its means to repay. see

Taleb and Mandelbrot on the Economy:  “A PBS New Hour interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, economist famous for his analysis of "The Black Swan" and his teacher Benoît Mandelbrot, professor of Mathematics. They claim the economic downturn may worse than the Great Depression. Worse than any crisis since the American Revolution. see

19 Million U.S. Homes Vacant:  Properties for sale and for rent stood empty at the end of 2008. Banks were seizing homes faster than they could sell them and prices continued to fall. The share of empty homes that are for sale, the so-called vacancy rate, rose to 2.9 percent in the quarter, the most in data that goes back to 1956. see

It’s the Boomers’ Fault: The Baby Boom Generation’s claim to fame is living beyond its means for the last three decades: they’ve virtually bankrupted our capitalist system. The Boomer generation has freely made choices over the last quarter century that has brought us to the brink of a second Great Depression. Beginning in 1982, Baby Boomers chose to take the easy road. Saving, investing and living within your means were cast aside as “Old School”. Boomers were handed a better future through the blood, sweat and tears of the “Greatest Generation”. Through their hubris, they’ve squandered that better future, the future of their children and imperiled our entire capitalist system. see

East West Divide: Workers in the West face the bleak prospect of losing their jobs as a global recession starts to bite. For colleagues in the East, the pain is more likely to come through a pay cut. Cultural differences explain why Asian firms try harder to preserve jobs in difficult times. And that may stem unemployment and keep Asian economies afloat at a time of slowing exports. This more paternalistic East Asian attitude may also make it easier for firms to recover quickly from the economic downturn since they will not need to rehire or train new staff. see

Sobering Assessment of the Economy: Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Steigliz looks at the economic data for 2009 and 2010. Video of the MSNBC interview. Steigliz concludes the underlying problems are more difficult than the problems that faced the country during the Great Depression. see

Subprime Mortgages and Credit Default Swaps: An insiders guide to the history of the Wall Streets bad decisions over the past two decades. Highlights the career of Steve Eisman. An analyst and fund manager for FrontPoint Partners, a hedge fund, who evaluated Wall Street banks, homebuilders, mortgage originators, and any company (General Electric or General Motors, for instance) with a big financial-services division—anyone who touched American finance. see

Bitter Medicine Only Remedy for U.S. Economy: Application of the ideas of Nobel prize winning economist, Frederick Soddy, to current economic crisis.  Advocates gradually increasing reserve requirements for banks. Commercial banks should act as financial intermediaries that lend other peoples’ money, not as engines for creating money out of nothing and lending it at interest. If every dollar invested represented a dollar previously saved. see

China Factory Closings Rise: Economic upheaval in the U.S. is already changing and shrinking China's vast manufacturing hub in the southern province of Guangdong, long regarded as the world's factory floor. However, factory closures won't just be a China problem — shoppers will feel the effect in malls and stores in the U.S. and Europe. see , see , see