The Great Recession of five years ago scared many Americans. Now that the Wall Street economy is booming again, many have rushed to warn against irrational exuberance. The common media practice of always staying one step ahead of conventional wisdom is now producing an Anti-Bubble Bubble.

The 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" has prompted a bout of national soul-searching about how much progress we've really made. If we're actually interested in helping the poor, we should look even farther back in history, and resurrect the WPA.

A new study that traces the effect of government programs on poverty all the way back to 1967 finds unequivocally that the money the government spends to help the poor does, in fact, reduce poverty. Suck it, Republicans.

The very rich have their politicians, and the very poor have their advocates. Will someone speak for the lower middle class? How retro!

America now has 6,891 federally insured banking institutions. That's the fewest we've had since 1934. Though it may cause reflexive distaste, it is a fact: we could use more banks.

Last week, voters in SeaTac, Washington voted to raise the minimum wage for airport workers to $15 an hour. California recently approved a statewide minimum wage of $10. As low wage workers increasingly voice their frustration with their shitty lot in life, it's time to raise the minimum wage— everywhere.

In America, the average CEO is paid more than 230 times an average worker's salary. In Switzerland, CEOs are paid 43 times more than the average worker. That figure is so shocking to the Swiss that they want to radically rein it in.

In 2009, just after the Great Recession struck, Andrew Huszar got a job at the Fed managing its "Quantitative easing" program— a huge purchase of bonds designed to stabilize the economy and get credit flowing. Now, Huszar says the program is a failure.

In Slate today, Matt Yglesias argues that anti-Wall Street populism is counterproductive, because it will cut Wall Street's profits, leaving less tax revenue for the populist government, thereby hurting the populist cause. It's worth pointing out briefly that this is incorrect.

In 2009, the US government passed bipartisan legislation designed to make the credit card industry fairer, and hold down credit card fees. Economists are flabbergasted to find that it did those things.

The global economy is like a boiling pot of water— full of bubbles. Or you might say it's like a glass of soda—full of bubbles. Starting small, inflating, and finally bursting—bubbles. Where will he next economic bubble"pop up," ha? Perhaps in a land far, far away.

The gross economic inequality in America gets quite a bit of attention, at least from the non-rich. But when you look at the distribution of wealth in the entire world, the picture gets even more shocking.

The ongoing movement to raise the wages of fast food workers got a boost today from two new reports that attempt to quantify just how much those low wages cost society as a whole. It's a lot.

As predictably as the sun rises and sets, so too do economic bubbles inflate and then pop, bringing euphoria followed by suicidal gloom. Where will the next bubble in our economy be? Today, we turn our keen eye to the source of all troubles: tech companies.

If you'd bought a flimsy McMansion in one of America's sweltering boom zones just after the recession struck, you could have had it for a nickel. Now, prices are soaring once again. The boomiest boom areas of the boom time are booming!

Janet Yellen, President Obama's nominee to lead the Federal Reserve, is a vastly wealthy multimillionaire—which is standard, because only those fully insulated from the effects of economic policies are allowed to make economic policies. Let's look at Janet Yellen's personal accounts, shall we?