No. 8: New Credit Card Laws
Credit card debt has become as American as apple pie and baseball — the big difference being that no one likes it. That hasn’t stopped us, as a nation, from piling up billions of dollars of debt. Once upon a time, the credit card was viewed almost exclusively as a…
No. 6: Tea Party Movement
It calls for smaller government. It wants to take America back. Its members oppose President Obama’s health care legislation. It fears fascists and socialists and sees opponents in the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and everywhere in between. It wants to end the Federal Reserve, to balance the budget, and…
No. 5: Health Care Bill
Before President Obama even took office, one of his main promises involved remaking health care in America, giving those without medical insurance the ability to get it at affordable rates, and creating a program that would ensure coverage across the nation. After a bruising and contentious fight that invigorated supporters…
No. 4: Foreclosures
Not that long ago, if you heard “California,” “Nevada,” “Florida,” or “Arizona,” you might think of fun in the sun. Now, you’d be just as likely to recognize them as the epicenters of the foreclosure crisis. Once retirement havens or places where people built a second or third home, the…
No. 3: Recalls
Product recalls are hardly new, but they’re on the rise — thanks to increased industry sensitivity and improved testing. The White House, as part of its 21st-century mission to unite bureaucracy and technology, consolidated recall news from several regulatory agencies in 2010 — and created an app devoted to product…
No. 1: Unemployment
Coming into the year, the unemployment level in the U.S. was one of the most worrisome topics from coast to coast. Now we’re leaving the year, and it still is. The official unemployment rate, as measured by the federal government’s Department of Labor, remains stubbornly stuck close to the double-digit…
Financial Uprisings
Reforming. Rebuilding. Reassessing. Restructuring. They’re all different ways of saying the same thing: revolution. Financial Uprisings Unemployment Wall Street Companies Recalls Foreclosures Health Care Bill Tea Party Movement Elizabeth Warren New Credit Card Laws Dow Jones Flash Crash Austerity Strikes If 2008 was the year our economic foundation nearly disintegrated,…
No. 2: Wall Street Companies
Wall Street: a location that conjures up images of wealth and imagination, along with notions of endless possibilities and the American dream. More recently, it has been seen as a pit of spite and greed overrun by win-at-all-costs robbers wearing $5,000 custom suits. The truth is probably somewhere in the…
No. 10: Russia Wildfires
Around the same time that one-fifth of Pakistan was drowning in flood waters, seven Russian regions were aflame, covering more than 300,000 acres. In July the hottest heat wave on record in Russia ignited widespread wildfires across the country’s peat marshes, filling the air with toxic fumes in a plume…
No. 9: East Coast Blizzard
On February 7, the day after the first major winter storm of the year dumped two feet of snow on Washington, D.C., President Obama met with the Democratic National Committee and vowed — with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek — to face the weather with a “flinty toughness.”…