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A former crack addict sues a Florida farm, accusing the owners of modern-day slavery—set up to live in an environment that preyed on his addiction and left him without a paycheck: “There’s something going on in this small town and it might be hard to care because the victims are often homeless black men who […]

A blow-by-blow account of a political negotiation gone wrong. President Obama and Republican House speaker John Boehner came close to a deal last July that would cut federal spending and bring in billions in new revenue. But a series of missteps led to its demise: “From Boehner’s perspective, it’s not hard to see why he […]

The Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane on banking, risk and how to bring social and financial equity back into the system: “Consider the effects of the too-big-to-fail problem on risk-taking incentives. If banks know they will be bailed out, those holding their debt will be less likely to price the risk of failure for themselves. […]

More people now recognized the Winklevosses as either themselves or a recently cloned Armie Hammer, and Felipe assumed the proprietary grandeur of a Victorian circus impresario before some engagingly deformed beast. “These are the ones who came up with the idea for the Facebook, but had it stolen from them,” he explained to one and […]

Graeber’s arguments place him squarely at odds with mainstream economic thought, and the discipline has, for the most part, ignored him. But his timing couldn’t be better to reach a popular audience. His writing provides an intellectual frame and a sort of genealogy for the movement he helped start. The inchoate anger of the Occupy […]

On the day his country exploded, Santiago Bilinkis stayed at home and watched the riots on television with his wife and infant son. It was painful. In Buenos Aires, one of the world’s great cities, looters were attacking grocery stores. Bilinkis’s bank account—along with every other account in the country—had been frozen by executive decree […]

On April 20, 2005, George W. Bush signed into law a bankruptcy bill that had been pending in Congress for eight years. The bill was written by credit-industry lobbyists, shopped to their friends in Congress, and supported by tens of millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions. It might be dismissed as just one […]

When luxury-loving Dr. Mark Weinberger vanished, in 2004, he left in his wake a wife saddled with more than $6 million in debts, a father headed for bankruptcy, and hundreds of patients who say he misdiagnosed them and performed completely unnecessary sinus surgeries. Now “TheNoseDoctor” of Merrillville, Indiana, is facing prison, along with more than […]

Never has the governing class allowed anyone to question the sacred principle that we all must pay our debts. That principle has recently been exposed to be a flagrant lie. As it turns out, we all don’t have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.

For the rest of the world, the Chinese consumer is one of the best hopes for future economic growth. In the years ahead, when the United States, Europe and Japan will have no choice but to slow their spending and pay off their debts, China could pick up the slack. Millions of Americans — yes, […]