Photograph by Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg
Union Square in New York on May 1, 2012, a last hurrah for Occupy Wall Street.
The rhetoric of anger at the one percent can be marshalled with equal fervor by both the right and the left. Being angry at the establishment isn't the same as agreeing on how to change things.
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Photograph by Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection
Is that Han Solo? Or Ben Bernanke at the controls sending the market into hyperdrive?
The S&P 500's gains in the last 50 months match those of the late 1990s. Does that mean a crash is coming? The answer is "it depends." The climb can slowly taper off as the Fed pulls back on...
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Photographer: Michael Goldman/Getty Images
Corporate love is more likely to come with an open palm.
When it comes to Kenneth Langone and the titans of finance, there is rarely a shortage of affection. Take Jamie Dimon. "I love Jamie, I know him well personally," Langone declared, "I love him."
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Photographer: Kostas Tsironis/Bloomberg
A closed store in Athens, Greece.
Greek retail sales have fallen 32 percent, almost double the drop in GDP. That would jibe with other evidence of the gravity of Greece's suffering, like the number of people going without food or fuel.
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Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
Gold bugs want protection from central bankers who'll debase their currencies. Ironic, isn't it, that nothing is easier for those wily bankers than obliterating the gold market?
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Photographer: ZenShui/Yves Regaldi/Getty Images
Need a reliable store of value in case of economic calamity? Look no further.
Investors in gold seem to fall into two categories: those who believe they're riding a gold bubble, and those who think it's a reliable store of value. The first have done well, the second are now getting killed in the...
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Photographer: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg
A community college, probably more typical view of the U.S. college experience than ivy-covered walls.
Much of the private loan meltdown we're seeing now is the overhang of loans coming due. And by far the worst crisis is not among those who graduated with ruinous debt, but those who didn't graduate.
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Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
The lights of Canary Wharf, kept on, perhaps, by bankers working late to justify their bonuses.
There's a compensation tool that accomplishes almost everything we want from incentives. It comes at the end of a year of good performance. It encourages employees to stay longer to realize its full benefit . It is the "raise."
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Photographer: Susana Gonzalez
The U.S. twenty-dollar bill: A widely accepted tool for everyday transactions.
Last month, I wrote a post titled “Sorry, Bitcoin Isn’t a ‘Currency’” pointing out that whatever the merits of Bitcoin as an investment, its use as an actual currency useful for buying and selling was minimal. I wrote it thinking...
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Photographer:Alex Cid-Fuentes/Bloomberg News
After all the criticism, Bank of America may have tamed the Merrill Lynch bull after all.
When Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch, investors sliced off $32 billion of the bank's market cap, and things got worse from there. Now that deal doesn't look so bad.
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Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
An anti-foreclosure demonstration outside Fannie Mae headquarters.
If there's such a thing as too big to fail, no one qualifies more clearly than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Unfortunately, splitting them up won't get government out of the loan guarantee business. Smaller companies in the subprime industry...
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