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The Great Recession has officially been over for a decade. For many Americans, there’s little reason to celebrate. Many people’s finances haven’t recovered from the recession’s blows, according to a new survey by personal finance website Bankrate.com. “There are still tens of millions who are struggling to even get back to where they were before the economy took a turn for the worse,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate.com. More than half of Americans who were adults amid the Great Recession said they endured some type of negative financial impact, Bankrate found. And half of those people say...

Western governments have compounded the economic crisis by rejecting the one force that can end it.In the years leading up to 2007, the rules necessary to govern a flourishing market economy broke down, producing a financial and economic crisis. Rather than responding to the crisis by fixing those rules, the West aggressively repudiated market economics, and the repudiation continues to this day. Through their actions, which have lately involved everything from European debt to the American financial system to house prices in Britain, government officials around the world have revealed a disturbing assumption: that they can decide how to allocate...

The New York Times op-ed page and the left-wing echo chamber. When Joe Nocera was given a regular op-ed column in the New York Times, there was kind of a collective “uh-oh” among people who have watched the gradual slide of that page into Krugmanism and ideological irrelevance. I was one of them, but thought there might be some hope. Some of his columns in the Times business section had suggested a glimmering of a willingness to consider other points of view and even facts.At first, I was disappointed. As he said in today’s column, he called my dissent from...

Many Greeks are draining their savings accounts because they are out of work, face rising taxes or are afraid the country will be forced to leave the euro zone. By withdrawing money, they are forcing banks to scale back their lending -- and are inadvertently making the recession even worse. Georgios Provopoulos, the governor of the central bank of Greece, is a man of statistics, and they speak a clear language. "In September and October, savings and time deposits fell by a further 13 to 14 billion euros. In the first 10 days of November the decline continued on a...

In today’s Wall Street Journal: Asked who was to blame for the 2008 financial crisis and whether any bankers should have been prosecuted, Mrs. Bachmann and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich put the onus on the federal government, with Mr. Gingrich suggesting that former Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, should both be jailed.“It was the federal government that pushed the subprime loans . . . that pushed the community reinvestment act,” said Mrs. Bachmann, citing what she considered the causes of the housing meltdown.Mr. Frank released an emailed...

Will high unemployment remain a constant feature of the new economy? So far the pace of recovery from the 2008-2009 recession, the deepest since the Great Depression, has been agonizingly slow, barely enough to absorb the monthly growth in the labor force and not nearly enough of offset the job losses that have occurred. Weak demand rather than structural changes in the composition of output or a mismatch between worker skills and jobs is the primary cause of continued high unemployment. Even if demand strengthens enough to create 300,000 jobs per month, three times the average monthly rate in 2010,...

(snip) Schonberger: Sans fiscal stimulus and the Feds' intervention -- quantitative easing -- do you think we would even have GDP [gross domestic product] growth? Schiff: We don't have economic growth. GDP is going up, but that's not a sign of any economic growth. All we're measuring is what we're consuming. But we are paying for it by going into debt. As a nation, we're in worse shape because of the GDP growth. The real economy is shrinking. All we're doing is borrowing money from economies that are growing, like China, and we're spending their money. But that's going to...

In the Galleon Group insider trading case, the focus has now turned to Warren Buffett’s Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) deal, which came during the peak of the financial crisis. The Wall Street Journal, citing a person close to the situation, has reported that before the public announcement of the deal where Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK.A) invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs Group, a director at the bank tipped off Galleon Group’s Raj Rajaratnam about the deal.

Two in California, one in Georgia and one in South Dakota - these FDIC closures bring the total number of failed banks in 2009 to 57. BY CATHERINE CLIFFORD NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- State regulators shut down four banks Friday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said. The bank were: First Piedmont Bank, based in Winder, Ga.; BankFirst, based in Sioux Falls, S.D.; Temecula Valley Bank of Temecula, Calif.; and Vineyard Bank of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. Friday's actions bring the total number of closings for 2009 to 57. . . . . . Friday's failures will cost the FDIC fund nearly...