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.

Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert Shiller won the Nobel Prize for Economics on Monday morning. The three American professors – Fama and Hansen from the University of Chicago, and Shiller from Yale — developed new methods to study long-term trends in the stock market.

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?

Thanks to the Internet, no one will pay for porn anymore unless it’s a celebrity sex tape. According to insiders, it’s sex tapes from the likes of Farrah Abraham and Sydney Leathers that are currently keeping the porn industry financially “afloat.”

Here is a fact: paying people money to give you investment advice is a waste of your money. It will not make you money. DO NOT HIRE INVESTMENT ADVISORS, STOP NOW.

Which famous economist are you most similar to?

Up until the Reagan years, workers in the finance sector of the economy were paid, on average, pretty close to what workers in most other industries were paid. That's all changed over the past 30 years. Do employees of the financial sector deserve to be paid so much more than most other workers? No.

The highly paid money managers of Wall Street often point out that they're not just making money for themselves; they're helping to enrich the retirement funds of millions of state workers, just like you. False! A new study points out that the more Wall Street makes, the less your pension fund makes.

Almost five years after the near-total collapse of the global economy, the stock market has once again reached new highs. The rich are, without a doubt, getting richer. So have we actually recovered from the Great Recession? No, not at all.

Michael Froman is President Obama's nominee to be the new U.S. Trade Representative, the government's top international trade agreement negotiator. Also, Michael Froman has cash stashed in the Cayman Islands and takes advantage of tax loopholes Obama has publicly railed against. Hmm.

"The typical household has regained less than half [the wealth lost in the recession]," according to a new analysis by the St. Louis Fed. "That's far below the estimate in a Federal Reserve report in March that calculated that Americans as a whole had regained 91 percent of their losses." Uhhh... yeah.

I despise when people say "Shocker" in front of a statement of fact, as a snide reminder of their own urbane ennui. If something is that unsurprising, why bother saying it all, you know? With that in mind, SHOCKER: the U.S. tax code is designed to help the wealthy.

Fewer people die during economic recessions. So that's something.

The deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh has sparked calls for better worker treatment. The revelation that Apple manages to avoid almost all taxes has drawn vague calls for tax reform. A more direct path to fairness: let's just have a reasonable international minimum wage.

For years now, affluent (mostly white) Americans have been moving back into our nation's "inner cities," those once-scary locations populated only by forgotten minorities and a distinct lack of quality condo development. And poor people, in turn, have been decamping for the suburbs, those once-deluxe bastions of white flight. Slumburbia is no longer our future. It is our present.

A small handful of huge Wall Street banks are quite literally Too Big to Fail: the failure of any one of these institutions would rip such a large hole in the global economy that we'd all fall in and break our necks. In times of trouble, therefore, these banks will always, always, always be bailed out by the public— by you, and me, and your poor little grandma. We learned this the hard way during the last financial crisis. So what has changed since then? Nothing.

Harvard professor and prominent Obama-critic Niall Ferguson told more than 500 financial advisers at a conference on Thursday that Keynesian economics, an economic philosophy that advocates stimulus spending and is not kind to the idea of empire (which Ferguson loves), is flawed because Keynes was gay and uninterested in future generations.

Remember the mid-nineties, when Americans thought that the dollar was on a dangerous free fall and the only secure investment was Beanie Babies? That was crazy, but we all learned a lot. We learned that the only secure investment is nickels.

In March of this year, about 7.6 Million Americans were working involuntarily part-time, in that they would rather be working a full-time job instead of the part-time job they have either taken out of desperation or been forced into by their employer. These part-time jobs have fueled the 30-month economic recovery, leading to an unstable economy built on an increasingly uneven labor force.

A new study reveals that one of the most cited economic principles regarding GDP and debt is most likely based on a "sloppy Excel coding error." According to a 2009 book by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time It's Different, countries with a high debt to GDP ratio have slow economic growth. But three economists at the University of Massachusetts have published a critique of Reinhart and Rogoff entitled: "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth?" They found a major and embarrassing error in the original calculations.