The Federal Reserve is scaling back its "signature" bond-buying program, signaling confidence that the economy no longer needs total life support. Markets are pooping themselves with joy, and the 2014 Hunger Games are apparently being canceled.

America now has 6,891 federally insured banking institutions. That's the fewest we've had since 1934. Though it may cause reflexive distaste, it is a fact: we could use more banks.

Hedge funds are privately controlled and notoriously secretive investment firms with billions of dollars in assets. Here's a document listing all of the income, salaries, and spending for one hedge fund over several years.

A spinoff group from the Occupy movement is seeking to launch its own prepaid debit card, as a prelude to offering a more complete set of financial services. Ridiculous? Not at all. In fact, taking over some of Wall Street's business could be the most useful thing Occupy Wall Street could do.

College endowments are much flashier than they used to be. They frequently reach into the billions of dollars; they attract top investing talent; and, most notably, the majority of their money is in "alternative" investments like private equity and hedge funds. Is this hurting students' ability to be proper idealists?

The farther we get from the last economic collapse, the closer we get to the next economic collapse. But which bubble is next to pop? Student loans? Desert real estate? Today, we turn our untrained eye to the backbone of the U.S. stock market.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, the whiz kid-ish New York Times Dealbook reporter, sometimes gets unfairly characterized as a bootlicking Wall Street suckup who wants only to ingratiate himself with the powerful. Other times—like today—that characterization is completely fair.

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.

Here is what a private equity firm does: it borrows money to buy a company; then it has the company borrow money to pay rich fees to the private equity firm, for providing the service of... sucking the company coffers dry like a voracious leech. This practice is currently bigger than ever.

Here's a good explanation of how high frequency trading screws everyone except for high frequency traders.

After the Great Recession struck, many "Main Street" types of Americans were mad that the entire global economy managed to melt down without resulting in any "Wall Street" types of Americans being thrown in jail. Finally, the law on this point is changing.

Even the lucky people who have cash to invest are often cynical about the stock market. "The game is rigged. Smart money vs. dumb money. Insiders win. Efficient markets. You can't beat the pros. Why try?" Etc. Wrong! To be a successful investor, you only need to know one thing.

There is currently a minor uproar over the revelation that various non-governmental groups sell early access— two seconds early—to their market-moving news releases to paying customers, who can then trade on that information before everyone else. This points to a larger problem: the entire institution of "high frequency trading" has no public benefit, and tons of risk.

When the whole global economy teetered on the edge of failure a few years ago— remember that?— one of the reasons was that insurers had insured lots of things that they could not, in fact, afford to pay for, when the bill came due. Now, they're marching down that path once again.

Financial stocks are booming, and more Ivy League grads are heading for jobs on Wall Street. Just your daily reminder that it is 2006.

Wow, the city of Detroit is so fucked.

Former Enron CEO and current jailbird Jeffrey Skilling should be out of jail in just four years, skipping nearly a decade of his prison sentence for corporate fraud and graft.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is currently at its highest point in history. Never before has the stock market been this valuable, uh, not taking inflation into account. As the media piles in and investors celebrate, the question of the day is: Is it now "time" to buy stocks?

Everybody talks about the "Too Big to Fail" problem: financial institutions that are so huge and interconnected that, when they run into a crisis, the public will always bail them out, because the consequences of not doing so would be catastrophic for everyone. Nobody does anything about it. Maybe that's because banks have powerful lobbyists; maybe it's a human psychological flaw that causes us to stop worrying about inevitable future crises as soon as the last crisis seems to have passed.

One thing you can do on Friday, at the end of the day, when you have a couple free minutes, is to pick up the phone fire all of your "financial adviser" and "investment consultants" and anyone else who takes money from you in exchange for recommending investments to you. Then just buy some low-cost index funds in a mix of stock and bonds, and then go to bed, because that is what smart people who don't like getting hustled do.