More than three years after Dodd-Frank financial reform was signed into law by President Barack Obama and five years since Lehman Brothers failed, touching off a global financial crisis, U.S. financial markets remain vulnerable to the kind of meltdown that brought the economy to its knees in 2008. Dodd-Frank –which is supposed to prevent large financial institutions from taking excess risk of the kind that caused JP Morgan to lose more than $6 billion on a series of failed derivatives trades in London—is slowly but surely being watered down. 

Will the U.S. economy go over the “fiscal cliff” after New Years Day? If so, what will that mean to the country’s most financially vulnerable people? Former White House economic advisor Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) told reporters on a national telephone briefing Thursday, organized by New America Media and CBPP, that he believes Democrats and Republicans will take the budget negotiations to and possibly over the cliff’s edge. 

While it’s difficult to calculate the overall impact of the Bush tax cuts, the Great Recession might actually have made them less detrimental to America’s finances. Because the economic slowdown drastically reduced government revenues, gross domestic product was well below projections, and the loss of revenue was actually somewhat lower than the Congressional Budget Office initially projected. Nevertheless, the Bush tax cuts left America in a much weaker position to cope with the 2008 crash.

From New America Media and the Investigative Reporting Workshop: Some call this moment the Great Recession. As the hardship has lingered, others have begun calling it the Little Depression. But equating the hard times of the 1930s with the hard times of today is mostly overblown rhetoric. Or is it?