This Friday (May 29), ABC will air a special called “Un-broke: What You Need to Know About Money”, which will attempt to explain this current recession to a distinct audience that pretty much needs it –the same young people who get roped into credit card debt, live well beyond their means because they have to have the 22” rims, and who may well find themselves, like so many people across America, broke. Knowing that our attention-addled youth won’t listen to some hand-wringing let’s-get-in-a-circle like Linda Ellerbee used to do on Nickelodeon, or a Nightline-type discussion by Robert Krulwich, ABC decided to bring out some big guns. Enter Will Smith, the Jonas Brothers, Samuel L. Jackson, Cedric the Entertainer and others, along with “Good Morning America” contributor Mellody Hobson, who try to talk to young people without talking down to young people. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s face it: the economy is in the toilet, we’re one paycheck away from living in the streets, and we’ve been shocked into suddenly having very little —losing a job, a house, a car, a livelihood, a thinner 401K and portfolio. What portfolio, you say? You don’t invest in stocks? What 401K? You don’t have enough to invest either, huh? You’re just struggling, like many millions of families around the country, to just keep your head above water.

We’ve rapidly had to become a country that is taking a shockingly cold look at itself –a nation of people living beyond their means, a nation of debtors who have lived off plastic and put off responsibility until later, and now dealing not just with the devastating dislocations like, you know, not having a home all of a sudden. Read the rest of this entry »

In this lazy summer of crushing gas prices, home foreclosures and general misery all around, the President the other day gave a news conference in which he pronounced himself an “optimist”. Things are really not as bad as they seem. Before taking the usual tough questions by the White House press corps, he tried to deflect any criticism that he, the lamest of lame duck Presidents with a lower-than-low—28%, according to the latest Gallup poll– approval rating, is really not out of touch with the state of the American economy:

The bottom line is this: We’re going through a tough time, but our economy has continued Read the rest of this entry »