Despite decades of policies aimed at improving the economic position of African Americans in terms of relative income and earnings, they remain substantially behind whites. The research presented in this brief indicates that the wealth gap is even more staggering. Following families over time in...

Economic growth and a rising stock market in the 1990s gave the impression that everyone was accumulating wealth and asset poverty rates were declining. The impression was supported by the official, income-based poverty measure, which exhibited a sharp decline. According to Senior Scholar Edward...

The Federal Reserve's response to the current financial crisis has been praised because it introduced a zero interest rate policy more rapidly than the Bank of Japan (during the Japanese crisis of the 1990s) and embraced massive "quantitative easing". However, despite vast capital injections,...

In this brief, Senior Scholar Jan Kregel reviews Hyman P. Minsky's concept of financial fragility - in short, that the structure of a capitalist economy becomes more fragile over a period of prosperity - and concludes that the current crisis is in fact the result of insufficient margins of...