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Credit cards have to be among the most useless things in the world. Aside from their symbolic financial function – which, for most of us, is no longer valid – and the deceptive comfort factor of having a nicely padded wallet, they’re just cheaply made rectangles of embossed plastic with magnetic strips and computer chips [...]

If Detroit is ground zero of our current financial disaster, then Kevin Bauman is one of its most committed documentarians. Since the mid-90s he’s been taking photographs of abandoned houses in his hometown, while its population has fallen by over one million. His website 100 Abandoned Houses highlights the most beautiful (and depressing) results of [...]

Amid all the economic doom and gloom, maybe we should be looking to financial films for some advice on dealing with white-collar crime and unethical business practices. mental_floss does just that in their listicle of 5 Movies About Underhanded Financial Shenanigans. Our favorite is undoubtedly the Dan Akroyd-Eddie Murphy class reversal comedy Trading Places:

Something that hadn’t dawned on us until just now: with stable, wage-earning jobs becoming ever-more scarce, will we suddenly see a sharp increase in dubious and unfounded lawsuits? If so, you’d better get creative because there’s no telling who’ll take you to court over an issue so trifling you that didn’t even know it was [...]

About a week ago we pointed you towards a listicle of New Depression photography, and since then bad financial things have continued to happen. It seems that many people getting laid off – at least those not brawling on the street in the middle of the afternoon – have become photographers.
This is convenient, as there [...]

Admittedly, recession stories are one of the more tiresome news trends these days. Sadly, strangely, the current financial crisis and global tidal wave of foreclosures also makes for some hauntingly beautiful and eloquent photography opportunities. Boston.com rounded up a terrific collection of 35 Sad Photographs of the Recession, our favorite of which is David McNew’s [...]

24-hour news channels and countless Internet outlets allow every news topic its allotted 15 minutes of fame and then some. Certain subjects produce a bounty of newsworthy details, but in a world where blogs update us three times a day on already-exhausted subjects and readers have a fly’s attention span, overexposure and ubiquity are [...]

If the Obama administration is acting like a bit of a national therapist these days, then Business Week has the listicle of its most needy clients (we hear they charge on a sliding scale). Compiling a reverse-quality of living index, BW has ranked America’s 10 Unhappiest Cities based on suicide and depression statistics, crime and [...]

As we now know, our current economic depression is the result of some fancy financial footwork and dubious bets on rigged races. Of course, amidst all the bad wagers being made, a few folks either knowingly or accidentally predicted the final outcome, and now the mass failure of financial folks has produced a few success [...]

As you, web-savvy reader, likely already know (and are actively precipitating by getting your information from this blog), the nation’s major newspapers are dying. Several paper-owning conglomerates have filed for bankruptcy, many smaller companies are losing money every day, and The New York Times took out a loan on its own building.
In several cities near [...]