By Doug Miller
Maybe, just maybe, America’s retail bankers really don’t get it. Despite being hauled before Congress, derided by the president and sinking like a bar of gold bullion in an increasingly choppy sea of public opinion, maybe they’re just incapable at this point of seeing the balance sheet for what it really is.

By Khalil Gibran Muhammad
“Education is the key to success. Knowledge is power.” Wise words repeated countless times to young people at home and in school every single day. But what should we say to them if one day their hard work meets empty promises, if their dreams are deferred, or their first paycheck of material reward is marked insufficient funds.

By Lee A. Daniels
Now that millions of white Americans are out of work, enduring the sense of desperation that poverty and joblessness bring, I can’t believe I’m not hearing the faux-moralists lecture them about taking “personal responsibility” for their own circumstances.

By Joseph Robinson
A decent job is a critical building block for a successful life. If it cannot be attained, how can there be hope of attaining others, like adequate housing and financial stability? At the time of their incarceration, many people with prison in their past were the family breadwinners. Their return home usually spikes expectations that the family’s financial struggles will be over. Instead, the struggles often worsen.

By C. Nicole Mason
The Administration is mulling over the possibility of another stimulus bill that would focus on job creation. The likely companion to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 comes at time when the national unemployment rate has hit a record high of 10.2 percent.

By Jackie Jones
“The question is whether or not you get your return on that investment in actual financial capital or some sort of human capital or emotional capital or social capital,” Boyce Watkins, a professor of finance at Syracuse University, told National Public Radio (NPR) in a recent interview. “The truth of the matter is that this blanket notion that going to college will guarantee you a better economic future is not always true.”

By The Editors
On Friday, President Obama  signed a measure once again extending benefits to the long-term unemployed—even as it became likely that  still another extension may be necessary next spring.

By Lee A. Daniels
Last month, according to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), an advocacy group, 400,000 of the long-term unemployed stopped receiving federal benefits. This month another 200,000 are due to be cut off. Unless Congress acts to again extend benefits for the long-term unemployed as it did earlier in the recession, by the end of December a total of 1.3 million of the long-term jobless across the country will be in the same predicament.

By Jackie Jones
We’ve been told that it’s a scary world out there. Labor Department figures show that unemployment, overall, stood at 9.7 percent in August and was 15.1 percent for black people. Black families began losing ground about three years before the recession began.

But one financial expert is opting out of recession-related woes.

By Andrew M. Sum
The summer 2009 employment rate for the nation’s Black teens was the lowest ever recorded in the 38 year period for which such employment data are available.