the recession diaries

MSN’s Money reports that although Americans spend a whopping $2.5 trillion on health care and related expenses each year, employers cover in excess of 70% of the total cost of health insurance premiums. As the health care reform wages on employers are bypassing politicians and insurance companies and are actively searching for their own ways…

Though it doesn’t seem like it, there are some American cities still thriving in the recession. And when I say thriving, I mean by the standard of, “well, they’re not floundering as bad as the rest of the country.” BusinessWeek.com used data and analysis from the Brookings Institution’s new MetroMonitor to come up with the…

Michael Arceneaux hails from Houston, lives in Harlem and praises Beyoncé’s name wherever he goes. Follow him on Twitter.

Forgive me for not being caught up in the spirit of the boo, but I haven’t dressed up for Halloween since I was six-years-old. I dressed up as Buster Bunny from Tiny Toon Adventures. At the time (and probably still now) my teeth went perfectly with Buster’s aesthetic. However, since then I haven’t paid any…

Do you know of any trifling people who unapologetically take two decades to pay off two shirts they charged on their credit card? Congratulations, the fees banks used to slap on them to boost income have now been transferred to you. At a time when the credit crunch shows no signs of improving anytime soon,…

When you go $95,000 into debt for a graduate degree, chances are you’re not expecting to find yourself standing in line with people who might not have even earned their high school diploma. But that’s exactly where NYU Journalism grad student Ryan McLendon found himself just a short time ago. The New York Times’ City…

The cowardice act of domestic violence has seen a surge in lieu of stressful economic times. And while governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger have made it increasingly difficult for women to get assistance after cutting funding for agencies that provide domestic violence services, it’s becoming particularly hard for immigrant women to get help. Isa Woldeguiorguis, policy…

Although countless media outlets have reported on the “mancession” – a phrase coined after evidence suggested that the recession has disproportionately hurt men – women aren’t exactly soaring either. A new study from Citi has shed light on what effects the recession has had on working women – namely mothers. Via U.S. News and World…

Though it sure seems like it, those seedy financial fissures are the not the only people smiling this week. Reuters reports that the abysmal job market has helped the U.S. military meet all of its recruitment goals in the past year for the first time since it became an all-volunteer force in 1973. Given that…

For the first time in over a year, the Dow Jones Industrial Index briefly hit 10,000. While Wall Street celebrated, chances are the nearly 1 in 10 Americans unemployed are staring at their computer screens befuddled as the financial industry’s fortune has yet to yield new job opportunities. But, for those unemployed at Goldman Sachs…