“The industry is sort of having a culture moment,” said Susan Ochs, founder of the Better Banking Project at the nonpartisan think tank New America Foundation. Ms. Ochs said she is discussing with bankers, consultants and regulators assessment tools that could be used across the industry based on her research.

2015 has started off right where 2014 ended – with a tricky state of affairs for those in the investing business.

As 2015 dawns the prospect looms of another year of disappointing global growth. Broken growth models litter the economic landscape. Divergent central bank policies suggest it is every country for itself as competition for market share intensifies.

Where financial reward was once presumed to be the only motivator, we now see the striking roles played by several factors, such as complexity and the desire to be seen as intelligent.

To assess the future, it helps to understand the past. We have spent the past six years or so battling the fallout from the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). This fallout includes broken growth models around the globe, both developed and emerging, leaving the world to await the next great growth model.

​Writer Michael Lind believes that American billionaires are not as powerful as one might think.

In the latest statement from the Federal Open Market Committee, Fed Chair Janet Yellen seemed to set aside some of her earlier concern about slack in the labor market and sounded a note of optimism that lower unemployment signaled a stronger economy.

Tracing the lineage of liberalism, linking today’s populism to the ideas of sovereignty espoused by John Locke and the Founding Fathers.

The state of the global economy resembles nothing so much as a soufflé on the brink of implosion. While the production side of the US economy appears robust, the same cannot be said for the rest of the world.

In 2014 emerging markets have shown remarkable resiliency despite negative news and record foreign investor outflows. Jay Pelosky, founder of J2Z Advisory LLC, suggests the answer lies with financial asset expansion in the emerging economies themselves—or what Pelosky calls “a rising tide of middle-class wealth.”

At first glance, the U.S job picture continues to improve with the U.S. economy generating an average of 222,000 new private sector jobs a month in the first half of 2014. But as Daniel Alpert, a founding member of the World Economic Roundtable, explains in his latest review of America’s job market there is a more sobering reality behind these headline numbers.

Economist Hyman Minsky had the rare ability to stand back from conventional wisdom and see beyond the current market’s irrationality.

Over time, the US economy has become more dependent on debt to fuel economic growth. American households, in particular, have become dependent on debt to maintain their standard of living in the face of stagnant wages.

Staring headlong into a difficult – and changing – world economy that has yet to fully recover from the Great Recession, many middle class families are trapped between low, stagnant wages and an increasingly expensive set of social and economic supports.

Income inequality in California is already high, and it continues to increase. This income inequality is exacerbated by unequal access to jobs, credit, and efficient vehicles.

The bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 plunged the U.S. economy into a serious crisis, leaving American households with a huge debt overhang and the economy with a large gap in output and employment.