Hedge funds are investments that are expensive, but also guaranteed to make you rich, if you are a hedge fund manager. Why do people continue pouring money into hedge funds?

A new report (funded by the petroleum industry) says that universities that divest themselves of fossil fuel companies will end up losing money—0.7% a year lower returns, according to the report. Huh. No shit! If divestment gained you money, everyone would do it, and it would have no god damn point.

"Since the start of the global financial crisis at the end of 2007, the total debt worldwide has risen by $57 trillion, rising to 286 percent of global economic output from 269 percent." That's an extra $19,000 in debt for every person one earth (which means nothing)!

"In the late 1960s, more than half [53%] of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today's dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year... But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow [to 43%], the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom."

Not long ago, "microlending" was the world's hottest poverty-fighting tactic—the UN even declared 2005 to be the "International Year of Microcredit." Now, a barrage of new studies say that microcredit isn't as great as everyone thought it was.

The entire financial world is freaking out and jabbering in existential panic over the fact that Switzerland uncoupled the franc from the Euro this week, yet you and I don't even know what the fuck this sentence means. It really makes you think.

For a while, it was very en vogue for American retailers and corporations to tout that their products (or some of them) were Made in America. That trend is reportedly coming back into fashion. But "buying American" is not the best way to be a good global citizen.

Oil prices have been plummeting for months now, and guess what—they keep on plummeting! It's time to ask: how low can they go?

Speaking of Congress's inability to pass a law that would actually decrease economic inequality: just how rich are members of Congress, who formulate the laws in America's oligarchy? We're glad you asked.

Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic Congressman from Maryland, has proposed a bill that is exactly the sort of socialism that America needs in our current age of inequality. It has already been declared doomed!