Jane White

The good news is that JP Morgan Chase is about to eat some humble pie. The $2 billion trading loss announced May 11 as a result of a bad bet on derivatives should encourage consumer activists to finally rein in our nation's bad banks. Only nine days earlier the banks...

Arianna's late mother, Elli Stassinopoulos, is one of the most incredible women I've ever wished I met. There are world-famous women who break barriers to achievement, like Marie Curie and Amelia Earhart, and there are women who are less famous but just as admirable for demonstrating incredible courage and encouraging...

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has tried to stimulate the economy by dumping $2 trillion in cash into the financial system, slashing overnight interest rates to zero and promising to keep them low for two years. The result: the slowest recovery in six decades.

Mitt Romney's Reaganomics...

As an advocate for 401(k) participants, the only thing more frustrating for me than not being able to get Capitol Hill to make the plans walk and talk like pensions is tackling "innumeracy" on the part of academics who portray themselves as experts, but apparently never consulted pension actuaries about...

The second biggest financial debacle facing Americans after the retirement crisis is the mortgage crisis. While many in the media have blamed the failures on reckless borrowers, the real driver of the crisis is lawless banks offering "bait-and-switch" adjustable rate mortgages.

While I've never seen an accurate analysis of the...

Among the many reasons why we've got the most dysfunctional retirement systems in the advanced world is the fact that our upwardly mobile workforce is punished for being -- upwardly mobile.

Despite having spent more than two decades as an employee -- including working for a major utility, a household-name...

I recently returned from a heartbreaking trip to Canada. I wasn't attending a funeral but depositing a big chunk of my household savings in a Canadian bank -- because I can no longer trust reckless American banks. What is most depressing is that my late parents were immigrants from Canada...

MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan has launched a laudable Get Money Out campaign to stop corporate contributions from corrupting politicians. The author of Greedy Bastards has not only gathered more than 300,000 signatures on his Get Money Out petition but managed to inspire politicians and others to create 13 proposals...

Okay, guys I know the topic of retirement is boring, but so is oxygen. Unfortunately, while our supply of breathing air is adequate, our retirement assets aren't.

With very few exceptions unless you are: a long-serving member of Congress, a Fortune 500 executive, an employee at one of the 17...

What's baffling about the Presidential election is the excitement over the Republican candidates when virtually everything that comes out of their mouths is either fodder for late-night talk shows or pretty deplorable. Rick Perry doesn't know the voting age, Michele Bachmann believes she must submit to...

In her recently released book The Retirement Heist, Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Schultz describes how employers were able to deprive their employees of pensions by switching to the more puny cash balance plans while not having to disclose the reduction in benefits.

For some reason Schultz doesn't devote...

The Treasury Department will soon be releasing guidance on "providing and encouraging lifetime income options" to 401(k) participants by encouraging the use of annuities, according to Mark Iwry, deputy assistant treasury secretary for retirement and health policy. Said Iwry: "We are trying to put pensions back in the pension system,"...

How are we going to get unemployed Americans back to work? The GOP wants to lower taxes and decrease regulation because it thinks we're stifling innovation. The Dems want to spend tax dollars on infrastructure and other public works projects.

The Republican strategy is absurd because if corporations...

On a North Carolina company's website it describes its corporate culture as "team-driven" and "result-oriented." It might also add, "We actually care whether you can afford to retire," since annually it sends its 6,000 employees a Total Compensation Report, which tells them whether they are on track and what to...

In India, tens of thousands of corruption-weary citizens have been galvanized by anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare, whose hunger strike forced the government to adopt a resolution Aug. 27th endorsing legislation that would create an independent anti-corruption agency. A 2005 study showed that more than 45% of...

Think about how surreal politics in this country has become since the Presidential election. While Obama won office largely on health care reform, apparently Republicans took control of Congress and may recapture the White House based on -- repealing...

After the OECD created the Better Life Index to discern which are the happiest countries in the world an organization known as 24-7 Wall St. cherry-picked the list to narrow down those countries with the highest economic stability. Most likely, says MSNBC, "the happiest people in the developed...

A labor lawyer has a great idea for not only saving Social Security but making it so it's almost as generous as those in other first-world countries.

As Tom Geoghegan recently observed in the New York Times, Americans have two pension problems -- our Social Security System pays...

If you need evidence that this country has been hijacked by special interests, look no further than the hell that compromised politicians are putting Elizabeth Warren through.

As Huffington Post reporter Michael McAuliff observed, Warren was repeatedly harassed and even called a liar by members of the so-called...

Like millions of her peers, my daughter graduated from college last weekend and I'm already nagging her about participating in the 401(k) plan at the university where she's working as a research assistant until she starts grad school. Needless to say, she's rolling her eyes at my nagging.

It amazes...