Recession

by Jay Pelosky

This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post. View the original piece here.

Washington is all about the fiscal cliff these days. In Doha, Qatar, world leaders are negotiating over climate change. Federal debt and carbon emissions are indeed two big problems on the nation's front burner. But they are just the beginning.

As the fog of the election season lifts, America has a lot to worry about -- everything from competing economically with China to housing rapidly retiring baby boomers.

Today’s prolonged economic slump is fundamentally different from an ordinary recession. In the aftermath of a severe financial collapse, an economy is at risk of succumbing to a prolonged deflationary undertow. With asset prices reduced, the financial system damaged, unemployment high, consumer demand depressed, and businesses reluctant to invest, the economy gets stuck well below its full employment potential.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include wealth and income inequality, housing, and financial education.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include inequality, child poverty, housing, and financial products.

Is America still a land of promise?

The biblical metaphor was used in 1785 by George Washington, who described the new United States as a "second land of promise." More than a century later, the progressive journalist Herbert Croly wrote: "From the beginning the Land of Democracy has been figured as the Land of Promise."

Though the Assets Learning Conference is now more than a week past, one session that has stuck with me dealt with The Great Recession and its Impact on Wealth in Low-Income Communities and Communities of Color. Through deftly interwoven presentations from the Urban Institute, Woodstock Institute, and Ohio State University (moderated by the U.S.

Our friends at Half in Ten are taking the lead on a Twitter campaign to get the moderators of the upcoming presidential candidate debates to ask a question about poverty (specifically child poverty). As recently released Census figures show, over one in five American children live in poverty, a rate that has changed very little over recent years. This Twitter campaign is an effort to elevate the seriousness of child poverty to the forefront and get the media and ultimately President Obama and candidate Romney talking specifically about what they would do to address this widespread problem. Half in Ten has a page set up with all the details about when the debates are, how to structure your tweets, and who to target.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the declining middle class, housing, the perils of lending, and connections between health and wealth.

In early July, we hosted an event to commemorate the release of Washington Monthly’s July/August issue, which explored some of the core concepts from the asset building field. To highlight key aspects of the event, we’ve separated out the video footage from the authors of some of the key pieces from the issue. The full event is available here.

Phil Longman, a Senior Fellow at both New America and the Washington Monthly, spoke about the inadequacy of a singular focus on jobs as the solution to our economic woes. Even prior to the recent recession, many employed people struggled to make ends meet and had little left over to save. How did we get to a place where a job was simply not enough to ensure long-term financial stability? At the event, Longman traced the demographic and economic shifts of the twentieth century that both created and then threatened the solvency of the middle class.