“You’ve got to stand for something, or you will fall for anything.”   – John Mellencamp   Many of my columns are about people who make bad financial decisions.  People who take out payday loans and run up debts on high-interest credit cards.  People who play the lottery and gamble too much at casinos.    People who just don’t know how to handle their money.   I’m convinced that most of the mistakes result from lack of information and bad habits formed in childhood.    Dr

The lack of a whole-hearted, landslide, public embrace of health reform is surprising considering that unless your family earns over $250,000, reform costs you nothing and, the President’s health care plan, if enacted, is estimated to increase the income of the average family of four by about $10,000 in 2030. One part of the explanation for public reluctance to embrace reform may be explained by behavioral economics.

Call it the fine art of giving to get. Last December, shortly after Bernard Madoff, the master of all Ponzi schemes, was arrested, Nino Selimaj, 51, one of New York City’s colorful and successful restaurateurs, came up with a novel promotional idea involving the king of the con men. In brief, he offered Madoff’s victims free meals for an entire week at one of his seven city Nino’s restaurants where the average dinner check, with wine, runs between $85 and $95 per person

Thirty-three TARP recipients missed a scheduled dividend payment to taxpayers last month, according to the Treasury Department, including 18 banks that missed a payment for the first time. It’s a powerful indication that the U.S. banking system remains troubled

The long awaited resignation of Bank of America’s CEO Ken Lewis finally arrived this week, but I guess we’ll still have to wait until January to see it come to its full, well deserved conclusion. Ken is “retiring” at the “end of the year.” Since the news broke I’ve seen a collection of old school bankers rush to poor Ken’s defense.

Last month a study from the credit reporting agency Experian and consulting outfit Oliver Wyman estimated that close to a fifth of troubled mortgages involved borrowers who were “strategically” defaulting–walking away from mortgages they could pay but decided not to because they owed more than their houses were worth. Self-assigned guardians of financial ethics see the willingness of borrowers to abandon their mortgage debts as a sign of the “erosion of social and moral standards.” The aim of these critics is to shame debtors into sticking with their mortgages. That’s something debtors should take with a grain of salt.

Ever heard the phrase “the medium is the message”? In the case of the rap in “End The Fed,” the anti-Federal Reserve music video below, the medium is actually, well, distracting. (Via Reason ) An artist named Sleuth has hit YouTube with a song that mixes classical economics theory, the politics of Ron Paul and even a reference to economist and housing expert Robert Shiller.