The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago, and there has been no real accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it.

Credit cards are like snakes: Handle 'em long enough, and one will bite you.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

There are a lot of things that people say about Hillary Clinton. But nobody says that she doesn't know how to throw a punch.

Some of the largest financial institutions can build a profit model on tricking people.

Once kids get older, the list is longer. So here goes: Stay out of debt. Sometimes debt is necessary, to buy a home or to get an education, but not to buy a sweater or to eat out.

Personal responsibility matters. There are no excuses for those who spend money on things they cannot afford. But it's a whole lot harder to act responsibly when consumer credit contracts are designed to be incomprehensible, when prices are obscure and risks are hidden.