Fed Ends Stimulus Program With Economy Still On Shaky Ground

Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve just declared the U.S. economy well enough to leave intensive care, though it is not yet the picture of health.

The Fed announced on Wednesday that it was ending a two-year stimulus program designed to keep interest rates low and boost the economy. The program -- known as "quantitative easing," or "QE3," for the fact that it was the third round of such stimulus since the financial crisis -- involved buying billions of dollars of bonds each month. The central bank has been cutting back on these purchases with every Fed meeting since December 2013. On Wednesday it said it was making its last such purchase this month.

In pulling away support for the economy, the Fed is taking a chance that recent signs of economic strength are more reliable than recent signs of weakness. On the one hand, unemployment has tumbled to 5.9 percent, the lowest in six years, and employers have added more than 200,000 jobs per month so far this year. GDP growth jumped at a 4.6 percent annualized rate in the second quarter. Gasoline prices are at their lowest in four years.

On the other hand, wages have stayed stubbornly flat, and much of the drop in unemployment has been due to workers checking out of the labor market, meaning they're no longer counted as unemployed. Financial markets have been turbulent lately, and economies around the world seem to be teetering on the edge of recession.

One of the Fed's policy makers, Minnesota Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota, dissented from the Fed's decision, arguing the economy was still too weak for the Fed to end QE3. He also argued that the Fed should have shown more alarm about the prospect of low inflation.

Still, in announcing its decision, the Fed sounded fairly optimistic about the economy, noting the job market's recent good news and saying that consumers and businesses have been slowly increasing their spending.

The Fed also chose to look on the bright side of one ominous development in the economy: Inflation is still lower than the Fed would like it. Low inflation might sound great to people dealing with rising food prices, but if prices generally stay too low for too long, that risks "deflation," or falling prices. When deflation happens, people stop spending while they wait for prices to fall further, and the economy suffers. See Japan in the 1990s or the U.S. during the Great Depression.

The Fed kept pumping stimulus into the economy in one way: It kept its target for a key short-term interest rate near zero and promised to keep it there for "a considerable time." This interest rate, the federal funds rate, which influences other borrowing costs throughout the economy, is the Fed's traditional policy tool for slowing down and speeding up the economy.

When zero-percent interest rates weren't enough to help an economy gutted by the financial crisis and Great Recession, the Fed turned to the extraordinary measure of buying up bonds to drive interest rates even lower. That bond-buying has left the Fed with a balance sheet worth $4.48 trillion, up from less than $1 trillion before the crisis.

The Fed's balance sheet has quadrupled in size.

What remains to be seen is the effect of the program's end on the economy and financial markets. The Fed has been warning of the end of QE3 for several months, giving markets time to adjust, and stock prices have recently soared to record highs despite the looming end of QE3.

As for the economy, interest rates have stayed relatively low even as the Fed has cut back on bond purchases. The rate on a 30-year mortgage was recently just a little more than 4 percent, up from a record low of about 3.35 percent, set just as the Fed was beginning QE3, according to monthly data from Freddie Mac.

Interest rates are still relatively low.

Fed officials have long maintained -- or hoped, anyway -- that the central bank's enormous holdings of bonds will keep helping the economy even when it stops buying more.

Interest rates rise as bond prices fall, and as long as the Fed is sitting on a mountain of relatively low-risk bonds, then bond prices should stay high, and investors will still be forced to go buy riskier stuff like corporate bonds and stocks.

The stock market, in fact, has been one of the most obvious winners of the Fed's bond-buying program. Stock prices fell on Wednesday after the Fed's announcement, but not by much. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down about 50 points, or about 0.3 percent, about 20 minutes after the Fed's announcement. The S&P 500 was down about half a percentage point.

Some Fed officials have fretted publicly about the unwanted side effects of their easy-money programs, including pumping up market bubbles and filling the coffers of the 1 percent while not doing much for the other 99 percent. Some Fed officials and economists have also been skeptical that QE was worth such risks. Many on the Fed now seem more inclined to try to use other tools to help the economy.

Majority Of Kroger Shoppers Want Gun-Friendly Chain To Ban Guns

The cadre of mothers crusading to ban the open carry of firearms in stores has added a new poll to its arsenal.

Sixty-four percent of shoppers in states allowing gun owners to brandish their weapons in public want supermarket giant Kroger to prohibit open carry in its stores, according to the poll, commissioned by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense In America, the increasingly powerful gun-control group backed by billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

On Wednesday, the moms plan to picket outside Kroger’s annual investor relations meeting in Cincinnati armed with a 300,000-signature petition and the poll, which was released Tuesday by the Benenson Strategy Group.

“People are now just realizing how absurd it is that someone could bring a loaded AR-15 into Kroger with them while they’re shopping,” Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, told The Huffington Post on Tuesday.

Moms Demand Action has already notched significant victories through powerful social media campaigns. At its urging, corporate food chains Chili’s, Sonic, Jack in the Box, Chipotle and Starbucks asked customers to leave guns at home or in the car. After a prolonged fight, during which the moms faced fierce rallies by rifle-toting open-carry advocates, the group convinced Target to announce a no-guns policy.

But the Kroger campaign marked a shift for the group toward more sophisticated tactics. Flush with cash from Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety fund, the moms rolled out campaign ads for the first time last month. Meant to jolt shoppers into realizing the absurdity of allowing assault-grade firearms in the stores, the ads juxtapose a person with an AR-15 slung around his shoulders with either a child holding an ice cream cone, a shirtless man or a teenager with a skateboard. The message: Deadly weapons are allowed at Kroger, where policy forbids these other, relatively harmless things.

One of the ads released by Moms Demand Action to pressure Kroger to ban guns.

Two radio ads, made by recording real customer service calls to Kroger, are also getting air time.

Since the moms embarked on the campaign, smaller grocers have approached the group for help drafting gun bans of their own.

Watts said her group chose the supermarket giant because of its size and visibility. Kroger operates 2,419 stores in 31 states, most of which are in the South and Midwest, regions where gun culture and the powerful National Rifle Association maintain a stronger grip than in, say, the liberal Northeast.

“We wanted to pick a campaign that would give us the opportunity, frankly, to do more brand damage by running ads,” Watts said. “They may at first sit back and allow the brand damage to occur, and then realize, ‘Oh, wait, we’re alienating most of our customer base, which is women and mothers.”

Kroger said it has no plans to change its current policy, and that it believes the Everytown is "a national political organization that is attempting to use retailers to further their agenda."

"Kroger's policy has been and continues to be to follow state and local laws and to ask customers to be respectful of others while shopping in our stores," Keith Dailey, a spokesman for the chain, wrote in an email to HuffPost. "We believe the controversial gun issue is best resolved by lawmakers, not retailers."

Though the results of the moms' new poll should be taken with a grain of salt, considering the group financed the poll, the findings indicate a desire to leave guns out of the grocery store.

A huge majority of those polled, 83 percent, said they believe Kroger has the right to prohibit guns if it so chooses. And 61 percent of shoppers who have guns in their homes say they don’t think such a policy would violate their Second Amendment rights. Most notably, 52 percent of shoppers who said they support a gun ban at Kroger keep firearms in their homes.

Open-carry activists marched through a Target location in Texas to protest the moms' early efforts pushing the retailer to ban guns.

Watts said most of the retailers that have announced no-guns rules over the last year conducted their own polls ahead of any policy changes.

But the rules aren’t always legally binding. It can be difficult for individual chains to enforce the policies, both legally and logistically, if a defiant customer decides to carry in a loaded assault rifle strapped to their back. But Watts, who has endured violent threats and brutal, misogynistic hate speech since founding the group after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, said the policies are first steps toward loosening the grip of the NRA gun culture.

“Ultimately,” she said, “businesses cannot withstand the wrath of American moms and women.”

This story has been updated with a statement from Kroger.

Walmart Was Offering A Special 'Fat Girl Costumes' Section In Its Online Store

Walmart has everyone's Halloween needs covered this year -- especially if you happen to fall into the category known as "fat girl."

No, we're not kidding, though we wish we were. Until just after 11am this morning, the mega-retailer actually had a subsection of online Halloween costumes marked as "fat girl costumes." (See below.)

A screenshot from Walmart.com taken on October 27.

This is an ill-advised category name, to say the least. "Fat girl" still remains a derogatory label, though it shouldn't be. And it's also unclear what the retailer's motivations were for creating such a category. As Anna Merlan at Jezebel pointed out, many of the costumes featured in the "Fat Girl" section were also available on a page labeled "Women's Plus Size Adult." So was this someone's idea of a funny joke? Or did Walmart actually think people were searching for "Fat Girl" costumes?

Walmart did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the section was taken down shortly after HuffPost contacted them. The "Fat Girl Costumes" page now redirects to an empty "Women's Plus Size Costumes" page.

In case you're not a fat girl but just think it would be hilarious to dress up as one for Halloween, why not try the Walmart "Fat Tinkerbell" getup? Or purchase a straight-up fat suit?

Halloween, brought to you by Walmart -- the best time of year to make fun of any woman over a size 6.

If you want some actually clever costume ideas, check out our list here.

UPDATE 2:04pm EST: The Huffington Post received the following statement from a Walmart spokesperson: "This never should have been on our site. It is unacceptable, and we apologize. We are working to remove it as soon as possible and ensure this never happens again."

H/T Jezebel

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The Workers Making Sure The NYC Subway Is Ebola-Free

The people who clean the subways might be New York City's unsung heroes. They work at all hours, power-washing urine from platforms, putting themselves in harm's way to clean tracks and mopping the train car floors and seats that millions of people use every day.

Still, workers were disconcerted by the news that Craig Spencer, the doctor who tested positive for Ebola in New York City on Thursday, rode the A, L and 1 subway lines the day before he was diagnosed. After all, they’re the ones who have to clean the trains on which Spencer travelled.

"It's a time for caution, a high level of caution," said John Samuelsen, president of the Transportation Workers Union Local 100, which represents Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers.

Samuelson told The Huffington Post that the biggest concern for transit workers right now is making sure they have the right protective gear for cleaning up hazardous waste. The union is advising workers to do their jobs and be professional, but to challenge any supervisor who tells them to deal with infectious waste without protective equipment.

The risk of any transit worker contracting Ebola is relatively low. The disease is not airborne, and it’s only spread through bodily fluids. For someone to catch it, they would have to actually come in contact with something like mucus or vomit from an infected person.

Bodily fluids weren’t reported on any of the subway lines Spencer rode on Wednesday, according to the MTA.

That said, uncomfortable cleanups are all too common on New York City's busy subway system.

"This is nothing new for transit workers," Samuelsen said.

Indeed, whoever ends up cleaning the subway will be well-prepared. Transit workers are trained regularly on how to deal with emergencies. Moreover, the MTA already has procedures in place for cleaning up infectious waste in the transit system, including isolating the bus, train car or subway where the waste is found and providing protective equipment and training to the people cleaning it up. The MTA has added extra levels of protection for workers cleaning the places where Spencer came in contact with the system.

“Based on advice from health experts, the MTA has updated the protocols to ensure employees are issued nitrile gloves, use a 10 percent bleach solution for disinfection, and double-bag any potentially infectious waste,” according to a statement from the agency.

In addition, the TWU Local 100 union released a statement Thursday saying that its director of occupational health, Dr. Frank Goldsmith, is “closely monitoring the situation."

The people who keep the subway humming work under a variety of strange conditions that would be foreign to most New Yorkers, according to Robert W. Snyder, the author of Transit Talk: New York Bus and Subway Workers Tell Their Stories. Their hours can be erratic. They’re in contact with many more people every day than most of us are. Some of their jobs are “industrial” and can involve dangerous conditions. Amid all of this, these workers are also expected to maintain a happy face for customers, Snyder told HuffPost.

(This is confirmed by just one look at the union's website, which is currently advertising a workshop called “Dealing with Difficult People.")

Transit workers are "often seen as invisible unless something goes catastrophically wrong,” said Snyder, who is also a professor at Rutgers University’s Newark campus.

That dynamic was on display earlier this month, when passengers wrote in anger to various news outlets about a used condom that had been hanging from a handrail on the F line for weeks. An MTA spokesman told Gothamist that he wasn’t necessarily surprised workers had missed the condom, which was relatively high up, because they’re so focused on cleaning the floors and seats of the train.

Despite the stressful conditions of transit work, people still flock to the job because “it remains one of the few jobs in the city where an ordinary person with an ordinary education can build a decent life with decent pay,” Snyder said.

Transit workers who clean the subway make about $25 an hour, according to data provided by the union. MTA workers also get dental and medical benefits, as well as perks like two weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave.

That may be part of the reason that, so far, transit workers and organizers haven’t used the Ebola panic to highlight the difficulties of the work. By contrast, earlier this month, airplane cleaners and other LaGuardia airport workers addressed Ebola in a strike that was organized with the help of the Service Employee International Union.

Though the LaGuardia protest dealt with working conditions more broadly, the Ebola outbreak offered a good opportunity to highlight those conditions, since the workers cleaning airplane cabins regularly come into contact with passengers’ bodily fluids.

Samuelsen added that his organization was in constant communication with workers and the MTA to ensure employees are working safely.

"We're not going to put ourselves in harm's way," he said.

Brace Yourself: Ugg Season May Be Even Bigger Than Usual This Year

Each year as the temperature dips, women across the country turn to their closets and dig their Ugg boots out of hibernation. Others head to stores to score a pair of the squat sheepskin booties in preparation for a chilly winter.

This year the Ugg frenzy may be even bigger than usual. Sales at the Ugg brand rose nearly 24 percent last quarter to $417 million, compared to $337 million for the same period the year prior, parent company Deckers reported Thursday. The spike was due to higher wholesale sales, online sales and new retail store openings worldwide.

And now, Ugg is about to enter its prime season.

"With temperatures turning cold in recent weeks, sell-through of weather boots and classics have gained pace across the majority of our markets," Deckers chief executive Angel Martinez said on a conference call with analysts on Thursday.

Ugg's upcoming product lines are "as compelling as we have ever seen for the company," Sam Poser, an analyst at Sterne Agee, wrote in a note to clients on Friday. He added that Ugg's reaping the benefits of favorable fashion trends, as shoppers search the aisles for comfy clothes like stretchy leggings and oversized sweaters.

However Ugg's holidays turn out, "Ugg Season" will remain. The annual donning of the Uggs has even made its way into memes, like "Girls be like."

Meanwhile, Ugg's plan to diversify its offerings seems to be working. Ugg is now selling more items that aren't dependent on cold weather. It launched a home goods line in October, offering an assortment of sheepskin area rugs, knit pillows and floor poufs. There's also Ugg's loungewear line, a casual clothing label. On the call, Martinez said that Ugg's home and loungewear businesses are still "small but burgeoning" and early results have been "very strong." Ugg will be pushing both lines hard through the holidays.

In an attempt to tell customers Ugg sells more than just shearling boots, the brand launched an advertising campaign in August with the tagline "THIS IS UGG," featuring sketch artist Langley Fox Hemingway and New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.

But until those lines get bigger, Ugg remains a slave to the elements. According to a report from Nomura Securities, Deckers is the best example of a company that's exposed to weather risk, something it could never hope to control. So far, the climate has treated Deckers, which also owns footwear brands Teva and Sanuk, quite well this year.

"Despite the mild weather conditions over the last two winters, this year was more seasonably cool and snowy in many parts of the U.S., which had a substantially large impact on companies with a great deal of cold weather product including Deckers," Nomura analyst Bob Drbul wrote in the report.

Overweight Women More Likely To Have Low-Paying Jobs Than Overweight Men

Fat shaming can have economic consequences.

As a woman gets heavier, her chances of working in a low-paying, physically taxing job grow, according to a new study from Jennifer Shinall, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. But weight doesn’t have nearly as much bearing on the type of job a man lands.

Though obese men are more likely than men of average weight to work in lower-paying, physical jobs, the effect isn't nearly as strong as it is for women. As a result, obese women make $7 less than their average-weight counterparts, while obese men make just $2 less.

“It absolutely suggests that weight is much more of a consideration in the labor market for women than it is for men,” Shinall told The Huffington Post in an interview.

Shinall’s findings add to the growing body of evidence that physical attributes play a depressingly large role in the lives of working women, no matter how they look. Very skinny women tend to get paid more. Hiring committees penalize attractive women by not calling them for interviews.

Such factors typically add to the broader discrimination women already face at work. Research shows women earn less than men in the same roles and are also more likely to work in low-paying fields.

Many female-dominated, low-wage jobs, such as home health care and child care, are where obese and morbidly obese women are most likely to end up, Shinall’s study found.

"Those are the only jobs that are available for the heaviest women in the labor market," she said.

For her study, Shinall analyzed occupation, health and population data for 10,007 women and 8,928 men. She found that, the heavier women get, the more likely they'll end up working in jobs that require more physical activity.

The opposite is true for women seeking jobs in fields that involve a lot of personal interaction, such as sales. Women become less likely to land those roles the more overweight they are. Morbidly obese women who do get jobs in such fields are paid about 5 percent less, on average, than other women, even controlling for factors like education, the study found.

For men, on the other hand, being heavier can actually boost earnings in some jobs. Overweight men working in more physical jobs make about 4 percent more, on average, than their average-weight colleagues, according to the study.

Shinall said she suspects that one of the main reasons obese and morbidly obese women tend to cluster in low-paying, strenuous jobs is because of discrimination in hiring for white-collar roles. Companies may not want an overweight woman representing them to customers, she said, and it's also possible that the person doing the hiring may not want to work with an obese woman.

How The Fed Blew Its Most Important Job For Over Three Years

WASHINGTON -- The Federal Reserve was aware of risky practices at JPMorgan Chase as early as 2008 but failed to follow up for more than three years until those risks had snowballed into the company's $6.2 billion London Whale scandal, according to a new report from the central bank's Office of Inspector General.

Financial reform advocates' response to this unhappy but perhaps not surprising news was summed by Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets.

"The remarkable thing here is that the Fed's own people identified the high-risk activities at JPMorgan Chase's offshore units and alerted their supervisors and others that a comprehensive systematic review of those activities should be undertaken quickly," Kelleher said. "And then they didn't. They just didn't do it."

But the implications of the IG report reach well beyond the Whale debacle, highlighting how much power the Fed's New York branch wields and how little influence the public interest has within that branch.

While the Fed Board of Governors, based in Washington, is a public agency, the regional Fed banks are private sector entities. The London Whale report has led bank watchdogs to suggest that, at the very least, the New York Fed presidency should be a fully public position, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

"The New York Fed is the key on-the-ground supervisor of the largest Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan," Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, told HuffPost. "So I think there are some questions about this hybrid public-private structure given the critical public interest in all these issues."

"Nobody with that much power and authority should be unaccountable to any publicly elected official," said Kelleher.

The London Whale rocked the American financial establishment when JPMorgan began taking sudden, heavy losses in 2012. The bank had placed big risky investment bets on an index of credit derivatives that then backfired. JPMorgan, which declined to comment for this article, was able to shoulder the brutal losses. Yet their speed and severity caused many to question whether the banking system was vulnerable to more and potentially bigger such problems.

Under the Volcker Rule approved by U.S. regulators in 2013, banks would now be barred from making such trades for their own accounts. But rules only matter if they are enforced, and the IG report offers little reason to have confidence in the New York Fed's oversight.

The Fed's IG report lays the London Whale regulatory breakdown at the feet of the New York Fed under multiple leaders. The New York Fed discovered the problematic proprietary trading at JPMorgan in 2008. The following year, it recommended a deep review of the JPMorgan division that ultimately harbored the London Whale trades. That review was never performed, and the New York Fed never coordinated -- as it should have -- with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which also has regulatory authority over JPMorgan.

Part of the problem may be that the top levels of the Fed are not fully staffed for regulatory oversight. The Fed's seven-member Board of Governors has two longstanding vacancies. One of those slots should be held by a new vice chair of supervision. The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law created the job -- effectively a formal regulatory boss at the Fed -- but it has never been filled.

"The Fed board vacancies -- we want reformers for those positions and people who are focused on better regulation of the financial sector," Stanley said. "And this kind of thing shows why."

One person who's been touted as a potential pick for vice chair of supervision is Elise Bean, a longtime staffer with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations. Bean has done extensive financial research for the subcommittee, addressing everything from offshore tax evasion to high-frequency trading. In fact, the committee released a much more extensive report on the London Whale mess in March of this year.

But the New York Fed's mishandling of the London Whale situation also raises questions about the central bank's dual structure as both a public and private sector entity. The Fed Board of Governors is a public institution that writes regulations, among other responsibilities, and the governors themselves are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. But much of the Fed's actual regulatory enforcement is delegated to the 12 private sector Fed banks.

These branch banks are controlled by their own nine-member boards. Three of those directors are chosen by the banking industry, three are chosen to represent other industries, and three are selected to broadly represent public interests. The president of each branch is named by the corporate and public interest directors.

In practice, this has meant that banking and other corporate interests are really running the show at most Fed branches. A 2011 Government Accountability Office report found that regional Fed bank directors are disproportionally white men who overrepresent business management, while labor and consumer groups have few voices on those boards. The New York Fed presidency has been held since early 2009 by a former Goldman Sachs banker, William Dudley.

Moreover, not all Fed branches are equal. The New York Fed, cheek by jowl with Wall Street, is by far the most dominant, and its president exercises enormous power. During the financial calamities of 2008, then-New York Fed President Timothy Geithner served as one-third of a crisis team that included then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Since the New York Fed isn't subject to limits on government pay, Geithner was the best paid of the trio, and he would take a significant pay cut to become treasury secretary in January 2009.

While the Fed Board of Governors is a notoriously secretive institution, the New York Fed is even more protective of its internal operations, officially contending that it's exempt from the Freedom of Information Act because it is not a government agency.

The tension between the Fed's public service functions and its ties to private banks is highlighted by the Fed IG report itself. The central bank's independent watchdog is confining public disclosure of its report to a four-page summary, arguing that the full report has too much "privileged and confidential" information. The Office of Inspector General declined to comment on the decision to keep the full report a secret.

During the debate over Dodd-Frank, many reform advocates called for revamping the Fed's internal structure, but only modest changes were made, and some of those, like naming a vice chair of supervision, have not yet been implemented.

All The Wealth The Middle Class Accumulated After 1940 Is Gone

Here's more proof the middle class is dying.

The middle-class share of American wealth has been shrinking for the better part of three decades and recently fell to its lowest level since 1940, according to a new study by economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics.

In other words, remember the surge of the great American middle class after World War II? That's all gone, at least by one measure.

In this case, "middle class" is defined rather expansively as the bottom 90 percent of all Americans. "Wealth" is the total of home equity, stock and bond holdings, pension plans and other assets, minus debt. As such assets are mostly owned by mid- to higher-income households -- and considering most Americans define themselves as "middle-class" -- it seems reasonable to use the bottom 90 percent as a proxy for the "middle class."

Saez and Zucman discussed their paper in a blog post for the Washington Center For Equitable Growth on Monday that included this stark chart:

Debt has been the big force driving net wealth lower for the middle class, according to Saez and Zucman. Brief bubbles in stock and home prices in the 1990s and 2000s only temporarily offset the steady, depressing rise in mortgage, student-loan, credit-card and other debts for the bottom 90 percent.

"Many middle class families own homes and have pensions, but too many of these families also have much higher mortgages to repay and much higher consumer credit and student loans to service than before," Saez and Zucman wrote.

Another important factor has been that incomes have stagnated for most Americans over the past few decades, once adjusted for inflation. Along with rising debt levels, stagnant wages have made it impossible for most families to save very much money.

And who has been the beneficiary of this middle-class misery? The top 0.1 percent of Americans, whose incomes have just kept rising, and whose share of wealth has soared to levels not seen since Jay Gatsby was still staring at the blinking green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock:

In fact, the middle class is not alone in suffering from shrinking wealth. The rest of the top 10 percent of Americans below the 0.1 percent -- the "merely rich," Saez and Zucman call them -- have also suffered from falling household wealth over the past four decades.

This rising inequality of wealth can only lead to more inequality of income and wealth in the future, Saez and Zucman warned, echoing French economist Thomas Piketty. The very rich will just keep getting richer by living on the returns from their wealth, while the rest of us will keep falling behind.

The 5 Worst States For Women

Based on recently released Census Bureau data, women made up almost half of the workforce last year. Yet, even working full-time and year-round, they were paid only 79 cents for every dollar men made. The wage gap varies considerably between states. Women receive 86 cents for every dollar men make in New York, for example, while in Louisiana, women are paid just 66% of what men earn.

Income inequality is only one of the challenges women face. Across the nation, women are less likely to serve in leadership roles both in the private and public sectors. Health outcomes among female populations also vary considerably between states. Based on 24/7 Wall St.’s analysis, Mississippi is the worst state for women in the nation.

Click here to see the 10 worst states for women

In all of the worst rated states, women were less likely than their male peers to hold private sector management positions. In two of the worst states — South Dakota and Utah — women held fewer than one in three management jobs. According to Ariane Hegewisch, study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, women are discriminated not just in base pay, but also lack career opportunities available to men. “A lot of [the wage gap] is also promotions, recruitments, and networking,” Hegewisch said. Perceptions of performance can also be affected by gender, meaning “the more the pay is related to performance and bonuses, the bigger the wage gap.”

Women in the worst rated states were also less likely to have leadership roles in government compared to women in the rest of the country. Only six of the 10 states had any female representation in Congress. Many of these states were among the nation’s worst for female representation in their own state legislatures as well. State Senates usually have between 30 and 50 Senators. Of the 10 states on this list, however, only Kansas had more than 10 female senators.

While the United States is among the most developed countries in the world, it was one of just a handful of nations where maternal mortality actually rose over the last decade, according to a recent study published in The Lancet, a respected medical journal. Pregnancy related mortality rates vary considerably between states.

To determine the worst states for women, 24/7 Wall St. developed on a methodology based on the Center for American Progress’ 2013 report, “The State of Women in America.”

We divided a range of variables into three major categories: economy, leadership, and health. Data in the economy category came from the U.S. Census Bureau and included male and female median earnings, the percent of children enrolled in state pre-kindergarten, state spending per child enrolled in pre-kindergarten, and education attainment rates. The leadership category included data on the percent of women in management occupations from the Census. It also includes the share of state and federal legislators who are women, and states that currently have female governors. The health section incorporated Census data on the percent of women who were uninsured as well as life expectancy. Infant and maternal mortality rates came from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Data on the expansion of Medicaid, as policies towards maternity leave, sick days, and time off from work came from the National Partnership for Women and Families.

State rankings on each of these measures were averaged to determine a score for each category. Possible scores ranged from 1 (best) to 50 (worst). The three category scores were averaged to create an indexed value that furnished our final ranking.

Go to 24/7 Wall St. to see the 10 worst states for women.