Economy, Entrepreneur | featured news

To quell the latest financial crisis, the Federal Reserve smashed interest rates to the floor by buying bonds with money it effectively prints. Since 2008 assets on the Fed’s balance sheet, including those bonds, have tripled, to $3 trillion. (Hey, people needed encouragement, and low rates are encouraging.) The mixed results: Entrepreneurs and homeowners got some relief, while savers got whacked along with the value of the U.S. dollar. Starving for yield, investors piled into stocks, pushing the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its all-time high, absent inflation.

While 2011 was a big year for political unrest, another uprising was afoot in the world of content creators and artists. Everywhere you look, artists are taking more control over their own economic well being, partly because the Internet has enabled them to do so.