I recently watched the HBO film Too Big to Fail and it was nothing short of amazing. This website is by no means geared toward rating movies, but HBO Films needs to be applauded for their remarkable job. This movie displays the troubling events of the financial meltdown of 2008 and focuses more closely on U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The star-driven cast allows viewers to connect the dots and reflect on the turbulence which happened not too long ago.

The show Seinfeld puts it best when explain double dipping: “It’s like putting your whole mouth right in the dip. Look, from now on when you take a chip, just take one dip and end it.” But this article isn’t about the socially-peculiar moments when you catch some double dipping at a party, rather it’s about the near future of our economy. Probabilities for a “double dip” in the market have definitely lowered over the past year or so, but we are not clear by a long shot. The status today stands much like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Jumping out of an economic down-turn is hard enough, but staying out of the ditch in the future is another subject all together. Learning from past mistakes, adjusting how we are governed, and adapting to different ways to live will predict how the coming decade’s economic outlook will be. Learning from other countries on various troubling topics such as those listed above will allow the United States to create a sustainable economy and once again regain confidence with its peers around the world.

I love to read the writings of the brave few who call for tax reform for Big Oil companies. Most are scared that if tax incentives for the oil industry are stripped, then prices at the pump will shoot to the stars. Over the past decade, notably during the Bush Administration, Big Oil has been given financial steroids to aid in the reduction of the price for the average household, but has that happened? The obvious answer is no. Since 1991 gas prices have increased more than 280% while CPI (Consumer Price Index) has increased by only 64, meaning that gasoline has increased in price more rapidly than most products.

Zero pay cuts, zero waste, zero layoffs, zero strikes, and even zero health care premiums—these aren’t facts from a glamorous company which many people think of, rather they’re from a relatively small car manufacture named Subaru. In the depths of Indiana lies the automotive plant which is changing how manufacturing and overall business is done. Driven by responsibility, Subaru has created a formula which rallies both employees and competitors to do and be more than average.

WD-40 has a passionate fan club which has recently published a listing of 2000 uses for the magical spray. This key household spray can be used for such functions as cleaning piano keys, prohibiting your glue gun trigger from sticking, and removing gum from flag poles, but oddly enough I did not see cleaning military vehicles and planes on that list. And yet, the Pentagon spends $22.9 billion (yes, billion with a B) a year to ward off rust and other deterioration problems. It’s so bad that back in 2003, Congress mandated the creation of the Corrosion Policy and Oversight Office. My first thought when reading about this was, “Wow this is intense.”

Less than two years ago this country faced the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. We have all heard this bold statement delivered to us by media broadcasters and even politicians themselves, but I fear that many young generations do not understand the true urgency that this country faced. Most of us understand that this crisis developed from various banks that participated in greedy and self-centered mandates to further inflate earnings, but many do not understand how this trickled across the board to many other industries. In my studies, I have found two dominant and prestigious companies that single-handedly have been models for how thousands of companies over decades that were almost taken down by this financial crisis.

Lithium is a forgotten commodity to many people around the world, but it will play a vital role in the decades to come. Most industry leaders state that there are indicators that by 2020 automotive manufactures will be producing more electric vehicles than gas powered equivalents. This is certainly the case in countries like China, India, and many parts of Europe.