A lot of people like to think of our current financial issues (especially the wildly massive wealth gap) as just another part the economic cycle. But it’s really not the same. In a Time cover story, Rana Foroohar does a great job of explaining the dramatic shifts we’ve seen, especially in the relationship between Wall Street and Main Street. My dad has the smartest economic mind of anyone I know (and he’s seen 92 years of so-called economic cycles come and go) and he told me to lead with this article because it’s one of the first pieces he’s seen that gets it exactly right: “America’s economic illness has a name: financialization. It’s an academic term for the trend by which Wall Street and its methods have come to reign supreme in America, permeating not just the financial industry but also much of American business. It includes everything from the growth in size and scope of finance and financial activity in the economy; to the rise of debt-fueled speculation over productive lending; to the ascendancy of shareholder value as the sole model for corporate governance; to the proliferation of risky, selfish thinking in both the private and public sectors; to the increasing political power of financiers and the CEOs they enrich; to the way in which a ‘markets know best’ ideology remains the status quo. Financialization is a big, unfriendly word with broad, disconcerting implications.”