52 Shades of Greed is a fully illustrated deck of finance and OWS-themed playing cards with drawings from 28 top illustrators. Learn about who and what is breaking our financial system. Enjoy the incredible art on the cards!

After being contacted by a member of the Occupy Wall Street alternative banking group , illustrator Marc Scheff agreed to do a few drawings for a deck of cards depicting some of the people and institutions responsible for causing the Great Recession.

"As a freelance illustrator I don’t get many opportunities to visualize ideas that I am personally committed to, so this project was an exciting departure. I thought that my collaborator Daniel and I would do some face cards and combine those with a standard deck of numbered cards for a sweet little project. Then he suggested bringing in more illustrators, so we made some calls. Within a few days, the project snowballed into a massive collaborative undertaking involving 28 artists from around the world. The deck grew to 56 cards (52 in the deck plus 4 bonus) on an extremely tight deadline."

All of the illustrators came in with incredible excitement and ideas for this collaboration. The vision evolved into making a visually dynamic and coherent set of cards with text and illustrations that would give people a snapshot of who the players are in this casino we call the world financial system.

It was a huge success. The completed designs can be viewed here, where the creators are looking for funds for future projects if you'd like to give these talented people a hand.

In 2008, the United States economy experienced a nearly unprecedented crisis, due to a perfect storm involving banking deregulation, complex derivatives, financial mismanagement, and larger systemic causes, including an inadequate educational system. Three years later, people rose up in protest—an organic national movement called Occupy Wall Street, its members chanting "we are the 99%" and saying that our system was broken, gamed by the wealthy and powerful.

The movement brought an entire nation's frustration with a runaway banking and financial sector, student debt, and unequal educational opportunities to the forefront of public debate. And thoughtful institutions responded, investing time and money to look into the phenomenon. On April 17th and 18th of 2012, the Rockefeller Foundation funded two panel discussions to address these urgent questions. The panels were sponsored by the New School and were held at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, and the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Moderator John Cassidy of The New Yorker perhaps summed up the issues best when he noted that the 1960s and 1970s had discredited the idea of an all-efficient government, and the 90s and zeros had done a very good job of discrediting the idea of an all-efficient market. "What's to replace both of those ideologies?" Cassidy asked. "That remains to be seen--Occupy Wall Street is obviously a part of the discussion."

Panelists included, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow; Pulitzer Prize-winning financial journalist David Cay Johnston; world-class international economists Jeffrey Sachs, Raghu Rajan, Carmen Reinhart, and Robin Wells; the Financial Times's Martin Wolf, and Bethany McLean of Vanity Fair.

Both panels grew out of The Occupy Handbook, a compendium of articles, edited by Janet Byrne, featuring leading economists and others on the causes and implications of the Occupy movement. This video features selections from the two panel discussions as well as public remarks by contributors to the Handbook.

As JPMorgan announced a $2 billion trading loss, members of Congress called for federal regulators to scrutinize and tighten banking rules and trades. New rules are being drafted as part of the Dodd-Frank bill that prevent federal banks from making investments that might put taxpayers at risk.

“The argument that financial institutions do not need the new rules to help them avoid the irresponsible actions that led to the crisis of 2008 is at least $2 billion harder to make today,” said Democratic Rep. Barney Frank.

After the creation of the Volcker Rule, a regulatory law meant to prevent overly risky trading, JPMorgan Chase sent lobbyists to Washington to argue for loopholes that would allow for trades much like those that led to a $2 billion loss announced by the bank on Friday. Bank chief executive Jamie Dimon and other members of upper management paid regular visits to lawmakers to argue that, while they thought some parts of the rule were useful, others would hurt the bank’s ability to hedge against risk. The result, said Senator Carl Levin, was a “big enough loophole that a Mack truck could drive right through it.”