The U.S. Census Bureau released a report yesterday showing that in 2009, more than 14 percent of the population was living in poverty: It's a rate that hasn't been seen in the U.S. since the early '90s. Looking ahead into 2010's statistics, economists fear poverty will soon be higher than at any time since the 1960s, before President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the War on Poverty, as part of his Great Society initiative.  We discuss what can be done to fight poverty in America and how the government defines being poor. 

By now, we’re all aware of the dark side of the world of finance. But there’s another side to finance that starts with a youthful impulse to save the world and evolves into something both savvy and humane. After a funny encounter with a child wearing her cast-off sweater in Rwanda, Jacqueline Novogratz realized how interconnected the world really is. Novogratz has been at the front of a movement that combines social investing and social entrepreneurship in some of the poorest countries in the world. She is founder of The Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture capital firm that supports small businesses in developing countries, and author of the book The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.