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JPMorgan. UBS. Societe Generale. These banks have been rocked by gargantuan trading losses in recent years because of excessive risk taking (and trades gone bad) by one or two "rogue" traders.

How can erroneous decisions made by one individual total billions of dollars in damages for his or her firm? John Coates, a former Wall Street trader and author of the book "The Hour Between Dog and Wolf," says biology plays a central role in the infamous trading scandals. A former trader at Deutsche Bank, Coates left Wall Street to study neuroscience and finance at the University of Cambridge. His goal was to find the answer to the question that has perplexed experts for years: why do traders make the decisions they do?

"I am not sure greed is the primary motivation here," Coates says in an interview with The Daily Ticker. "There are institutional incentives to maximize the variance of your trading results. But underlying it all is human behavior."

Coates

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In the new HBO documentary, "Hard Times: Lost on Long Island," award-winning producer and director Marc Levin takes a deeper look at how many average middle class Americans are still struggling from the fallout of the Great Recession. The film puts a human face on the ongoing U.S. unemployment problem, which has stumped policymakers and economists alike.

Starting in 2008, workers lost their jobs by the hundreds of thousands each month. In just two years the unemployment rate went from 5 percent to nearly 10 percent by the end of 2009.

While the jobs picture has been improving, U.S. unemployment still sits at a staggeringly high rate of 8.2 percent. Millions of Americans are looking for a job but just cannot find work. Last month 5.4 million people, or 42 percent of those who are unemployed, had been unemployed for more than 27 weeks and the underemployment rate — which includes those who have a part-time job but seek a full-time position and those