The Unintended Consequences File

As part of a government settlement, Bank of America began sending out 200,000 letters to people who have not been paying their mortgage. These "troubled" homeowners stand to get some of their mortgage debt forgiven.

Jim Grant (Grant’s Interest Rate Observer) tells CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo he would set up a new Office of Unintended Consequences – just as soon as the Hon. Ron Paul is elected President and appoints Grant as new Fed Chairman.

Repeat after me: you should never, ever use email to communicate a major status change to your employees. Or to put it another way, don’t ever even think about terminating anyone via email.

For many, moving to Israel means forgoing Passover's second-seder meal - that is, until their out-of-town guests show up.

Unintended consequences are sometimes frustrating, sometime humorous, and in reality, sometimes tragic:

A California 911 caller told emergency dispatchers he'd just been robbed at gunpoint by two men who fled with his computer and backpack.

Two U.S. senators are asking Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate whether employers asking for Facebook passwords during job interviews are violating federal law, their offices announced Sunday.

We all know that teen bullying – both online and offline – has devastating consequences. Jamey Rodemeyer’s suicide is a tragedy. He was tormented for being gay. He knew he was bei...

Will the people that call for the continued war on drugs ever care about the consequences to addicts? Probably not. What about the consequences to innocent people? I can think of two examples for ...

Why do we tend to react AFTER the fact, but not before? How much time, money, trust and lives would be saved if we simply stopped and thought through the implications of a problem or opportunity before the proverbial horse was out of the barn? Think about it.

This is Michael Baker. Michael is 20 years old, lives in Kentucky, and likes The Bucket List on Facebook.

Apple is on the verge of doing what few others have: change the English language. But genericization can be both good and bad for companies like Apple, which must balance their desire for brand recognition with their disdain for brand deterioration.

Today we’re going to shift to the unintended consequences of your actions, and why so often your actions that you think are doing good actually cause more harm.

So the future was supposed to be upon us: a world in which, untethered by the need to be physically anywhere, we would all put our information in the cloud and access it by any device we chose, anywhere we happened to be.