Cash is the new Black.(OFF COLOR)

DO YOU REMEMBER that time last October when we were all bombarded with images of downward-pointing line graphs and the sounds of Jim Cramer yelling "Crash! Crash! Crash!" as the engines of capitalism came to a halt? Like many of you, I wanted to understand why we were losing billions every day.

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It was during this time that I came across the book How to Hustle and Win: A Survival Guide for the Ghetto by Supreme Understanding Allah (yes, that's his real name). In it, I found this nugget of wisdom: "We hustle like pimps and rocksellers. We get easy money and spend it like it will always be there. Then we learn that easy money is risky money. But we learn that the hard way."

Now, I'm no expert hustler. If I were, I wouldn't have student loans or a crappy apartment. But I do have the wisdom of Supreme at my fingertips--a man who wants his brothers to learn how to hustle and win without landing in prison or sending the Dow down 900 points.

You may be wondering what hustling has to do with our dire financial situation. Well, to be honest, everything. Banks, lenders and investors hustled us to get a few points more in returns on their investments. We let them hustle us because we've been in pursuit of a perverse version of the American Dream that we can charge on a credit card. And now, the hustle blew up in our faces like a coke deal gone wrong.

The reason for this happening is simple: we broke the key rules of the hustle. This rookie mistake was particularly pervasive in the housing sector, which led to the financial crisis, which led to all those pictures of sad guys on Wall Street.

Reading over Supreme's chapter titled "Check Yourself," it's hard to ignore the obvious rules we broke.