As Mark Zuckerberg rang the opening bell at the NASDAQ, plenty of people like me likely shared the same thought: my asinine thoughts, likes, dislikes and photos are now worth millions, and owned publicly. Fantastic! What was once private is now public, as far as both the SEC and your mother are concerned. We're good at sharing stuff, aren't we? But are we good at anything that actually matters? -- Facebook closed at its opening price, indicating that no, maybe we aren't. The theme of this week's news is exactly that: can young people make and save money where it counts?

  This week, the biggest names in financial technology  were at a conference in San Francisco, showing off products and services to journalists, potential investors/partners and one another. Meanwhile, 8.9% of Bay Area residents are unemployed according to official numbers, meaning the actual percentage is likely substantially higher. Despite the booming tech industry, Bay Area residents have the same unemployment rate as the rest of the country -- even a little bit higher. What is the use of all this technology if we have no money? This week's news has some answers.

The need to be better than everyone else is at the core of the American culture -- even in banking. From mobile check deposit to mobile payments, more and more U.S. banks are embracing financial innovation to provide additional services and improve the customer experience. But, foreign banks aren’t any less competent in that regard. Some have cool features that American consumers would like to see from their own banks.

Wells Fargo, the third biggest bank in the nation by deposits, is the No. 1 mortgage lender by a longshot. Bloomberg reported this week that Wells Fargo originated a full third of all residential mortgages in the United States -- more than triple the number of loans originated by the No. 2 bank, Chase.

The meteoric rise and fall of the Kony 2012 phenomenon was about as strange and alienating as any Internet-bred phenomenon is, even if it felt special while it was happening. What sets it apart from Lana Del Rey, planking, bros icing bros, or any other collective fascination that quickly turns to self-loathing and thinkpiece fodder, is that Joseph Kony really is a warlord who really rapes and kills and keeps an army of children -- his offenses were against humanity, not good taste. Stranger still was the man who put himself at the center of the story, Jason Russell, head of Invisible Children. His approach evinced a sort of obsession with branding and virality that seemed to supersede any interest in the actual issue underlying the campaign: Joseph Kony himself.

April was another month in which the Federal Reserve repeated a familiar message -- current economic conditions warrant no change to its monetary policy. Yet, rates on certificates of deposits (CDs) continued on a slow, downward path.

At press time, freelancers worldwide are owed a staggering $4.1 million from deadbeat clients, and the number is rising rapidly. The Freelancer's Union, a New York-based group that represents the 1099ers among us, started a new project called the World's Longest Invoice. It's part-petition part-publicity stunt, and it's all brilliant. Best of all for web petitions, it might actually make a difference.

Discover cardholders have a lot of options when it comes to using the cash back they earn on purchases, but only one consistently allows them to tack on extra earnings at the point of redemption. The issuer’s partnerships with certain merchants allow cardholders to put their cash back towards a gift card containing more than the amount they are being asked to redeem.  For example, you can cash in $45 worth of your hard-earned rewards in exchange for a $50 gift card to Red Lobster.

It's hard to know where to park your savings these days with the market so volatile and interest rates so low. Put it in the markets and you might lose it all; put it in a savings account and you know you'll lose it to an inflation rate that's higher than any available APY. Buy a house? Yeah right. Naturally, this leads to a little bellyaching by consumers about the Fed's zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) for the fact that it's hurting America's savers while doing little to help the economy as a whole. This is true, but it's worth considering the downside to raising interest rates just to give your 36-month CD a better rate: it could be disastrous to the economy.

Your retirement won't look much like your grandparents', and not because of structural changes in the economy, exactly, but because we want a different sort of retirement, according to a new poll from T. Rowe Price and Harris Interactive. The poll found that nearly 70 percent of young investors (defined broadly as between 21 and 50 years of age) plan on working during their retirement -- in other words, they don't plan on retiring, they plan on "retiring." The bright side to this is that three-quarters of us plan on doing so "to stay active and involved," while just 23 percent will do so because "they will not have saved enough money," according to a press release. Let's hope that's the case.