Free Republic

Reagan-like faith in efficient markets set the stage for the financial meltdown. Great crises have a way of reminding us that acting as though we know perfectly well what the future holds almost always leads to disaster. That's especially true in economics, which tends to underscore the murkiness of the real world by dealing out surprises one after another -- booms, crashes, bubbles, you name it. It's fitting, therefore, that the recent economic meltdown has begun to restore that great apostle of uncertainty, John Maynard Keynes, to his rightful position of influence in economic thought. "Keynes asked why financial markets...

There has been an endless amount of chatter about the price of gold being too high (it's not) and perhaps representing a bubble. It also seems that fair amounts of ink and windage have been wasted on worries about the gold trade being "too crowded." In my daily column on my own Web site, on Sept. 17, I noted a remark by Dennis Gartman of The Gartman Letter that the gold market was "terribly, egregiously, preposterously, shockingly overpopulated." That day, gold closed at $1,014 an ounce. Here we are, about two months later, and gold is more than 10% higher....

The Huntington Planning Commission had a major item on their desk last week. It was a new proposed signage ordinance. The first ordinance was established in 1984. The new proposal had business owners showing up at the meeting, causing the vote to stall. Because of the outcry, the vote has been set to take place in December.

NEW YORK (WPIX) - Sen. Charles Schumer is sponsoring the first ever legislation to protect consumers' frequent flyer miles. Schumer urged the Department of Transportation Sunday to do a better job of notifying travelers about pending termination of their frequent flyer accounts, or the miles they have accumulated. At present, your account can be terminated and miles can be deemed canceled or expired with seemingly little or no notice from an airline, he said. "As the holiday travel season approaches, we cannot let airlines and credit card companies continue to fly off with hard-earned, frequent flyer miles," Schumer said. He...

You can't say we weren't warned ahead of time about Obama's globalist and controlling tendencies. As candidate Obama explained in a campaign speech in Portland on May 18, 2008, it would be tough for him to get together with the world's leaders and establish international controls on human behavior if we continue to carry on with our individualistic hankerings to eat cheeseburgers and drive things that are twice as big as the SmartCar. "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times and then just expect that...

As tragedies go, the Senate's Saturday night vote to proceed with a debate on a vast new health-care entitlement wasn't exactly Shakespearean. The outcome was expected but the writing wasn't as good and the acting was more Jon Lovitz than Laurence Olivier. The only real drama was how much publicity and pork the supposedly fence-sitting Democrats could exact in exchange for a vote that everyone knew was a foregone conclusion. At this stage of the legislative process, Democrats are at ramming speed, determined to pass this destructive legislation at whatever cost before more voters figure out what is being done...

The economic programs and policies currently in place are truly astounding. I don't think I have ever seen a more harmful economic environment for the country. While some of these programs started with Bush, the Obama Administration has advanced them to insane levels. Logic, economics, common sense and history must be defied to believe a recovery is possible in this environment. The nation's standard of living will be substantially lowered unless changes in policies are forthcoming. To understand why this economy cannot recover under these policies, it is necessary to differentiate between the macroeconomic and microeconomic approach. Arguably, macroeconomics is...

WASHINGTON -- Now that health-care reform has reached the Senate floor without a single Republican vote, four Democrats are vying to become King of the Hill by demanding laundry lists of changes in exchange for their votes -- prompting liberals to vow not to be held hostage by a few foot-draggers. Majority Leader Harry Reid got the bill to the floor by a 60-39 vote, the narrowest possible margin. The close vote provided a vivid demonstration of each Democrat's ability to sink President Obama's top domestic priority -- or use his vote to try to extract concessions Sen. Ben Nelson...

Sometimes, not even a politician can be all things to all people. With Saturday night's vote to bring Harry Reid's health-care bill to the floor, "moderate" Senate Democrats like Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mary Landrieu (La.), and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) had to choose between pleasing party leaders and their reputations for moderation. Moderation lost. Of course, some will say that this was merely a vote to proceed, not a vote on the merits of the bill. They were just "moving the debate forward," will try to improve the bill on the floor, and, as Seinfeld would say, yada, yada, yada. But...

Saturday night's health-care vote in the Senate was a theatrical fizzle. Sure, Majority Leader Harry Reid made senators sit at their desks for their vote to create a sense of "history" -- but everyone knew that he'd get the 60 votes he needed to start debate on ObamaCare. If a $100 million Medicaid payoff to her state wasn't enough to keep Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu bought for at least a few days, there truly is no honor among thieves. Landrieu bragged about her swag, calculating that the "Lousiana Purchase" was really worth $300 million. The two other centrist Democrats whose...

Anxious to avoid raising taxes too much to pay for their health care proposals, the Obama administration and its congressional allies hit on a great new idea: Make the states raise their taxes to fund the program, instead. Both the House and the Senate bills require that states cover a larger percentage of their people under Medicaid -- a joint state and federally funded program. The idea was to force states to raise their taxes to cover a big part of the health care bill for treating poor people. Since the Feds can simply charge any increase in spending to...

Bredesen has been asked to cut as much as 9 percent from budgets. Releasing as many as 4,000 nonviolent felons from Tennessee's prisons. Placing caps on TennCare coverage. (Ironic huh...) Closing State run Mental Health Faculties. Jacking up tuition at state universities. Sounds like a mini California... Copy and paste the link below, Tennessean flings a fit over links posted here...

SINGAPORE (MarketWatch) -- The U.S. dollar fell against the euro and the yen in Asia Monday, after a top U.S. Federal Reserve official said he would prefer to keep the central bank's asset-buying program active beyond its current cut-off date. In an interview with Dow Jones Newswires, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said an extension of the program--which has been widely considered a negative factor for the dollar--would give policymakers more flexibility as they seek to shepherd the economy toward recovery. Such a comment "suggests that the Fed will continue to underwrite the rally in risk...

"Green energy" is proving to be no miracle solution to the nation's monumental unemployment problems, and it is doing little to help the economy emerge from its deepest recession in decades, economists say. A large part of the $786 billion stimulus bill was devoted to green or renewable energy projects, with President Obama, Democratic legislators and their environmental allies repeatedly promising that the money would be used to create an army of home weatherizers, wind-turbine factory jobs and other employment opportunities that would help put to work the nearly 8 million people who have lost jobs during the recession. The...

If Americans would stop and think of the implication of having an insurance fund with no money backing up $9 trillion in their deposits, they would probably pause for a few minutes. And just because your money is sitting in a bank account doesn’t mean that it is safe. The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve is on a war path to devalue the dollar so even though your money is nominally the same, in real terms you have gotten a lot poorer. The dollar has fallen by over 15 percent since March. This is an enormous amount but given the...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- After several months of improvement in housing, manufacturing and sales, the U.S. economic recovery appeared to sputter in October, leading investors and analysts to re-evaluate whether their forecasts were too rosy. The economic data to be released in the holiday-shortened week ahead could provide a few more "what-were-we-thinking?" moments. All in all, though, the data shouldn't kill hopes for modest growth while we wait for the private sector to start hiring again. Last week, a "reality check" rippled through the markets following weak data on housing starts and industrial production, said Nigel Gault and Brian Bethune, U.S....

Jobs that not only help save the planet but usher individuals and neighborhoods out of poverty - talk about a silver bullet. If the promise of green jobs sounds too good to be true, the simplicity of the logic is difficult to resist: Train and hire people who are economically marginalized in work that is critical but has been neglected. Instead of poor people getting stuck at the back of the line, they step to the front of the new technology. The Bay Area's Van Jones was a visionary, early recognizing the social justice potential in the green economy. Jones,...

The president’s visit to China was seen as failure, but what if that was just the new standard? Martin Jacques on why the U.S. must get used to decline—and learn humility. Obama’s visit to China last week was starkly different from previous such occasions. The United States has stumbled into a new era. Just a decade ago it all looked so different. President Bush—in one of history’s great miscalculations—believed that the world stood on the verge of a new American century. In fact, the opposite was the case. The defeat of the Soviet Union flattered only to deceive and mislead....

Banks are avoiding commercial real estate losses by refusing to assess property values. Losses on commercial real estate have been the proverbial "other shoe" waiting to drop on bank balance sheets for months now. So far, though, loan losses on office buildings, shopping malls and real estate developments have been subdued. What's the holdup? A troubling report from one analyst contains some clues. Banks are doing everything they can to avoid placing a firm value on buildings that have likely fallen sharply in price, writes Joe Morford, who monitors bank stocks for RBC Capital. This kind of "see no evil"...

India May Get $1 billion In IT Outsourcing Contracts: Report MUMBAI (Reuters) – Leading Indian outsourcers such as Tata Consultancy (TCS.BO), Infosys (INFY.BO) and Wipro (WIPR.BO) stand to gain contracts worth about $1 billion in the next one or two years as U.S. banks emerge from the troubled asset relief program, the Economic Times reported on Monday. The newspaper said JPMorgan (JPM.N), Goldman Sachs (GS.N) and Morgan Stanley (MS.N) that received approval to buy back government stake worth $68 billion earlier this year are among the firms seeking operational efficiencies by outsourcing non-core IT and back-office projects to India.

About 660,000 people nationwide – or 7 percent of Medicare Advantage enrollees – are in plans that are set to close. Between now and Jan. 1, they can switch to another private plan or join Medicare's traditional fee-for-service program. Many premiums are on the rise. Medicare Advantage enrollees who do nothing and remain in the same plan in 2010 will see their monthly premiums increase an average of 32 percent, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. In addition, seniors will have fewer "zero-premium" plans next year. Those plans have proved popular because beneficiaries pay no more than...

It's a little-known - and slightly ironic - fact that when Lehman Brothers exploded last year it did so as the proud owner of 500,000 pounds of yellowcake uranium: enough to make a nuclear bomb. Uranium’s appeal was as a maturing commodity, one reaching the stage where it had become attractive not just to countries with military ambitions but also to energy traders with one eye on the growing global demand for new reactors. Less than a decade ago, nuclear was a dead industry. The US, Germany, the UK, Russia and even the atomic bandleader France had no intention of...

NOVEMBER 23, 2009 She's Back A transcript of the weekend's program on FOX News Channel. Stuart Varney: This week "The Journal Editorial Report," Sarah Palin's relaunch. The former Alaska governor re-emerges on the national stage to mixed reviews. We'll have ours. And a double-dip recession? President Obama says it's a risk with rising debt. So why is there talk of another multibillion-dollar stimulus? *** Varney: Hello everyone. Welcome to "The Journal Editorial Report." I'm Stuart Varney, in this week for Paul Gigot. First up, the relaunch of Sarah Palin. The former Alaskan governor and vice presidential candidate launched a nationwide...

Since the summer of 2008, the U.S. Treasury and the Fed have initiated a welter of new spending, lending, and subsidizing programs ostensibly aimed at steming the recession that began early in that year and deepened quickly in its last quarter and in the first quarter of 2009. Among the most notable of these programs have been attempts to prop up the real estate market and the residential construction industry, where the Fed’s easy-money policies in the first half of the present decade induced lenders to make millions of mortgage loans to home buyers who would not have qualified for...

"Green energy" is proving to be no miracle solution to the nation's monumental unemployment problems, and it is doing little to help the economy emerge from its deepest recession in decades, economists say. A large part of the $786 billion stimulus bill was devoted to green or renewable energy projects, with President Obama, Democratic legislators and their environmental allies repeatedly promising that the money would be used to create an army of home weatherizers, wind-turbine factory jobs and other employment opportunities that would help put to work the nearly 8 million people who have lost jobs during the recession. The...

California Budget's Going To Be Dreadful Until long-term structural issues are fixed, there is no way legislators can produce an honest spending plan so the state lives within its means. George Skelton Capitol Journal November 23, 2009 The Capitol's budget oracle projects $20.7 billion in new red ink for the next 19 months. Here's my projection: More punting, "kicking the can down the alley" and numbers-rigging. Hope we're both wrong. Hope there's an economic miracle or political heroism, which would require sacrifice to the demagogues. But, based on history and facts, that's too much to hope for. Here's how nonpartisan...

NOVEMBER 20, 2009 The Coming Deficit Disaster The president says he understands the urgency of our fiscal crisis, but his policies are the equivalent of steering the economy toward an iceberg. DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN President Barack Obama took office promising to lead from the center and solve big problems. He has exerted enormous political energy attempting to reform the nation's health-care system. But the biggest economic problem facing the nation is not health care. It's the deficit. Recently, the White House signaled that it will get serious about reducing the deficit next year—after it locks into place massive new health-care entitlements....

$1160 now shattered. Just like last week, gold is rocking out of the gate, breaking $1160/oz for the first time. Astounding.

There seemed to be enough lawmakers on the Sunday news shows the day after a major health care reform vote to make up a quorum, but the one clear message that emerged was the long and difficult road the legislation has to go in the Senate . While New York Sen. Charles Schumer said on CBS Face the Nation that "now, the wind is at our back," Democrats wrestled with questions about how to keep aboard some in the party who were willing to vote to get debate started on the Senate floor, but still harbored serious reservations about provisions...

Hackers Expose Climate Brawl Monday Nov 23, 2009 Caroline Overington writes up the story of the hackers breaking in to the East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU), but misses the meat of the story. The Australian can tick that box: “Covered”, but not tick that box, “Incisive”.She includes a few of the emails, but misses the bombshells while wasting column space discussing irrelevancies. As the Australian Senators sit down to assess the meaningfulness of an Emissions Trading Scheme this week, we can only hope they have better sources of information than our national masthead.The extraordinary emails from the East Anglia...

The independence of the Federal Reserve is essential for credible monetary policy and doubts about the U.S. central bank's ability to do its job without political interference could hurt the nascent economic recovery, a senior Federal Reserve official said on Sunday. "Talk of eroding the Fed's independence can be counterproductive for economic recovery," St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President James Bullard said in slides to accompany a presentation prepared for a panel discussion in New York. Bullard said that non-independent central banks have historically been forced to finance large government budget deficits. "This can be very inflationary," he added. Last...

Visitors to America might have noticed the television ads urging us to buy gold. One such “spokesman”, formerly in charge of managing the government’s hoard of the yellow stuff, including the ingots buried at Fort Knox, points out that the value of gold has never fallen to zero. Why investors are expected to find such a modest claim reassuring I can’t imagine. But something is persuading people to buy gold, driving the price to and past $1,100 per ounce, from about $270 at the beginning of this decade, and around $700 when the financial crisis first hit.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Kenneth Harney is speculating on what the Federal Housing Authority may have to do to shore up its balance sheet. A few things should be kept in mind about such a move: 1. The FHA has been a main spigot through which the government has been propping up the real estate market (See: Real Time Madness: Watching the FHA Prop Up the Housing Market) 2. The FHA is in real bad shape. John Carney points out: The FHA has expanded from guaranteeing just 2% of mortgages to over 20% in just a couple of years, dramatically...

The TERRY ANDERSON SHOW.. Articulating the Popular Rage! A warrior in the fight against illegal immigration and those who promote it (the Squatter Support Squad) for over a decade! From the streets of Los Angeles to the halls of congress, Terry has been there. No one has the passion and common sense of Terry Anderson...He is A MUST listen! The BEST one hour of radio you'll find anywhere. Sunday Nights- Listen on the radio! 12-1 AM EDT, 11-12 PM CDT, 10-11 PM MDT, 9-10 PM PDT KRLA - 870 AM - Los Angeles -- KDWN - 720 - Las Vegas...

SAN FRANCISCO — In January, Mike Rowland was so broke that he had to raid his retirement savings to move here from Boston. A week ago, he and a couple of buddies bought a two-unit apartment building for nearly a million dollars. They had only a little cash to bring to the table but, with the federal government insuring the transaction, a large down payment was not necessary. “It was kind of crazy we could get this big a loan,” said Mr. Rowland, 27. “If a government official came out here, I would slap him a high-five.” In its efforts...

11/21/09 London, England – Okay! We’ll say what we’ve been thinking… …that our children are going to spit on our graves! First, Americans made a colossal mistake in the ’90s and the ’00s. They partied…they spent…they borrowed…running up huge debts in the private sector. Most kids could forget about inheriting anything from their parents; the geezers spent it years ago. The boomer generation also made a mess of the biggest success story in world history – the United States of America. In the ’60s and ’70s – when boomers matured and began to take over – the US was still...

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” said Blanche DuBois, in the final words of the play A Streetcar Named Desire. Well, don’t we all. Many citizens probably still cling to the old saw that public debt doesn’t matter because “we owe it to ourselves.” Wrong. Debt always matters. And as for whom we owe it to, it is a lot of kind (or, at least, not yet unkind) strangers. As recently as 1970, foreign holders of U.S. debt were essentially non-existent. But their slice of our obligation pie has steadily increased, especially over the past two decades,...

Gov. Rick Perry's campaign, not too surprisingly, pounced on Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's comment on Meet the Press that if Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner deserves to be fired, members of Congress do, too. "Senator Hutchison finally admitted that she is part of the problem with the out-of-control spending in Washington," said Perry spokesman Mark Miner. "After supporting record deficits, bailouts and earmarks during her more than 16 years in Washington, most Texans would agree with the Senator's statement, 'We shouldn't keep our jobs either.'" Hmmm. Doesn't that contradict Perry's old standby that Texas is better off if Hutchison stays in...

The Investigation The vast majority of people who either visit or sell guns at gun shows are law-abiding citizens and dealers. However, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms , and Explosives (ATF) reports that 30 percent of guns involved in federal illegal gun trafficking investigations are connected to gun shows. This multi-state undercover investigation exposed how easy it is for criminals to buy guns at gun shows. The City of New York investigated 7 gun shows in 3 states involving buys from 47 gun sellers using hidden cameras. The investigation videos showed that 35 out of 47 sellers approached by...

These are the emails that should have Professor Phil Jones most worried about his future. Jones, head of the CRU unit whose emails were leaked, has been under most fire so far over one email in particular in which he boasted of using a ‘“trick" to “hide the decline” that would have otherwise spoiled his graph showing temperatures soaring ever-upward. But far more serious - at least in a legal sense - may be his apparent boasting of destroying data to stop sceptics from checking this alarmist work. If, as some emails suggest, he destroyed it to thwart FOI requests...

In a year of job losses, foreclosures and bag lunches, Americans have spent record-breaking amounts of money on guns and ammunition. The most obvious sign of their demand: empty ammunition shelves. At points during the past year, bullets have been selling faster than factories could make them. Gun owners have bought about 12 billion rounds of ammunition in the past year, industry officials estimate. That's up from 7 billion to 10 billion in a normal year.

THOMSON, Ill., Nov. 22 (UPI) -- Thousands of jobs would be created in Illinois if the U.S. government purchases a nearly empty prison there to house terror detainees, a study indicates. The study, performed by the Obama White House Council of Economic Advisers and obtained by The Chicago Sun-Times, asserted that 2,290 to 2,960 jobs would be created in and around Thomson, Ill., in the first year after its conversion to house some of the prisoners now held at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility, the newspaper reported Sunday. Local residents in the Illinois-Iowa border town would be "good candidates"...

New York voters aren’t very optimistic about the financial solvency of their state, but they're also sending their elected representatives mixed signals. They oppose budget cuts in a couple key areas but are against tax hikes even more. A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the state finds that 56% of voters say it is at least somewhat likely that New York will be bankrupt by the end of the year. Twenty-one percent (21%) say it is very likely. Thirty-seven percent (37%) believe that outcome is unlikely, but only nine percent (9%) say it is not at all likely. An...

While U.S. newspapers are losing subscribers at a staggering rate, a few dailies stand out because their circulation is rising. But they aren't necessarily selling more copies. Here's why: Since April 1, new auditing rules have made it easier for newspapers to count a reader as a paying customer. These looser standards are especially helpful to a newspaper if it sells an "electronic edition." That can include a subscriber-only Web site, such as what The Wall Street Journal has, or it can be a digital replica of a newspaper's printed product. Several dozen publications, including USA Today, sell access to...

A New York Times editorial slammed Goldman Sachs for its role in the financial crisis and said that instead of paying big bonuses to its employees it should make a multibillion-dollar gift to help reduce the U.S. national debt. The editorial, published November 21, attacked Goldman for everything from its top executive's failure to apologize properly for his investment bank's part in creating the crisis as well as Goldman's awarding of bonuses related to profits that the paper said were boosted by a government bailout. The Times sniffed at Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein's acknowledgment last week that his bank "participated...

Latinos and African-Americans in Massachusetts and across the country are facing high unemployment rates that could spiral to levels not seen in decades as the jobless economic recovery drags on, analysts and urban community advocates say. At the same time, some big-city mayors and community activists complain that the $787 billion federal stimulus package that the Obama administration promised would preserve or create jobs has not put a significant dent in urban unemployment, threatening to leave blacks and Latinos behind when the economy finally turns around. The Congressional Black Caucus and civil rights organizations are calling for a targeted aid...

On Fox's Nov. 22 "Fox News Sunday," former "Special Report" anchor and Fox News senior political correspondent was dead spot on target in many regards when it came to criticizing the tack President Barack Obama has taken with his foreign policy gestures. First, Hume reflected on how Obama reacted on his trip to Asia last week. He noted that Obama was in a tough position, having to rely on borrowed Chinese money. However, "embracing weakness" was not the proper way for Obama to represent the country in Hume's view (emphasis added). "Look, the president is in a weaker position than...

Financial And Economic Situation Could Get Ugly Fast Economics / Economic Stimulus Nov 21, 2009 - 03:27 AM By: Mike_Whitney Things could get ugly fast. With the Democrats backing-off on a second round of stimulus, the Fed signaling an end to quantitative easing, and Obama moaning about rising deficits; there's a good chance that the stumbling recovery could turn into another sharp plunge. Bank lending is shrinking, consumers spending is off, housing prices are falling, unemployment is soaring and the wholesale credit markets are in a shambles. This isn't the time to slash government support in the name of "fiscal...

Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming. While few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world's climate -- nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal -- public debate persists. And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain's Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US retailers are taking desperate measures to spark holiday sales in the face of what promises to be another troubled year-end shopping season. Merchants are furiously working to ramp up consumer interest ahead of "Black Friday," on November 27, the day after the Thanksgiving Day holiday that marks the traditional kickoff of the holiday gift season. Some are promising price cuts of 50 percent or more on some hot electronics, and planning for big events to bring out shoppers for big sales promotions.