Free Republic

The head of the Bundesbank appealed to Britain on Wednesday to stay in the European Union, saying membership of the bloc had given the country an economic lift and posed little threat to London. In a speech to business people and bankers in central London, Jens Weidmann broke the central bank’s traditional silence on political questions, saying the European Union would benefit if Britain “continues to make its voice heard”. “The EU is stronger today because of Britain’s contribution to it,” Weidmann said, adding that the country’s trade with EU neighbors had been boosted by more than half because of...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —In recent years, gun sales have gone through the roof out of fear gun laws would drastically change, but they didn’t.

Although Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said nothing new in her carefully manicured semi-annual testimony to Congress last week, her performance there, taken within the context of a lengthy profile in the New Yorker (that came to press at around the same time), should confirm that she is very different from any of her predecessors in the job. Put simply, she is likely the most dovish and politically leftist Fed Chair in the Central Bank's history. While her tenure thus far may feel like a seamless extension of the Greenspan/Bernanke era, investors should understand how much further Yellen is likely to...

We featured FXI, a general Chinese exchange-traded fund (ETF), a little more than a month ago, and that fund’s upward climb warrants us looking at other ETFs focused on that huge emerging market. To that end, today’s ETF Talk will introduce you to two ETFs, with each fund tracking different areas of China’s market: small caps and the consumer. Guggenheim China Small Cap ETF (HAO) traces the results of an index that follows publicly traded small capitalization companies based in mainland China. In other words, HAO profits on the success of smaller publicly traded Chinese companies. While this fund is...

The planned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the US threatens the concept of sustainable food security, the development NGO Brot für die Welt announced at a presentation of its annual report, in Berlin. Development politicians agree: The key to fighting world hunger is strengthening smallholders in developing and newly industrialized countries. “With the planned TTIP agreement, the EU and US are not only defining rules on trade between each other, but indirectly also respective trade with third states,” said Cornelia Füllkrug-Weitzel, President of Brot für die Welt. The two large trade powers “could intensify pressure...

The New Jersey Turnpike Authority has filed a lawsuit to get a Florida pizza company to stop using logos similar to Garden State Parkway signs. The suit, filed this week in federal court in Newark, claims Jersey Boardwalk Pizza is infringing on the authority's service marks with its signage online and at its Tavernier and Florida City, Fla., shops.

At 74,000 pages, the IRS code is a mind-boggling ode to lobbying, pork-barrel spending and graft. These are the only good things that I can say about the IRS. Ode may be too friendly a word, however. Let’s instead call it an incantation for our country. Because the code holds a country in thrall like the winged monkeys in Dorothy’s Oz were held. And until the witch is dead, we monkeys must do her bidding. Politicians, economists and ordinary citizens can’t follow the tax code, which has tripped up cabinet nominees, majority leaders and others who ought to know...

Terrible ideas never really die on the Left; they just come back over and over again, like a gas station sandwich after a night of heavy drinking. So it is with reparations for slavery, which liberals would happily embrace en masse if they ever thought they could ram it through Congress. Here's why reparations for slavery are a bad idea. 1) How do you prove that slavery is responsible for problems black Americans are having today? If it were 1866, it would be easy to prove that black Americans who had been enslaved were hurt by the practice. They were...

As I was watching the video clip of Jonathan Gruber talking about state-based exchanges and subsidies last night I came across another admission which deserves some attention. A few minutes later in the Q&A following his January 18, 2012 speech, Gruber admits that the public option was an attempt to slip single-payer into the Affordable Care Act.(VIDEO-AT-LINK)So I like the public option. The public option is actually the brainchild of another academic, a guy named Jacob Hacker who's at Yale. And the public option, basically it was a clever idea. He said look, the left wants single-payer, the right wants...

More than half of the jobs currently being done in Germany could be taken over by robots in the next 20 years, according to a think-tank. The study from Brussels think-tank Bruegel found 51 percent of jobs in Germany at the moment could be computerized and left to robots in the next two decades. European countries most at risk from this computerization were Romania (62 percent) and Italy, Poland, Bulgaria and Greece - all 56 percent. The exact affect this could have on unemployment rates is unclear because as technology takes over, new jobs are created, meaning those who lose...

The number of people without a job in France rose in June to a new record. The Labour Ministry said the unemployment total in mainland France rose by 9,400 to 3,398,300. That is a 4.0 percent increase on June last year and up 0.3 percent from May. It is another blow to Socialist President Francois Hollande.

Recall what we said earlier today: the proxy Ukraine war just like that in Syria preceding it, "is all about energy." Recall also the following chart showing Ukraine's shale gas deposits, keeping in mind that the Dnieper-Donets basin which lies in the hotly contested eastern part of the nation and where as everyone knows by now a bloody civil war is raging, is the major oil and gas producing region of Ukraine accounting for approximately 90 per cent of Ukrainian production and according to EIA may have 42 tcf of shale gas resources technically recoverable from 197 tcf of risked...

The chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Chairman is calling on President Obama to cut off all business pending between the Export-Import Bank and Russia because of the nation’s recent actions in Ukraine. “The situation in Ukraine grows worse every day,” wrote Texas U.S. Rep. Jeb Hensarling in a letter to Obama, Sec. of State John Kerry, Sec. of Treasury Jack Lew, and others. “Russia bears responsibility for this conflict, including the atrocity of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, because Russia is supplying the separatists with advanced weapons and encouraging their attacks on aircraft and on the...

Soon there will be three anti-Clinton books on the market, which is apparently enough to have gotten under the skin of Team Hillary. The First Family Detail by Ronald Kessler, set for release next month, will join Clinton, Inc. by the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper and Blood Feud by Ed Klein on bookshelves. Yesterday we reported that Clinton, Inc. has shot up the charts and now both Halper and Klein’s books are outselling Hillary Clinton’s recent memoir Hard Choices. “With Klein, Halper and Kessler, we now have a Hat Trick of despicable actors concocting trashy nonsense,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill...

A $137 million three-mile train is coming to a nearly deserted avenue in a bankrupt city. Growing up in the 1940s, Robert Fogelson remembers banging on the typewriter and peering out the window at his father’s office in a Manhattan skyscraper. Then "[my dad] would take us for lunch to a nearby Schraft’s, a chain of restaurants that was popular with housewives like my mother, who regularly went downtown to shop…to socialize ...or to meet my father for a play or a movie." Fogelson hadn’t decided yet what he would do with his life, "[b]ut I took it for granted,"...

Changes are coming to Wisconsin's Do Not Call Registry effective Aug. 1, the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection said Friday. Users will no longer be required to register their phone numbers every two years, and their numbers will be placed on the national list aimed at preventing unwanted telemarketing calls and text messages. Consumers can sign up once and not have to worry about whether their registrations lapse. Also, new registrations will be handled by the Federal Trade Commission's national Do Not Call list, and those registrations will become effective the following day rather than weeks later,...

Just the other day when I was home in Dunn, a woman standing in the checkout line told me that she felt as though she had less money in her pocket. And, unfortunately, she’s right. Did you know that the average clothing cost for children has risen $310 during the president’s term and that food costs have risen an average of $210? Or that an average family of four is missing as much as $1,120 from their monthly budget? I bet women do. No one understands the true implications of these missing dollars better than women. Women are the ones...

Ever since AT&T Inc. CEO Randall Stephenson revealed in March that his company would bring its ultra-high-speed broadband service to the Dallas area this summer, potential customers — and there appear to be many — have wanted more specifics. What neighborhoods will get the service and exactly when? Four months later, there are still few specifics. But AT&T did indicate Thursday which areas of the Dallas-Fort Worth region will receive its U-verse With GigaPower service later this summer. The company said the initial launch will include parts of Highland Park and University Park, with upload and download speeds of up...

Google has signed a deal to buy game-livestreaming firm Twitch for $1 billion, confirmed sources familiar with the matter. We don’t know everything about this deal, such as when it will be announced and the exact purchase price. We do know that...

President Barack Obama said Thursday that American companies performing tax "inversions" are not doing right by their country. Obama said that these companies, which buy foreign firms to technically change their tax domicile to a country with a lower tax rate, benefit from America's university system and infrastructure, but then turn around and "game the system." He told CNBC exclusively that, despite the legality of this corporate practice, inversions are not fair. "You are an American company. You continue to benefit in all kinds of ways from being an American company," the president said. "It is true that there are...