Free Republic

China has become a banking powerhouse. Four of the five largest banks in the world are Chinese, according to SNL Financial’s latest global bank rankings. It’s a big change from the past few years when only two Chinese banks made the top five. Beijing-based Industrial & Commercial Bank of China holds the top spot with assets valued at $3.5 trillion. That means the bank is worth more than the entire value of the British economy. The only non-Chinese bank remaining in the top five is HSBC, which is eadquartered in London. It fell several spots to position No. 4 this...

Well, it’s that time again – time to get out the Christmas list and start hitting the stores. The problem is – what stores? For any Christian who wants to spend hard-earned dollars with family-friendly, Christian-affirming retailers, restaurants and service providers, the list is growing shorter all the time. I stopped shopping at Macy’s in 2011 after learning about the retailer’s grossly unjust policy against women. Macy’s management said “yes” to a transsexual young man’s demand to change in the women’s dressing room and rejected a Christian employee’s attempt to block his inappropriate access, even firing her because of her...

One by one, the giant investment funds are quietly switching out of government bonds, the most overpriced assets on the planet. Nobody wants to be caught flat-footed if the latest surge in the global money supply finally catches fire and ignites reflation, closing the chapter on our strange Lost Decade of secular stagnation. The Norwegian Pension Fund, the world's top sovereign wealth fund, is rotating a chunk of its $860bn of assets into property in London, Paris, Berlin, Milan, New York, San Francisco and now Tokyo and East Asia. "Every real estate investment deal we do is funded by sales...

On Friday, during a campaign stop in Harlan, Iowa, Ted Cruz made clear his stance on President Obama's Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), telling a crowd of supporters that the colossal 12 nation trade accord was "deeply concerning." "There are a number of Republicans on that [debate] stage who support TPP, who support [Trade Promotion Authority (TPA)]," Cruz said, according to the Des Moines Register. "I voted against TPA, and I intend to vote against TPP." Now that the 5,594-page text of the TPP has been made public, grassroots conservatives are voicing their case against the deal, and Cruz is staking...

In an article celebrating the incestuous relationship of a brother and sister who met for the first time as adults, Cosmopolitan magazine defies “the last taboo” and argues that, by virtue of shared genetics, a brother and sister coupling creates a “perfect storm” that others might be missing out on.The leftwing publication has a history of pushing liberal social causes—whether its celebrating a woman who posted on Facebook a video of herself having an abortion, advocating for gender neutral restrooms, or praising the Kardashian/Jenner family as “America’s First Family.” Now Cosmo is pushing the taboo of incest and seemingly overlooking...

Blue Origin, the private space firm owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, has just dropped a huge gauntlet in the race to develop a reusable rocket. It just launched its New Shepard space vehicle (video, below), consisting of a BE-3 rocket and crew capsule, to the edge of space at a suborbital altitude of 100.5 kilometers (62 miles). The capsule then separated and touched down beneath a parachute, but more importantly, the BE-3 rocket also started its own descent. After the rockets fired at nearly 5,000 feet, it made a a controlled vertical landing at a gentle 4.4 mph. So far,...

don’t often write about global geopolitics because I think, in general, investors spend too much time worrying about things they can’t control or aren’t going to happen or wouldn’t matter much if they did. The best example is the Middle East which has been a mess my entire life and long before it for that matter. Changing your investments based on the latest threat in or from the Levant is a recipe for constant chaos. The only accurate prediction about the Middle East will always be that the various factions that have been fighting for centuries will continue to fight....

President Obama declared Tuesday that next week’s climate change summit in Paris would be a “powerful rebuke” to terrorists, speaking alongside French President Francois Hollande at a joint news conference. “Next week, I will be joining President Hollande and world leaders in Paris for the global climate conference,” Obama said during his prepared remarks, which focused mostly on the efforts to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). “What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be, when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for...

Young people are on track to be poorer than their parents at every stage of their lives, according to a new report. The study, by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), added that households actually grew richer during the financial crisis. But it said that the reason for the growth between 2006-12 was the increase in pension values over the period. And the slow rate of growth in overall wealth suggested that young people would lag behind earlier generations....

Mechanical engineering student James Patrick recently uploaded a video to his YouTube channel showing off the fully functional PM522 Washbear .22LR revolver that he designed and 3D printed. With the exception of the firing pin, a few elastic bands that act as springs and the legally required amount of detectable metal, the entire gun including the body and cylinder is completely 3D printed. This is, to my knowledge, the very first functional repeating firearm ever made entirely (This doesn’t count, it has metal barrel inserts) on a desktop 3D printer. The optional 8 barrel revolver needs metal tubing inserts for...

A German professor has confirmed what skeptics from Britain to the US have long suspected: that NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies has largely invented “global warming” by tampering with the raw temperature data records. Professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert is a retired geologist and data computation expert. He has painstakingly examined and tabulated all NASA GISS’s temperature data series, taken from 1153 stations and going back to 1881. His conclusion: that if you look at the raw data, as opposed to NASA’s revisions, you’ll find that since 1940 the planet has been cooling, not warming. According to Günter Ederer,...

Consumers confidence fell in November to the lowest level in more than a year, a survey shows. The consumer confidence index dropped to 90.4 from a revised 99.1 in October, the Conference Board said Tuesday. That's the lowest level since September 2014. Economists polled by MarketWatch had expected the index to rise to 100. The present situation index, a measure of current conditions, dropped to 108.1 from 114.6. .... "The decline was mainly due to a less favorable view of the job market," said Lynn Franco, director of economic indicators at board. The number of people who said jobs were...

Americans are losing faith in the jobs market. The Conference Board's consumer confidence index for November, released on Tuesday, unexpectedly fell to 90.4, a 14-month low. Economists had estimated that the index rose to 99.5 in November, from an upwardly revised 99.1 print (from 97.6) in October. The Conference Board's Lynn Franco explained in the report: "The decline was mainly due to a less favorable view of the job market. Consumers' appraisal of current business conditions, on the other hand, was mixed. Fewer consumers said conditions had improved, while the proportion saying conditions had deteriorated also declined. Heading into 2016,...

Tax Policy: The Pfizer-Allergan deal that will let the U.S. drug giant cut costs by renouncing its citizenship cries out for reform of an outmoded business tax system. Instead, our crackerjack regulators are pouncing into action. The Treasury Department has announced it will create new legal restrictions on the ability of U.S. companies to merge with foreign firms in a tax-saving process called "inversion." In this case, $48-billion-in sales Pfizer, now headquartered in New York City, will merge with $15-billion-in sales Allergan and move certain operations and jobs to Ireland. But the administration wants to build a de facto regulatory...

If the 2016 election is not determined by the economy, Republicans will lose. And as things look right now, they might even lose if it is about the economy. The reason for both conclusions is simple: Barack Obama has given Republicans the best chance for victory any president could — a weak economy — but so far they've been unable to seize it. As measured by growth, Obama's economic record is the worst of any president since Herbert Hoover. Real GDP came in at 1.5% in the third quarter, leaving average growth year-to-date at just 2%. If 2015 finished there,...

How monstrous will the mainstream media get before the whole thing breaks apart? No telling. But this indicates that it is certainly descending to the murky depths already.“CNN Reporter: Parisians Shaken Because This Time It Wasn’t Just Jews Targeted, ‘This Was Just People,’” by Jamie Weinstein, Daily Caller, November 24, 2015:A CNN reporter says that what really has shaken the people of Paris in the aftermath of the Nov. 13 terror attacks is that this time those killed by Islamist terrorists weren’t just Jews or provocative cartoonists.Talking to CNN host Don Lemon Monday night, reporter Martin Savidge tried to convey...

Dell laptops are coming preloaded with a self-signed root digital certificate that lets attackers spy on traffic to any secure website. The reports first surfaced on Reddit and were soon confirmed by other users and security experts on Twitter and blogs. The root certificate, which has the power of a certificate authority on the laptops it's installed on, comes bundled with its corresponding private key, making the situation worse. With the private key, which is now available online, anyone can generate a certificate for any website that will be trusted by browsers such as Internet Explorer and Google Chrome that...

PJ Media has an interesting piece on Ted Cruz when he was developing economic policy as the director of the Federal Trade Commission's Office of Policy Planning. PJ Media | What No One Seems to Know About Ted Cruz’s Past (A few highlights, read the article for the meat in between.)– Cruz launched an initiative to study the government's role in conspiring with established businesses to suppress e-commerce. – To lay a foundation, Cruz organized a conference on regulatory barriers to e-commerce.– After the conference, Cruz testified at a hearing supporting the online sales of contact lenses and pushed the...

While millions of Americans prepare to stuff themselves with Turkey and pie, the Obama administration quietly released its plans for 2,224 federal rules Friday - a preview of just how many more regulations the president is attempting to issue before he leaves office. President Barack Obama's Unified Agenda for Fall 2015 is his administration's regulatory road map and lays out thousands of regulations being finalized in the coming months. Obama has developed a habit of releasing the agenda late on Friday before a major holiday.

What No One Seems to Know About Ted Cruz's Past At the FTC, Cruz's agenda could have been written by Milton Friedman. Cruz promoted economic liberty and fought government efforts to rig the marketplace in favor of special interests. Most notably, Cruz launched an initiative to study the government's role in conspiring with established businesses to suppress e-commerce. This initiative ultimately led the U.S. Supreme Court to open up an entire industry to small e-tailers. Based on his early support of disruptive online companies, Cruz has some grounds to call himself the "Uber of American politics." Moreover, and perhaps surprising...