Free Republic

Cardigan Council bosses have been struggling to find £22,500 needed to repair the four pay-and-display machines in the Welsh town's main carpark - much to the delight of shopkeepers who have reported a rush of shoppers enjoying hours of free parking. The vandalism has accidentally exposed the fact that parking meters, far from generating revenue for a town, appear to cripple trade and kill town centres. Locals and visitors to the picturesque town with a Norman castle have been thronging the town which had previously seen a dearth of shoppers due to having to pay for a limited amount of...

2016: If only Wall Street bankers had listened to St. Hillary during the subprime mortgage frenzy. She now claims she warned about the risky loans. Yep, a Clinton actually went there. Her campaign may regret it. While bashing Wall Street for risky acts and "criminal behavior," Clinton in her first economic stump speech portrayed herself as the voice of financial sanity in a casino of wild greed. "As we all know, in the years before the crash, financial firms piled risk upon risk," she intoned, "and regulators in Washington either wouldn't or couldn't keep up. "I was alarmed by this...

U.S. stock futures ticked higher on Wednesday, with a note of caution taking hold ahead of a speech by U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to Congress later in the day. Second-quarter earnings season, a key vote in Greece's parliament to pass legislation needed to secure a third bailout and renewed turbulence in China's stock market were also in focus. Having closed higher on Tuesday, stock futures pointed to a slightly positive open for Wall Street shares with Dow Jones industrial futures up just 10 points in early London trade. Fed chief Yellen appears before the House Financial Services Committee...

U.S. stock markets were tipped to open higher on Monday following news that Greece and its international creditors have reached a bailout agreement. European Council President Donald Tusk said early on Monday that euro zone leaders reached an unanimous agreement with Greece after all-night talks in Brussels to move forward with a bailout loan for Greece provided Athens implement tough reforms. "Markets have responded very positively to the news, which comes following months of uncertainty and increasing fears that Greece could suffer a messy exit from the euro zone," Craig Erlam, a senior market analyst at currency trading firm OANDA....

It’s a progressive paradise.Public employees get 30 vacation days a year. Anyone who works over eight hours in a day gets paid time-and-a-half. Employees have strong rights.The minimum wage is high: 77 percent of the median wage.Environmental regulations are settled beyond the pressure of local economic interests. The forests and mountains are pristine destinations for ecotourism.Energy costs are kept high, pushing consumption down to a level deemed “socially beneficial”. Utilities have strong public backing and provide jobs to thousands.Union jobs in shipping are protected from outsourcing to cut-rate foreign competitors.The social safety net is buoyant and provides a solid working-class standard...

LONDON (Reuters) - The dollar was near a three-week high on Thursday and world stock markets had a delicate feel, as the implication of U.S. jobs data later for a possible Fed rate hike added to Europe's uncertainty over Greece. Chinese shares also remained in focus as they suffered another heavy tumble overnight to take their loses over the last six weeks to 25 percent, countering otherwise solid performances in the rest of Asia's main centres.Europe's main bourses in London, Frankfurt and Paris and Milan opened largely flat having rallied on Wednesday but the mood remained skittish after hopes of...

...Federal Reserve chair told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday the central bank is in no hurry to raise interest rates. Yellen once again stressed the word "patience." On Wednesday, she appears before the House of Representatives' Financial Services Committee. Yellen talked about a solid and improving economy but also about disappointing labor force participation and anemic wage growth. She said it would be several months before the Fed would boost rates. Stocks soared on the news with both the S&P 500 and Dow closing at record highs. The Nasdaq also saw healthy gains and is now less than 1%...

Facebook now offers more than 50 ways for users to identify their gender. Says one exec, “Gender neutral is kind of the new thing.” With Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn, transgender issues have become front and center in the mainstream cultural conversation. But among many young people, there is a much bigger conversation going on about gender. The whole notion of “binary” — female and male — gender norms is being seen as limiting, and unnecessary. At elite liberal arts colleges like Vassar and Wesleyan, students have earnest conversations about gender being a “social construct,” and bathrooms are “gender neutral,”...

The deepening Greek crisis hit global markets on Monday, as the country imposed capital controls ahead of a national referendum on creditors' bailout conditions. Uncertainty surrounding the country's economic future dragging equity markets lower. European markets were trading sharply lower, with the pan-European Stoxx 600 (^STOXX) falling around 2.4 percent in morning trade. Both Germany's DAX (^GDAXI) and France's CAC (Euronext Paris: .FCHI) fell nearly 3.5 percent. U.S. futures also indicated a lower open, with the Nasdaq (^NDX), S&P (^GSPC) and Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow Jones Global Indexes: .DJI) all seen opening down over 1 percent. Greece's main stock...

With the rise of flexible working schedules, the freelance economy, and video conferencing, more Americans are getting their jobs done without ever heading into an office, according to new data from the American Time Use Survey released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among all workers, 23% report spending all or part of their day working from home. That’s up from less than 19% in 2003, the first year for which there’s comparable data.

I would love to patronize Freeper-owned or conservative-owned businesses online and brick-and-mortar stores. Are there any Freepers who own one or could point me in the right direction? I wish we had a "Classified Ad" thing here on FR.

Civil Rights: The Supreme Court has given the White House license to water down, if not destroy, virtually every standard dealing with housing. There's nothing stopping its push for affirmative-action lending and zoning. In a shocking 5-4 decision, the high bench ruled that housing- and lending-discrimination lawsuits based on no proof other than statistics showing different outcomes by minority groups are within the bounds of civil-rights law. It agreed with housing-rights zealots that zoning and underwriting policies that have a harmful effect — or disparate impact — on minorities are illegal, even if that harm is unintentional. Sometime-conservative Anthony Kennedy...

The U.S. economy contracted in the first three months of the year, just not as much as previously estimated. More recent data show that the weakness was largely temporary, with a rebound in the works for the April-June quarter. The economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, shrank at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 0.2 percent from January through March, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. That's better than last month's estimate of a 0.7 percent decrease. Harsh winter weather slowed spending by keeping consumers away from shopping malls and auto dealerships. The trade deficit ballooned, slicing growth by...

Juncker called the latest proposals from Greece a "good basis for progress", while EU Economic Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said he was "convinced" agreement will be reached. Spain's finance minister Luis de Guindos said a deal was not possible on Monday, however, meaning it may be the scheduled leaders summit on Thursday before any agreement is reached. Investors appeared willing to give the protagonists in the saga the benefit of the doubt. "The odds seem to shift in favor of a compromise," said Rainer Guntermann, rates strategist at Commerzbank. At mid-session in Europe, Germany's DAX .GDAXI and France's CAC 40 .FCHI...

We've got a secret the rental car companies would prefer you didn't know. people camping in RV More The Cheapest Way to Roadtrip Might Surprise You 3 Ways to Avoid Costly Rental Car Insurance These Are the Most Hated Fees in America This won’t come as news to commuters and frequent road trippers, but drivers are encountering more and more toll roads, as well as higher and higher tolls on the existing ones. The latest example is I-10 in Texas, where plans called for the maximum toll during peak travel hours to shoot from $7 to $10 as of May...

U.S. flags fly over the New York Stock Exchange early Tuesday morning Jan. 22, 2008. Seven years after the financial crisis (and six years after Warren Buffett declared it to be over), Americans are still leery of getting back into stocks. That's the upshot of a poll recently released by Gallup, which confirmed that while no longer quite as negative on stocks as they were a couple of years ago, American investors still haven't returned to the levels of stock ownership seen before the crisis -- or even in its immediate aftermath. Once Burned, Still Shy In the run-up...

A recent study by three researchers at the IMF addresses an important question: Under what circumstances should a country pay down its public debt? When countries face fiscal crises, they have no choice but to cut debt. When they need a Keynesian stimulus, they end up raising debt. But what about a country that is not at risk of a fiscal crisis and is near full employment - a country that is in what the researchers call "the green zone?" Should it pay down its debt (reduce its deficit) or pursue other objectives like public investment?The IMF researchers write down...

...profit-seeking marketmakers are much too smart to be so easily fooled by the Fed’s monetary machinations; they can look through (and past) the Fed’s artificial policies and unearth the real state of things. The opposite view, from “behavioral finance,” holds that policymakers are omniscient and omnipotent preventers and fixers of “market failure”.In our judgment, U.S. nominal bond yields have declined in recent years not due to Fed money printing but due to three main factors: 1) steady disinflation,2 2) a persistent decline in market expectations of the long-term real return on capital,3 and 3) the Fed’s seemingly interminable zero interest-rate...

Do Americans face a future of living standards that don't grow as fast as they once did or, worse yet, even decline? Previous generations might have scoffed at the question. Becoming better off in terms of consumption per capita was something of a birthright, the result of decades of progress that put Americans at the top of the heap with average spending of $32,000 a year.But the long-established optimism has faded in recent years — and we have only ourselves to blame. The country has strayed from the economic model that created a consumer cornucopia. We're living above our means,...

EPA has abandoned its duty of protecting American citizens from health hazards introduced into the environment to that of protecting the environment from American citizens' good health and welfare Some twenty states, power utilities and mining industries, having taken the hard-nosed measure of suing the EPA for destroying business, grip the edge of their seats anticipating three decisions from the Supreme Court this month. That there is need to bring suit against governmental agencies for damage incurred by overbearing regulation is wrong in itself, but the role reversal these cases exemplify is the true travesty. America has turned so upside-down...