Free Republic

How online auctioneer EnergyNet helps bring liquidity, and recovery, to America’s busted oil patch. In the first 18 months of the oil bust, 70 companies have gone bankrupt, defaulting on $40 billion in debt. A trillion dollars of oil company equity has been wiped out. Layoffs top 200,000. With oil holding at around $45 a barrel, more liquidations are on the way. Already the old guys swear this bust is worse than in 1986, when oil dropped below $25 in today’s dollars. At least one thing is better now: Thanks to the magic of the Internet, it’s easier for cash-strapped...

Broad demographic shifts in marital status, educational attainment and employment have transformed the way young adults in the U.S. are living, and a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data highlights the implications of these changes for the most basic element of their lives – where they call home. In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household. 1 This turn of events is fueled primarily...

May 31, 2016 Jeff_Berwick It seems barely a day passes now without some big name person warning of imminent collapse. The latest is Alan Greenspan. In an interview on Thursday he told Fox News that Venezuela is now under martial law and that “America is next.” He said that what was happening in Venezuela was inevitably going to take place in the US. I agree with this. In fact, we said this exact thing just last week with our article, “Venezuela Descends Into Chaos… Europe and US Next.” Funny enough, a few brainwashed sheeple said we were crazy for saying...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) A Texas Department of Transportation official said the state would need $38 billion to pay off debt linked to dozens of toll roads and make the highways free to drivers. Executive director James Bass updated a Texas House panel in Austin. The 2015 Legislature ordered TxDOT to report on the status of Texas toll roads. A final report is due in September.

Chinese banks sitting on $1.7 trillion debt time bomb by business reporter Stephen Letts Chinese banks are looking down the barrel of a staggering RMB 8 trillion - or $1.7 trillion - worth of losses according to the French investment bank Societe Generale. Put another way, 60 per cent of capital in China's banks is at risk as authorities start the delicate and dangerous process of reining in the debt-bloated and unprofitable state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector. Disturbingly though, debt is not only not shrinking, it is accelerating, making the eventual reckoning far worse. China's overall non-financial debt grew by 15.2...

China’s financial system The coming debt bust It is a question of when, not if, real trouble will hit in China May 7th 2016 | From the print edition Timekeeper CHINA was right to turn on the credit taps to prop up growth after the global financial crisis. It was wrong not to turn them off again. The country’s debt has increased just as quickly over the past two years as in the two years after the 2008 crunch. Its debt-to-GDP ratio has soared from 150% to nearly 260% over a decade, the kind of surge that is usually followed...

Last quarter, over 86% of energy sector operating profits were used to cover the interest payments on debt. U.S. energy sector (XLE) is facing $370 billion of debt, a number that has more than doubled in the past decade. But even as oil rebounds off 13-year lows, many energy companies are struggling to stay afloat. To simply make the interest payments on the debt, energy companies shelled out $16.7 billion last year—about half of their total operating profit, according to data compiled by FactSet and Yahoo Finance. The figures from the past quarter are increasingly grim: over 86% of energy...

Central banks are dumping America’s debt at a record pace. China, Russia and Brazil sold off U.S. Treasury bonds as they tried to soften the blow of the global economic slowdown. They each sold off at least $1 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds in March. In all, central banks sold a net $17 billion. Sales had hit a record $57 billion in January. So far this year, the global bank debt dump has reached $123 billion. It’s the fastest pace for a U.S. debt selloff by global central banks since at least 1978, according to Treasury Department data published Monday...

the public pension debt for the 50 states and the District of Columbia jumped 84 percent in recent years, from $2.625 trillion in 2008 to $4.833 trillion in 2014. ... The highest pension debt/household is in Alaska, with an estimated $113,137 figure; Illinois and California are in the second and third highest rankings at more than $77,000 per household.” The lowest state pension debt per household is in Tennessee at $17,761. Illinois has the lowest “market funded ratio” (value of pension assets divided by market liability), at 23.3 percent. The other 49 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. have a market...

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew got a first-hand look at the humanitarian impact of Puerto Rico's $70 billion debt crisis, touring an elementary school struggling with limited electricity and a hospital unable to provide some basic services to infants....... Garcia said that Puerto Rico is not asking for a bailout and has not been offered one...... "If Congress does not act then we will need a bailout, and it will be very expensive to U.S. taxpayers," he said.

Donald Trump says Puerto Rico has "far far too much debt," and the U.S. government shouldn't bail out the island....... Puerto Rico is in crisis mode. It has run up $70 billion in debt, a staggering amount for an island of under 3.5 million people..... "You have to cut the debt way down and get back to business," he said.

Since Boehner and Ryan took over the finances of the federal government we have seen the national debt keep growing. It's now 19.188 trillion. How will we pay this and the exponentially growing interest? The taxpayers are tapped out. The disciples of Bernie are wanting to burn even more dough. But it will be years before the Treasury will bring in enough revenue to cover the already accumulated deficit and interest obligations before it can spend another penny except through more borrowing.

<p>Reminds me of something Mike Murphy said about Trump in the aftermath of Jeb’s collapse. The logic in favor of nominating another Bush was always, er, complicated, but the logic against nominating a loose cannon is straightforward.</p> <p>I’ll bet even Murphy didn’t think Trump would advertise the possibility that America’s creditors might not receive payment in full in a Trump administration. Choose your own preferred term for what he’s recommending here — renegotiation, bankruptcy, default.</p>

One day after assuring Americans he is not running for president “to make things unstable for the country,” the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, said in a television interview Thursday that he might seek to reduce the national debt by persuading creditors to accept something less than full payment. Asked whether the United States needed to pay its debts in full, or whether he could negotiate a partial repayment, Mr. Trump told the cable network CNBC, “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.” He added, “And if the economy was good, it...

In the six months that have passed since then-retiring House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell cut a budget deal with President Barack Obama that suspended the legal limit on the federal debt until March 15, 2017, the federal debt has increased by more than $1 trillion. The Senate passed “The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015” with a vote held in the early morning hours of Friday, Oct. 30. Obama signed it on Monday, Nov. 2. At the close business on Oct. 30, 2015, the total federal debt was $18,152,981,685,747.52. By the close of business on April...

Atlantic City has so little money left that it could miss a $1.8 million bond payment due Sunday, a step that would make it the first New Jersey municipality to default on debt since the Great Depression. The Jersey Shore gambling destination has endured years of strain as a third of its casinos shut down. But now its cash levels are low enough that bankruptcy is a possibility for the 39,000-population city, according to Mayor Don Guardian.

"...Icahn, who Trump had previously suggested could serve as his Treasury secretary, warned that markets will have a "day of reckoning" without fiscal stimulus, and argued that the U.S. government "certainly could do more spending." "The Republican Party that I used to be more sympathetic with — I'm right in the middle now, although as you know I'm for Trump — but what I would say is Congress is in this massive gridlock," he said, explaining that the Republican-controlled body is "obsessed with this deficit to a point that I think it's almost pathological..." "

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected a whopping $500 billion loss in revenue for the Gulf nations in 2016, which is 30 percent more than the $390 billion lost in 2015. The massive shortfall has crippled the gulf economies, which are facing record budget deficits and seeking external funding to overcome it. Many experts believe that $100 per barrel oil prices are history, and we might not revisit those prices for more than a decade. It implies that the recent crisis will not end as quickly as the downturn in 2007-2009. The oil-dependent nations will have to figure out...

RIYADH—Saudi Arabia, crimped by low crude prices, approved Monday a long-term blueprint for the kingdom’s economic transformation aimed at reducing its dependence on oil. The multiyear plan, dubbed “Saudi Vision 2030,” was approved by the cabinet, according to Saudi Arabia’s monarch, King Salman. The Saudi cabinet, in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, said the government’s economic council would be in charge of overseeing the vision’s implementation. Saudi officials later Monday were to present a broad overview of the country’s most extensive economic shake-up in decades. The steep drop in oil prices has given new urgency to...

Since this is an election year, you’re hearing a lot about the size of the national debt — and the financial imperative to expunge it before it gets passed on to our kids and grandkids. Donald Trump ... ...suggested earlier that it would be possible to pay off the entire national debt in about eight years... ...the only way to advance the debate is to get past the myths... #1) The federal government’s books are not like a family’s finances ...put yourself in the position of the government. Say you earn the typical American family income, and you spend and...