Free Republic

Federal Reserve officials said the shedding of the $4.5 trillion in bonds the central bank is holding on its balance sheet will begin this year. The revelation came Wednesday from a summary of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting held in March, during which the group approved a quarter-point hike in its benchmark interest rate target. Officials at the meeting noted that the Fed likely is on a faster pace with rate hikes ahead. Unwinding the balance sheet is significant both because of its sheer size and the impact it could have on markets, as Fed members including Chair Janet...

President Donald Trump vowed on Tuesday to cut red tape to speed up approval of infrastructure projects and said his overhaul could top $1 trillion on roads, tunnels and bridges, one of his 2016 election campaign promises. Trump, a real estate businessman before he was elected, did not provide further details on the amount or where the money would come from. Trump said building a highway can require dozens of approvals and take 10 to 20 years, a process he vowed to speed up. Trump said he would not fund projects that cannot be started within 90 days. The administration...

The US current account deficit shrank dramatically in Q4.Beating expectations of -$129 billion by 8 standard deviations, the $112.4 billion print is the smallest deficit since Q2 2015. So 30 economists were way off the estimate with both trade and capital inflows improving -  the balance of goods and services deficit widened to $132.32b (compared to $116.23b prior quarter), and the balance on primary income widened to $61.5b (compared to $41.6b prior quarter).The current account deficit represents 2.4% of gross domestic product in the fourth quarter after 2.5% in the prior quarter.This smaller-than-expected current account balance is a positive for...

Federal Gov't owns about 750 million acres of land ( excluding Alaska ). Much of this land is low value, but a surprising amount is in high value areas. If the Feds sold off 1/2 their property at average price of $50,000 per acre that would generate about $20 trillion. This would be enough to retire the entire national debt. What are Freepers thoughts' ?

Yesterday I told you that the US government had recently released its annual financial report to the public.And the numbers are pretty gruesome.For example, the government’s “net loss” in fiscal year 2016 more than doubled, from MINUS $467 billion to MINUS $1 trillion.It’s astonishing that anyone could manage to lose so much money, let alone in a year where devoid of major wars, recessions, financial crises, or infrastructure projects.But what else can we expect from an institution that spent billions of dollars to build a website?Today I wanted to highlight a few other items from the government’s report that are...

The United States ran a merchandise trade deficit of $734,316,300,000 in 2016, according to data released today by the Census Bureau. During 2016, the U.S. imported $2,188,940,500,000 in goods but exported only $1,454,624,200,000. The People’s Republic of China was the greatest contributor to the U.S. merchandise trade deficit for the year. The U.S bilateral merchandise trade deficit with China was $347,037,900,000. This deficit resulted from the U.S. importing $462,813,000,000 in goods from China while exporting only $115,775,100,00 in goods to China.

President Donald Trump’s reported plan to gut federal spending by $10.5 trillion over the next decade includes eliminating three of iconic agencies defended as cultural mainstays by many Democrats. The next administration is working on plans to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The Hill reported Thursday. Combined, the three departments cost around $741 million in 2016, and is a small part of a host of budget reforms needed to cut more than a trillion a year from the federal budget. Eliminating funding to the Corporation...

BILLINGS -- As bipartisan crowd-pleasers go, few get Montanans nodding more approvingly than calls for a balanced federal budget, which is why U.S. Sen. Steve Daines recently offered a bill forcing his peers to go unpaid unless they reign in spending. “As I travel around Montana, as I did in December wrapping up a 56-county tour, when I talk about this bill, it’s a bill that will literally bring applause from across the state,” Daines told The Gazette. The state of Montana balances its budget. The federal government should do the same, or so goes the narrative that literally every...

Think bigger Today, Democrats are quaking in their jackboots. It’s bad enough that their messiah is about to leave D.C., but they’re also facing a new government that’s openly hostile toward most of their goals. On top of that, we’re getting word that the nascent Trump administration has “dramatic” plans to trim the federal fat. This news will, as will most news concerning Trump, have lefties curled up in a ball in the corner, shaking their fists as the sky.

For months, if not years, we've warned that conflicted politicians and union bosses pursue a perverse set of goals in their management of pension funds, most of which have nothing to do with the application of sound financial principles. Here's how we summarized the situation back in the summer (see "An Unsolvable Math Problem: Public Pensions Are Underfunded By As Much As $8 Trillion"): Defined Benefit Pension Plans are, in many cases, a ponzi scheme.  Current assets are used to pay current claims in full in spite of insufficient funding to pay future liabilities... classic Ponzi.  But unlike wall...

Fake News: When the media report these claims by Obama without challenging them, it's the definition of fake news Most of the coverage of this, especially on conservative sites, has focused on Obama’s claim that the media were unfair to Hillary during the election. Yeah. I don’t even know what to say about that one other than to shake my head and give the man back-handed props for his willingness to say absolutely anything, no matter how self-evidently absurd. But I think there are two far more substantive points to deal with here. Actually there are surely more than two....

Any reporter who's written about the federal budget knows that there's a surefire solution to every problem. It's called "fraud, waste and abuse." You want to end budget deficits? Just eliminate all the "fraud, waste and abuse" in the $4 trillion budget. The same is true for cutting taxes or raising spending. Attacking fraud and waste is virtuous and dispenses with the hard political work of making unpopular choices. It's a fantasy... ...it turns out that the estimated savings of $125 billon are spread over five years, from fiscal 2016 to 2020. This changes the numbers dramatically. Instead of annual...

While it is unclear if the recent increase in government spending and the resulting increase in the budget deficit, has been a factor in the recent string of better than expected US economic data, at 2pm on Monday the US Treasury announced that in November, the government's budget deficit rose to $136.7 billion, nearly double the $64.5 bilion deficit reported in the same month of 2015, which however was largely a function of a calendar quirk.Not only was November total more than double the amount reported a year ago, but the $136.7 billion deficit, was also the highest going...

‘Thank goodness for Kevin McCarthy!” isn’t something one says every day, but in the matter of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s backward and destructive plan to resurrect 19th-century tariffs, the gentleman from California is invaluable. Trump wants to impose 35 percent tariffs on . . . somebody. He does not seem quite sure. One of the reasons for that is that Trump has the question of trade deficits mixed up in his head with the question of offshoring and, like most Americans, he does not understand either of them very well. The president-elect, writing on Facebook (because that’s what presidents-elect...

Obama’s “worst legacy, one that remains grotesquely underreported by the ‘watchdog’ mainstream media” is “by far the worst deficit record in U.S. history.” The election of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on November 8 was not only a rejection of Hillary Clinton, based on her trustworthiness and her legal and ethical problems, it was also clearly a repudiation of Democratic policymaking, with Trump promising to eliminate or revise a number of Barack Obama’s signature achievements. But, speaking to the press in his first press conference after the election, President Obama maintained that he is leaving the White House and America...

Have you noticed that for a few months, President Barack Obama has stopped bragging about how the federal budget deficit is shrinking? That's because it's not. For the first time since 2009, the deficit has gone up rather than down. The Congressional Budget Office recently released its budget review for September 2016. It shows that in fiscal 2016, which ended Sept. 30, the deficit grew by $149 billion, from $439 billion to $588 billion. It now stands at 3.2 percent of gross domestic product, up from 2.5 percent last year. It's also the first increase in the deficit as a...

WASHINGTON The government ran a $587 billion budget deficit for the just-completed fiscal year, a 34 percent spike over last year after significant improvement from the record deficits of President Barack Obama's first years in office. Friday's deficit news, while sobering, does not appear bad enough to jolt a gridlocked Washington into action to stem the flow of red ink. It came in an annual report by the Treasury Department and the White House budget office. In the presidential campaign, intractable budget deficits and growing debt have been mostly neglected by Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. The latest...

For the first time since the mid 1990s, Norway’s expenditures have exceeded state revenues. Figures released by Statistics Norway (SSB) on Tuesday show that the state’s total revenues in the second quarter of this year totaled 328 billion kroner, which is 2.3 percent less than in the same quarter of last year. […] “Reduced income from petroleum taxes and reduced surplus from the State’s Direct Financial Interest in petroleum activities (SDFI) account largely for the continued decrease in total revenue in Q2 2016,” SSB wrote. …

That's a 35 percent increase, and it brings debt held by the public to the highest share of GDP since 1952 If I told you the deficit was soaring, economic growth was terrible and ObamaCare was collapsing, you’d assume that Obama’s approval ratings would be in the tank and the Democrats would have no hope of electing someone who basically promises to continue his policies. Well, I’m telling you. All this is happening. But these are not the major issues in the presidential campaign because one candidate is hopelessly corrupt and dishonest and the other one just really bothers people...

The federal government has sunk deeper into the red than analysts projected just five months ago, and is now poised to post a $590 billion shortfall this fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office said Friday. That’s some $56 billion worse than the CBO had projected in March, and it comes as new spending far outpaces revenues. Both individual and corporate income tax revenue is down so far this year — though the reasons are not fully clear yet, analysts said. What is clear, though, is that government spending continues to rise, and when adjusted for the timing of payments is...