Free Republic

Is $120 oil even real? Not if you ask the Saudis, or even Lehman Bros. The investment bank’s oil expert said this week that the oil boom is due to bust. Economic growth across the globe will slow just as new refineries kick in, raising supply.

t's low in fat, low in food miles and completely free range. In fact, some claim that Sciurus carolinensis - the grey squirrel - is about as ethical a dish as it is possible to serve on a dinner plate. The grey squirrel, the American cousin of Britain's endangered red variety, is flying off the shelves faster than hunters can shoot them, with game butchers struggling to keep up with demand. 'We put it on the shelf and it sells. It can be a dozen squirrels a day - and they all go,' said David Simpson, the director of Kingsley...

Analysis: Some good economic news is a mirage masking weakness in national economy WASHINGTON (AP) -- The unemployment rate drops. Productivity grows. The trade deficit shrinks. Sounds great, right? Not so fast. Borrowing radio broadcaster Paul Harvey's signature saying: let's hear the rest of the story. ADVERTISEMENT Some seemingly good economic numbers can be something of a mirage masking weaknesses in the national economy. Let's take the unemployment rate, which dipped to 5 percent in April, from 5.1 percent in March. A closer look reveals that the decline in unemployment is not as good as it looks at first blush....

ELK GROVE VILLAGE, Ill. — The foreclosure crisis is hitting yet another American locale: the self-storage center. As they lose their homes, people are turning to these humble cinderblock and sheet-metal boxes to store their stuff. But some people cannot keep up with their storage bills any better than they could handle their mortgage payments, and storage companies are auctioning off their property for a pittance.

Two years after questions arose regarding the viability of the U.S. rice industry, the sector has emerged stronger and has a very promising outlook with total U.S. rice exports forecast to increase around 20 percent, according to a new Rabobank report, “U.S. Rice.” “The outlook for U.S. rice growers remains strong, with more cause for optimism than concern. However, with global rice stocks already at low levels, prices are especially susceptible to any shocks,” said Michael Whitehead, food and agribusiness research and advisory vice president. “Adverse weather in a particular rice-growing region could be one cause of price increases, while...

The subprime mortgage meltdown has cost the world 15% of its market capitalization, about $9 trillion. The primary culprit who caused all of this financial loss, pain and suffering is not the mortgage companies. Neither is it the overextended borrowers. It is our own federal regulations interfering with the free market. ... The unintended consequences of good intentions can do more economic harm than all the mean-spirited greed within capitalism. Part of the good intention was forcing banks to be good neighbors by making altruistic loans that discriminated in favor of underprivileged communities. Any attempts by banks to set higher...

"It's a recession," said President Harry Truman, "when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours." For people facing home foreclosure, job loss or the struggle of paying high gas prices, the definition a recession seems immaterial and insignificant. True. But during an election year, the media's constant use or expectation of "recession" does matter. Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic Party's likely nominee, already considers the U.S. economy "in a recession." So are we — at least as economists commonly define the term? No — not even close. But a recent typical news wire story, however,...

Washington - Today, the Club for Growth released its 2007 annual scorecard, awarding the Defender of Economic Freedom award to six senators and forty-nine representatives who scored a 90 or above on the Club's scorecard.... "These top-scoring members of Congress are staunch defenders of American taxpayers," said Club for Growth President Pat Toomey. "Their votes are critical to lowering taxes, cutting wasteful spending, and promoting economic growth for all Americans. The Club for Growth scorecard allows taxpayers to see how their senators and representatives are performing in Congress and find out who is truly fighting for pro-growth, limited-government policies...." The...

Regional air pollution regulators have again cited TXI Riverside Cement for allowing plumes of potentially harmful dust to escape its century-old plant north of Riverside. "Riverside Cement will continue to get notices of violations until they solve their dust problem," Sam Atwood, spokesman for South Coast Air Quality Management District, said Saturday. A recent air district investigation found that dust from the plant contains hexavalent chromium, a cancer-causing substance that is a byproduct of cement-making. The plant, located just south of the border between Riverside and San Bernardino counties, was cited for producing dust clouds longer than 100 feet and...

Hard numbers: The economy is worse than you know Ever since the 1960s, Washington has gulled its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics, the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed. The corruption has tainted the very measures that most shape public perception of the economy: • The...

Wal-Mart Stores Inc on Thursday reported a stronger-than-expected 3.2 percent rise in sales at U.S. stores open at least a year in April. Analysts, on average, were expecting the company's same-store sales to rise 2.1 percent, according to Reuters Estimates, while Wal-Mart forecast a gain of 1 percent to 3 percent. The world's biggest retailer said net sales in the month, ended May 2, rose to $29.18 billion from $26.57 billion.

Last week, the government released two important figures: GDP growth (or lack thereof) for the first quarter of this year, and the number of jobs created (or lack thereof) for the month of April. The day before the released GDP report, a headline in USA Today read, "USA TODAY survey: We're in a recession, economists say." The first two sentences read as follows: "The U.S. economy is in recession, or soon to be in one. … the economists said the U.S. economy is in recession." the 52 economists' predictions. They predicted 0.1 percent economic growth for the first quarter, 0.5...

What does that mean for all of us tax-paying angry renters and honorable homeowners who have paid their loans on time?

How could job loss for 80 small-town residents be a "great story?"

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Thursday that the worst of the credit crisis is over, according to attendees at a New York speech. Greenspan also said house prices still had a long way to fall and it was unlikely they would stabilize by year-end, according to meeting attendees who provided Reuters details of the speech delivered at the Alternative Public Strategies Conference. The attendees, who declined to be identified by name, said Greenspan mentioned that U.S. growth was likely to be sluggish for an extended period of time. The U.S economy is reeling from a housing-led slowdown,...

The number of newly laid off workers seeking unemployment benefits dropped much more than expected last week. The Labor Department reported Thursday that applications for unemployment benefits fell to 365,000, a decline of 18,000 from the previous week. Economists had been looking for a much smaller decrease of around 5,000. Weekly jobless claims have been exceptionally volatile in recent weeks because of strike-related layoffs in the auto industry and an unusually early Easter, which has played havoc with the government's seasonal adjustment measurements. Many economists believe that a prolonged housing slump and severe credit crisis have pushed the economy into...

If the globaloneyists had their way, a man named Jed would still be “a poor mountaineer who barely kept his family fed.” In the short span of 30 years, the Greens have cooked up massive global warming hysteria, stood in the way additional oil exploration and gasoline refinement, and refused to allow viable alternatives to oil (nuclear, coal, natural gas, etc.) to even be seriously considered. As Americans consider proposals for a national energy policy, it is important to keep in mind the words of Lincoln: “He has the right to criticize who has the heart to help.” For all...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5UYNX_XGQA&NR=1

Economists received gloomy news last week that the worst economy since the depression grew by over a half percent. “At this rate I’ll be dead before most of humanity is killed and the rest of us are forced to endure a hand-to-mouth existence as subsistence farmers and mastodon hunters,” Malbert Crickendale, economist for the DotPenn financial report said. “I wish the Democrats in Congress would get off their asses and do something to speed up this demise.” Crickendale said that mainstream media’s continual harping on the “subprime implosion,” “credit massacre,” “unprecedented foreclosures” and “Brittany’s meltdown” should have had far worse...

Click on the link to check gas prices in Europe. And take a look at other factors regarding the cost of gas. And what happended to the Great Depression we were promised? Whatever happened to the Great Depression? Not the real one from 70 years ago, the lost decade of unimagined misery and Steinbeckian angst, the worst period in the history of modern capitalism. I mean the replay we were promised this year. I don’t know about you but I feel a bit cheated. There we all were, led to believe by so many commentators that the sub-prime crisis was...

The White House's top economist said he's confident the U.S. economy hasn't dipped into recession, and expressed optimism that stimulus checks could bolster growth in the current quarter, earlier than expected. "The data are pretty clear that we are not in a recession," Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Edward Lazear told a meeting of editors and reporters from the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. Battered by the housing crisis and rising energy prices, the economy grew at an anemic 0.6% rate in the first three months of the year, the same pace as in the fourth quarter of...

Paulson Says Worst Of Credit Crisis May Be OverCBS News Interactive: Eye On The Economy WASHINGTON (AP) - The worst of the nation's credit crisis may have passed, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Wednesday, though he acknowledged rising gas prices will blunt the effect of 130 million economic stimulus checks. He ruled out a second stimulus package for now. In an interview with The Associated Press, Paulson said the turmoil that has gripped Wall Street and that took a turn for the worse again in March has eased somewhat. "There's progress," he said. "I think we're closer to the end...

It’s an election year, and partisan acrimony has escalated. Democrats and Republicans portray themselves as the nation’s saviors against all the programmatic atrocities of the other side. Can we find a refuge of common-sense agreement amid this self-serving political din? Well, here’s a proposal for the economy: Enact a temporary extension of unemployment insurance from the standard 26 weeks to 39 weeks. The proposal’s virtue is precisely its modesty. Benefits have been extended in every recession except one since the 1950s. Although most unemployed usually find new jobs within the normal six months, the task becomes harder in a slump....

For more than 200 years, America reigned as the worlds most productive, prosperous, powerful and generous nation on earth. Like all nations, America is nothing more or less than the sum of its people and their belief system. In the case of America, they were once a people who had risked all to gain national independence and sovereignty, individual liberty and personal freedom for every man, woman and child. Generation after generation volunteered the blood of its best citizens to protect individual rights from all who would attack them in the name of some greater common good. The brave who...

Worker productivity rose by a better-than-expected amount in the first three months of the year while labor cost pressures eased. The Labor Department reported Wednesday that productivity, the amount of output per hour of work, increased at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the first quarter. That was slightly higher than the 1.5 percent increase which had been expected. In a sign that inflation could be easing, labor cost pressures slowed a bit. Unit labor costs rose at an annual rate of 2.2 percent, down from a 2.8 percent rise in the final three months of last year. While...

President Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country. About a month ago, he told reporters, "We're not in a recession — we're in a slowdown." At a White House news conference a few weeks later, despite the fact that reporters pressed him to use the "R" word, Bush refused. And last Friday, after the most recent jobs report — which produced a much-smaller-than-expected decline in corporate payrolls, a huge 362,000 increase in the more entrepreneurial household survey (the best gain in five months) and a historically low 5% unemployment rate (4.95%, to be precise)...

[snip]In the United States, the producer price index increased 6.9% in the year to March, while that for crude goods increased more than 30%. Like a bowling ball swallowed by a python, that inflation will move through the economic system and eventually be reflected in consumer prices. Indeed, it may already be showing up there; the seasonally unadjusted consumer price index for March was up 0.9% (an annual rate of around 11%) and only a heroic seasonal adjustment of 0.6%, double the next-largest seasonal adjustment for any month in the last 10 years, brought the figure down to an acceptable...

Hillary Rodham Clinton attacked the financial backbone of her home state when she told Indiana voters it's time to hit the "Wall Street money brokers" over the nationwide recession. Clinton leveled the comment - one of a series of increasingly populist remarks she has made - just hours after also targeting OPEC, vowing to bust its "cartel, a monopoly that gets together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world." ~~~ SNIP ~~~ "Why don't we hold these Wall Street money brokers responsible for their role in this recession?" Clinton thundered to...

All day Wednesday, the FOX News Channel was repeating some poll in which around 45% of Americans believed we are in a recession. It’s not like the signs aren’t all around us. While Neil Cavuto reminded fact-challenged, Clinton operative Lanny Davis that 95% of homeowners are indeed paying their mortgages on time, Davis continued his recitation that America is spiraling downward. Despite all the doom and gloom, America is not in a recession, in fact, according to our rule of economics, “if the economy contracts for six straight months it is considered to be in a recession. That, however, didn't...

In the past few months, American workers, consumers, and businesses have experienced a sudden and dramatic rise in gasoline prices. In some parts of the country, gasoline costs as much as $4 per gallon. Some politicians claim that the way to reduce gas prices is by expanding the government’s power to regulate prices and control the supply of gasoline. For example, the House of Representatives has even passed legislation subjecting gas stations owners to criminal penalties if they charge more than a federal bureaucrat deems appropriate. Proponents of these measures must have forgotten the 1970s, when government controls on the...

Pelosi backs 2nd stimulus, says Bush "in denial" Tue May 6, 2008 12:30pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday called for a second economic stimulus package, and said President George W. Bush is "in denial" about the country's economy. "It's clear there is a need for a second stimulus," Pelosi, a California Democrat, told reporters at a news conference. "The president has for a long time been in denial on the state of the economy," she said. Tax rebate checks are in the mail to millions of Americans under a $152 billion...

Whatever happened to the Great Depression? Not the real one from 70 years ago, the lost decade of unimagined misery and Steinbeckian angst, the worst period in the history of modern capitalism. I mean the replay we were promised this year. The one we were told was the inevitable counterpart to the greatest financial crisis since a couple of medieval Italians first sat down on a Florentine bench and invented the word “bank”. I don’t know about you but I feel a bit cheated. There we all were, led to believe by so many commentators that the sub-prime crisis was...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- In this downturn, the Federal Reserve is fighting on two interrelated fronts simultaneously, battling to keep the real economy growing and to revive the credit markets. The Fed has won some victories on both fronts. A serious recession has been prevented so far, and the worse fears of a systemic credit meltdown have been put to rest. However, if health isn't restored to the credit system, the downturn could worsen......................

WASHINGTON—In March, inspectors checking Chinese seafood arriving at U.S. ports made some unsettling discoveries: fish infected with salmonella in Baltimore and Seattle, and shrimp with banned veterinary drugs in Florida. Meanwhile, a shipment intercepted in Los Angeles on March 19 and labeled "channel catfish" wasn't catfish at all, though records don't say what it was. "A lot of those products coming in from overseas, you have no clue as to what is in them," said Paul Hitchens, an aquaculture specialist in Southern Illinois, where cut-rate Chinese catfish are threatening the livelihood of fish farmers. China rapidly has become the leading...

INDIANAPOLIS, May 3 -- Sen. Barack Obama sought to shore up support among working-class voters Saturday as he launched a closing drive to secure a pair of primary victories on Tuesday that could end Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's hopes of wresting the Democratic presidential nomination. Clinton, campaigning with growing confidence, hopes to capitalize on her victory in Pennsylvania two weeks ago and the rising importance of economic issues to help carry Indiana and hold down the margin of Obama's expected victory in North Carolina. Accomplishing those two things, her advisers believe, will allow her to press her case with superdelegates...

My client likes my plan, but he is reluctant to spend the money. “It’s the economy, D.F. It has me jittery.” Jittery? You don’t think he needs to cut down on the caffeine, do you? Lots of people in the business world are nervous about the economy. It’s all people talk about. No one wants to spend. No one wants to expand. No one wants to hire. No one wants to launch anything. They’re all “jittery”. Because they’re sheep.

I hate to pick on a fellow journalist, but if I were Jeannine Aversa of the Associated Press, I would be embarrassed. Ms. Aversa covers economic issues for the AP, and I guess it’s hard to come up with actual economic facts every day, so she likes to publish predictions. This tends to precipitate the following chain of events: Ms. Aversa reports that economists expect the economy to tank, jobs to disappear, etc. The economy does not tank, and jobs do not disappear (at least not as much as “economists expected”); Ms. Aversa reports economists’ surprise. Ms. Aversa reports that...

A good country style vegetable soup has lots of fresh vegetables, a thick beef broth and plenty of beef chunks. It’s a meal in a bowl. A bowl of vegetable soup with only a few vegetables, a thin beef broth, and not a chunk of beef to be found is disappointing, and you are still hungry. That was most of the mainstream media headlines last week. As always they covered the natural disasters and tragic happenings well, but did very little to give people any sense of hope that the sky was not falling. Here are my headlines. Gasoline prices...

Forget this last post, the Federal Reserve has stepped in and settled the debate that was brewing between the White House & Congress. Basically, the student loan companies need someone to buy some loans so they can have enough reserve cash to offer more loans in the future. Due to high default rates, high inflation rates, and overall low student loan return rates, no investors are showing up for the normal bond auctions. Part of this, of course, is due to an over-correction by Congress during the financial boom period of 2004 to 2006. By the time legislation had passed...

[WARNING: CONTAINS VULGARITY] As the West's industrial regime sputters toward a cheap-energy-crackup conclusion, there have been attempts to recast what our economy is actually about, how to account for whatever wealth we manage to produce, and project what our society will actually be organized to do in the years ahead. For a while in the 1990s, the idea was a "service economy," kind of like the old fable of the town whose inhabitants made a living by taking in each other's laundry -- only in our case it was selling hamburgers to tourists on vacation from their jobs making hamburgers...

...The Democratic push on Capitol Hill for more budget-busting spending and greater protectionism bleeds into the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who promise to deconstruct NAFTA and to avoid almost all new taxes from here to eternity. Perhaps they dissemble. But even this causes allies and rivals abroad to water down expectations that changing administrations will automatically make for a more reliable and cooperative American partner. A clear advantage that the Democratic Party had in world opinion is withering, according to foreign officials and professionals I have encountered recently. ...Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for...

Forget inflation, the economy, your unpaid bills, that pink slip in your locker. An edgy new Harley-Davidson ad campaign reflects on today's difficult times, finishing with the tag line, "So screw it, let's ride." The campaign, launched this week with a full-page ad in USA Today, also reminds people that the Milwaukee-based motorcycle maker and the nation in general have endured plenty of pain - and not just lately. "Over the last 105 years in the saddle, we've seen wars, conflicts, depression, recession, resistance and revolutions," the ad says. "We've watched a thousand hand-wringing pundits disappear in our rear-view mirror....

The global credit crunch has eased for bankers, says Warren Buffett. “The worst of the crisis on Wall Street is over,” Buffett said. “In terms of people with individual mortgages, there’s a lot of pain left to come...

Is Treasury Chief Hank Paulson the financial equivalent of Civil War General George B. McClellan? The "Young Napoleon" brilliantly organized and trained Union armies in the first year and a half of the Civil War. His problem: He couldn't bring himself to actually engage the enemy, always proffering excuses as to why he couldn't take decisive action. An exasperated Abraham Lincoln finally fired him. Mr. Paulson repeatedly says he wants a strong U.S. dollar. Last month he told Reuters: "I've been as consistent as anyone that you've ever heard in saying that the strong dollar [is] in our nation's interest."...

President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country. About a month ago he told reporters, "We're not in a recession, we're in a slowdown." At a White House news conference a few weeks later, despite the fact that reporters pressed him to use the "R" word, Mr. Bush refused. And on Friday, after the most recent jobs report -- which produced a much-smaller-than-expected decline in corporate payrolls, a huge 362,000 increase in the more entrepreneurial household survey (the best gain in five months), and a historically low 5 percent unemployment rate (4.95...

A lot of people are having a good chuckle over Hillary Clinton's frustrating encounter with a coffee maker at the gas station market. If she's not ready to make a latte from Day 1, she won't be awake enough to take the 3 a.m. phone call. While the coffee maker was rejecting Clinton, economists and policymakers were reacting the same way to the proposal she'd gone to the gas station to promote. Clinton's proposal to lift the 18-cents-a-gallon federal gas tax has been roundly criticized by experts of all ideological stripes for doing little to lighten the burden on drivers...

For Immediate ReleaseOffice of the Press SecretaryMay 3, 2008 President's Radio Address   President's Radio Address  Audio  En Español       In Focus: Economy THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. This week, the Commerce Department reported that GDP grew at an annual rate of six-tenths of a percent in the first quarter. This rate of growth is not nearly as high as we would like. And after a record 52 months of uninterrupted job growth, April was the fourth month in a row in which our economy lost jobs, although the unemployment rate dropped to five percent. My Administration has been clear and candid on...

The relatively slow currency growth over the last few years appears to be due in part to the recent relative economic and political stability in some nations that previously had been heavy users of U.S. currency...

The American economy lost 20,000 jobs in April, the fourth consecutive month of decline, in what many economists took as powerful evidence that the United States is almost certainly now ensnared in a recession. But the number of jobs reported lost by the Labor Department on Friday was significantly smaller than most analysts had predicted, and the unemployment rate nudged down to 5 percent, raising hopes that the economy may not suffer as severely as once feared. “It strongly argues that this downturn will be mild and short- lived,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “As long as...

President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country. About a month ago he told reporters, “We’re not in a recession, we’re in a slowdown.” At a White House news conference a few weeks later, despite the fact that reporters pressed him to use the “R” word, Mr. Bush refused. And on Friday, after the most recent jobs report -- which produced a much-smaller-than-expected decline in corporate payrolls, a huge 362,000 increase in the more entrepreneurial household survey (the best gain in five months), and a historically low 5 percent unemployment rate (4.95...