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The Supreme Court on Tuesday confirmed that its decision a day earlier extending religious rights to closely held corporations applies broadly to the contraceptive coverage requirement in the new health care law, not just the handful of methods the justices considered in their ruling. The justices did not comment in leaving in place lower court rulings in favor of businesses that object to covering all 20 methods of government-approved contraception....

The United States could soon become a large-scale Spain or Greece, teetering on the edge of financial ruin. That’s according to Donald Trump, who painted a very ugly picture of where this country is headed. Trump made the comments during a recent appearance on Fox News’ “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.” According to Trump, the United States is no longer a rich country. “When you’re not rich, you have to go out and borrow money. We’re borrowing from the Chinese and others. We’re up to $16 trillion in debt.” He goes on to point out that the downgrade...

Emmie Martin and Max NisenJuly 1, 2014 When you think about Houston, Texas, you probably picture massive oil refineries, oppressive humidity, and a sub-par baseball team — a far cry from one of the nation's most up-and-coming cities. But you shouldn't dismiss Houston so easily; the Bayou City is an economic juggernaut. It's by far the country's No. 1 job creator and home to 26 Fortune 500 companies. A paycheck goes farther here than anywhere else in the country, and it has a medical center larger than downtown Dallas.Add a thriving restaurant and cultural scene, and you've got a winning...

Do you know why the U.S. economy shrank almost 3 percent in the first quarter of this year? When the news of the dreadful gross domestic product (GDP) number came out last week, many were surprised, but none were more surprised than the folks in the Obama administration. Many of their supporters had been saying this was the year of a real economic recovery. The quick reaction was to blame the bad GDP numbers on the weather, and it is true that much of the country did have record cold temperatures, but in all likelihood the weather was only a...

Tyler Durden 06/30/2014 Copper has rallied almost 6% in the last few weeks with a 1.25% surge today sending the 'economic' metal back to near 4-month highs. This must means demand is picking up, right? This must mean the world is ok, right? Chatter is that this morning's home sales 'noise' surprise spike was the catalyst but it appears much more likely that a combination of a continued squeeze of a very-extended spec short position and the ongoing unwind of China's commodity-finance-deals is the real catalyst. As the market comes to terms with synthetic demand (CCFD unwinds buying back hedges)...

During a meeting with analysts and investors on Wednesday, Advance Auto Parts executives were asked how many stores they expect to close as a result of the company's acquisition of Raleigh-based General Parts International. George Sherman, Advance Auto's president, said the company is consolidating 100 stores as part of a first round of closings. "There will be more going forward," he said. "We have to assess fully 1,200-plus stores across the country. There will be a large group of consolidations, but there will be a lot of conversations where we flip the banner and there will be some relocations." General...

If ever there were good political reason for both parties finally to cooperate in passing at least one type of tax reform, two economic stories in the past fortnight provide that reason in abundance.Two weeks ago, Medtronic, Inc., a major medical-device manufacturer in the U.S., agreed to merge with rival Covidien PLC, domiciled in Ireland. The companies merged largely to escape the outlandishly high American corporate-tax rates that are piled atop Obamacare’s senseless medical-device tax.Last Wednesday, the Commerce Department made a stunning downward revision in its report of first-quarter gross domestic product, announcing that the economy contracted at a 2.9...

Jim EdwardsJune 30, 2014  The Bank for International Settlements — the Swiss-based financial institution that acts as a counterparty to national central banks — has declared that stock markets are currently in a "euphoric" state and has urged central banks globally to begin tightening interest rate policies now while economies are growing rather than wait for another recession, when it will be too late. Those are scary words, coming from a set of economists whose job it is to monitor how capable central banks are of responding to economic conditions with flexible monetary policy. The subtext (and not-so-subtext) of...

1 million immigrants a year isn’t enough for the cheap votes/cheap labor lobby. Their Super-Amnesty is determined to legalize another 12 million illegal aliens and import millions more using amnesty as a magnet.The current border crisis is only a small part of what will happen should Congress pass Super-Amnesty.Advocates of Super-Amnesty claim that immigration is an engine of job growth. It’s not. Cheap labor just undercuts the middle class while cheap votes passes the social welfare bill to that same middle class. All Employment Growth Since 2000 Went to Immigrants – Number of U.S.-born not working grew by 17 millionGovernment...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)“By every economic measure, we are better off now than we were when I took office. You wouldn’t know it, but we are,” the president said Friday. That’s right, the president — the president of the United States, mind you — says Americans are better off, they just don’t know it. That is the height to which the president has raised his level of mendacity. He has the sheer audacity to tell Americans that he has successfully turned the economy around, that things are all good, but that there are no real quantifiable indicators by which they could ever know...

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo which sparked the war and the NYSE decided to close for the duration (more here).  This week we begin the new quarter --and the second half of 2014.  We'll see if the GDP for Q2 shows any improvement (1st report coming out in three weeks).  Imho we're in an economy where we can still make money but it's just going to take more effort. Review of last week here, reports/consensus coming out this week here. This is the thread where folks swap ideas on savings and...

Nicole Hill holds up her past-due water bill at her home in Detroit. Her water has been off for about six weeks. It has been six weeks since the city turned off Nicole Hill's water. Dirty dishes are piled in the sink of her crowded kitchen, where the yellow-and-green linoleum floor is soiled and sticky. A small garbage can is filled with water from a neighbor, while a bigger one sits outside in the yard, where she hopes it will collect some rain. She's developed an intricate recycling system of washing the dishes, cleaning the floor and flushing the...

Picture of graph only.

A shocking new report from the Center for Immigration Studies claims to prove that every single new job created in America for the last fourteen years has gone to immigrants, legal and illegal. This would fly in the face of those who claim that immigration is an economic boon to native born Americans: The CIS report found that over the last 14 years, people who were born in the United States held 114.8 million jobs in 2000, and held 114.7 million jobs in 2014, a drop of 127,000. But it’s an entirely different picture for immigrants — 5.7 million more...

June 27, 2014 Raul Meijer Oh Japan, what are you doing, where are you going? As Japanese consumer prices rose 3.4% in May (and I do wish people would stop calling this inflation, it is not and never will be), consumer spending was down -8.9% That is from a year earlier, so it has nothing to do with the April 1 tax hike! It’s an insane number when you think about it, and it’s the direct result of Abenomics tightening the thumb screws. With the population having seen their savings collapse, their wages move way down, and now rising prices...

Memo: From Nick Hanauer To: My Fellow Zillionaires You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate...

I warned about this in part two of my 2.5 hour Economics Video Presentation back in November of ARSH 2012, and, sure enough, it has now happened. Because, as I have been saying all along, for anyone who knows ANYTHING about ANYTHING having to do with economics, finance and/or banking, and who does not have their brain bucket completely and firmly inserted up their rectal vault, it is obvious what is happening and how the chain of events will unfold. If a mouthy broad with a mere bachelor’s degree in animal husbandry from a land-grant university can see this stuff...

How in the world does the government expect us to trust the economic numbers that they give us anymore? For a long time, many have suspected that they were being manipulated, and as you will see below we now have stone cold proof that this is indeed the case. But first, let's talk about the revised GDP number for the first quarter of 2014 that was just released. Initially, they told us that the U.S. economy only shrank by 0.1 percent in Q1. Then that was revised down to a 1.0 percent contraction, and now we are being informed that...

If you’re a typical family, you’re considerably poorer than you used to be. No wonder the “recovery” feels like a recession. ... The median household in 2013 had a net worth of just $56,335 -- 43% lower than the median wealth level right before the recession began in 2007, and 36% lower than a decade ago.

Shrinkage: Economists are writing off the sharp 2.9% drop in first-quarter GDP as a temporary contraction. Maybe. What isn't temporary is President Obama's massively subpar growth record over the past five years. [snip] In the nearly five years since the Obama recovery started — just months into Obama's first term — real gross domestic product has increased only 10.2%. That's less than half the average growth rate for every other economic recovery since World War II, and almost a third less than the pace set during the Reagan recovery. Looked at in dollar terms, if the Obama recovery had merely...