Free Republic

Nearly half of all illegal immigrant children don’t show up for their deportation hearings, federal officials testified to Congress on Wednesday, underscoring just how easy it is for those surging across the border right now to disappear into the shadows. The number could be even higher for the current surge of unaccompanied children flooding across the border, who are often released to illegal immigrant parents who have no incentive to bring their children to immigration courts. And federal authorities specifically refuse to ask the legal status of the parents or relatives who come to claim the children, officials acknowledged. “We...

How does the U.S. economy do it? Europe is floundering. China faces slower growth. Japan is struggling to sustain tentative gains. Yet the U.S. job market is humming, and the pace of economic growth is steadily rising. Five full years after a devastating recession officially ended, the economy is finally showing the vigor that Americans have long awaited. Last month, employers added 288,000 jobs and helped reduce the unemployment rate to 6.1 percent, the lowest since September 2008. June capped a five-month stretch of 200,000-plus job gains - the first in nearly 15 years. After having shrunk at a 2.9...

The banking industry likes superfluous language. There's "quantitative finance" for example, which (given that finance isalready a quantitative subject) is a bit like saying "aerial flight" or "wet swimming". And then there's "forward guidance". What, as opposed to backward guidance? I mean, what other type of guidance is there? Last summer the Bank of England (BoE) decided it wanted to import the U.S. Federal Reserve's forward guidance policy. In short this went along the lines of "we'll link future moves in the base rate to other external market indicators, so that as these other indicators move then so will base...

U.S. stocks climbed on Wednesday, lifting the S&P 500 to a record finish, after the Federal Reserve said the economy is rebounding and that interest rates would stay low for some time. "We are inching from unprecedented accommodation to policy tightening, even though it's not imminent," said Anastasia Amoroso, global market strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds. The Fed alluded to a slightly faster pace of interest rate increases next year, while suggesting benchmark borrowing costs in the longer term would be lower than the Fed has indicated before. Fed Chair Janet Yellen attempted to "introduce a degree of uncertainty into...

Joe WeisenthalMay 26, 2014, 11:11 AM At the end of last year, we wrote a post titled: Pretty Soon We Need To Talk About Inflation. The argument was not that inflation was going to be a problem, or that the Fed needed to tighten rates, or anything like that. It simply pointed out that since the crisis, there's been no legitimate reason to even be discussing inflation, since there wasn't any. But that that was about to change. And indeed, here in 2014, there are indeed a lot of people talking about inflation. Morgan Stanley's Vincent Reinhart writes in a...

Chriss W. Street 26 May 2014 After five years of the federal government telling the public that despite a $3.5 trillion increase in monetary expansion, the inflation rate is below +2%, the Department of Agriculture (DOA) just warned the American public that the consumer price index for food is up by 10% this year. The DOA tried to blame food inflation on the drought conditions in California, but last year’s drought was worse and food prices fell by -6%. The real problem is Federal Reserve monetary stimulus is stimulating inflation. I reported in "Food Price Inflation Scares the Fed” two...

The way Charles Plosser sees it, the Federal Reserve is sitting on a ticking time bomb that could severely damage the economy unless the central bank reacts quickly to defuse the looming threat. The Philadelphia Fed president, viewed as one of the bank’s leading hawks, is worried about some $2.5 trillion in “excess” reserves. That is, loanable funds available to individual or corporate borrowers through the nation’s banks. The Fed has created these reserves through unpredented purchases of U.S. Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities, a strategy known as quantatative easing. These reserves are just sitting in the bank system, basically doing...

Mises Institute: How would you translate your new book’s title into English? Andreas Marquant: I would like to say The State Causes the Poverty It Later Claims to Solve. This is the title of my article on mises.org last December. An even better title could be The Austrian Answer to Thomas Piketty. MI: Your book addresses the issue of income inequality. Is income inequality a bad thing? AM: First of all, inequality and income inequality are natural phenomena because people are different. They all have different talents and that is a reason for the division of labor. It’s also a...

An ABC News investigation found that a badly-flawed and archaic government recall system has permitted millions of potentially dangerous tires to remain in use, on store shelves for sale or simply unaccounted for.

TARP was the absolute height of crony capitalism. Many of the big banks should have gone down, but in the midst of a “Blackberry panic” – as David Stockman puts it – the masters of the masters of the universe lost sight of reality and the nature of markets. Yes, Goldman Sachs would have gone down. But this would have been a GOOD THING. The blood which should have filled the the streets of Downtown Manhattan would have washed the unsustainable leverage clean from the system (for a while.) Giants are meant to fall. It would have been good for...

“Got a buck? you’re in luck!” This jingle was a staple for you ever since your parents started giving you an allowance. At the time, you got maybe $5 a week to spend or save as you pleased. Although this was a fortune as far as you were concerned, a fiver tends to evaporate quickly, and your snack options were limited. One of the few exceptions to this was McDonalds. For just a dollar and change you could get a double cheeseburger or even hot fudge sundaes. Fast forward 5 years. You’re paying a lot for college, so the Dollar...

A school district in Chicago’s northwest suburbs is quitting the National School Lunch Program over new regulations championed by first lady Michelle Obama. The so-called Smart Snacks in School policy, set to take effect on July 1, is the latest attempt by our Regulator-in-Chief to dictate every aspect of Americans’ behavior. It dictates strict calorie, sodium, fat, and sugar guidelines for any food sold in schools during the day. That even includes the ubiquitous bake sales and other fundraisers. Instead of forcing the school district’s 500 low income kids and others to eat “healthier,” however, the administration is only creating...

In testimony before a Senate committee on Thursday, Fed Chair Yellen said a minimum wage increase would likely have some negative effects on jobs, though it´s not clear how large. Still, boosting the federal minimum wage, which has remained at $7.25 per hour since mid-2009, would benefit some people, she added. In recent months, the federal minimum wage has been a hot-button issue. In February, President Barack Obama boosted the minimum pay for federal contractors hired in the future to $10.10 per hour. He´s also voiced his support for the federal level for all workers to rise to $10.10 from

Gold is falling after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen gave an upbeat assessment of the U.S. economy and said that inflation remains low. […] Yellen’s comments suggest that the Federal Reserve is set to continue reducing its economic stimulus, lessening the threat of rising prices. Investors typically buy gold as a hedge against inflation. …

When it comes to the San Francisco Fed, it is best known throughout the financial community as the group of crack economists who spend millions of taxpayer funds to investigate such probing, for kindergarteners at least, topics as: is water wet, do trees make a sound when they fall in the forest, is it still worth going to college, and are hedge funds important in a crisis. Little did we know that, at least some of them, are homicidal psychopaths with suicidal tendencies. Because this is precisely what was revealed moments ago when Bloomberg reported that the chief operating officer...

The Fed Could Have Bought California & Texas… or All of China & Japan's Treasuries With QE Money Phoenix Capital Research 05/06/2014 12:31 The Federal Reserve has spent over $3.2 trillion in the post-Crisis era. The bulk of this money printing has gone towards buying garbage mortgage securities or US Treasuries from Wall Street. Because we’ve reached a point in time at which $1 trillion no longer sounds like a lot of money, we thought we’d go through the exercise of assessing just what the Fed could have done with this money besides give it to Wall Street. With $3.2...

Foreign individuals and businesses long ago cut back on their purchases of U.S. bonds. Their place was taken by foreign central banks. The central banks simply created money in their own currency and used it to buy our bonds.The Federal Reserve always knew that we couldn’t rely on foreign central banks to buy our bonds forever. This may be the main reason it began the program called quantitative easing, in which the Fed created money out of thin air specifically to buy back U.S. debt.Quantitative easing may have been intended to be a kind of insurance policy. If foreign central...

Armed federal agents deployed last week to northeast Clark County, Nev., for what can only be described as a major escalation in a decades-long standoff between a local cattle rancher and the U.S. government. .Cliven Bundy, the last remaining rancher in the southern Nevada county, stands in defiance of a 2013 court order demanding that he remove his cattle from public land managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management. The 67-year-old veteran rancher, who has compared the situation to similar confrontations with government officials in Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas, told TheBlaze that his family...

Last week, St. Louis Fed Director of Research David Andolfatto released a presentation on Bitcoin, becoming one of the most prominent central bank officials to study the cryptocurrency. We caught up with Andolfatto to ask him about why he put this deck together, where he thinks Bitcoin is going, and whether he personally has anything invested in it. Business Insider: What was the genesis for this presentation? David Andolfatto: Its genesis was a blog post I'd started, addressing arguments that gold bugs frequently put forth, that gold is superior money. Of course, Bitcoin was in the news — I read...

The fear of deflation serves as the theoretical justification of every inflationary action taken by the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world. It is why the Federal Reserve targets a price inflation rate of 2 percent, and not 0 percent. It is in large part why the Federal Reserve has more than quadrupled the money supply since August 2008. And it is, remarkably, a great myth, for there is nothing inherently dangerous or damaging about deflation. Deflation is feared not only by the followers of Milton Friedman (those from the so-called Monetarist or Chicago School of economics), but...