Free Republic

If there ever was a doubt that Dodd-Frank had unintended consequences the announcement that Ben Bernanke was unable to refinance his home clenched that argument for good. We know Mr. Bernanke recently lost his job as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, but we can rest assured he is capable of getting another high paying position. If Bernanke has a problem refinancing than what will face Joan Miller is Elmira, New York?We recently discussed the state of the market with Richard Koevary. Koevary is President of Blue Sky Mortgage, Inc. in Arizona where he has been a licensed mortgage broker for...

"[If] the monetary authorities are intent on depreciating the currency, then I think that in the fullness of time they will succeed all too well. …The important thing about QE [quantitative easing] is this idea, this radical precedent is now on the books — the virus as it were is in the monetary bloodstream. ...all of this is…in the books as precedent, and the monetarists and Keynesians are rather preening about the evident success of these interventions, and we can be sure I think that they will not forebear to do more still next time. There will come a time...

If I were advising the White House right now, I would encourage President Obama to take advantage of the end of this year's election cycle—the next fifty or so days—to immediately try to change the subject, in a big way. The Obama administration should act right away to use its executive powers to take steps to deal with long-ignored issues that need to be dealt with for the good of the nation. This cannot be done quietly. To change the media narrative, issues acted upon will have to be controversial enough to dominate the news. President Obama should embrace good...

The week was dominated by news by central banks as the Federal Reserve ended QE and the Bank of Japan pushed its QE program to new heights. The result was another rally in stocks around the globe that made the mini-correction earlier this month seem like a dream (or a nightmare). The question is what happens next, and all indications are that markets will continue to ride the wave of central bank liquidity as far as it takes them. Markets were also boosted by a strong initial third quarter U.S. GDP report showing the economy grew at 3.5% and strong...

Federal Reserve is losing control. They cannot keep interest rates low forever. Nobody can. And when rates rise, the results will be devastating In the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) utters, “the horror, the horror,” on his deathbed. He might as well have been talking about the U.S. dollar. Central banks maintain a nation’s currency. As the world’s largest central bank, the United States Federal Reserve, or “Fed,” sets the rate of interest in worldwide lending. It also has major influence on monetary policy. For instance, the Fed’s $85 billion per month in...

It’s long past time to end the Fed as it is currently constructed. And it was only a matter of time before an Obama appointee put an exclamation on the point. It’s what Obama appointees are best at. Yellen stepped out of her role as Master of the Stock Market to expound on taxation and public education.Yellen points out that poor school districts sometimes aren’t funded as well as rich one are because the United States relies on local control of education. It’s what she calls “subnational taxation.” Her implied proposal is that it would be much better if the...

Prior to 1913, there was no federal income tax. The states had rights and representation in Washington, D.C., there was no Federal Reserve Bank, and the federal government lived under the enumerated powers afforded within the U.S. Constitution. What a difference one year can make... ... Passage of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution would forever change life in America, and not for the better. ... Further, thanks to the 17th Amendment, also passed in 1913, the states no longer have representation in Washington, D.C. Once again, what seemed like a simple sentence and a good idea to some at...

The IRS failed to take all required steps for collecting unpaid taxes from people it can’t locate in over half the cases that investigators studied, potentially costing the government a pile of lost revenue, according to a federal report released Monday. The study does not estimate exactly how much money the IRS might collect if its workers were conducting all the research they are supposed to perform to find the taxpayers. The investigators wrote that in 2012, the IRS declared $6.7 billion in unpaid taxes to be uncollectable—involving nearly 483,000 tax returns—because it couldn’t find the taxpayers. Of that total,...

For years, many people have suspected that the New York Fed is more or less controlled by the "too big to fail" banks. Well, now we have smoking gun evidence that this is indeed the case. A very brave lawyer named Carmen Segarra made a series of audio recordings while she was working for the New York Fed. The 46 hours of meetings and conversations that she recorded are being called "the Ray Rice video for the financial sector" because of the explosive content that they contain. What these recordings reveal are regulators that are deeply afraid to do anything...

Despite struggling with the ongoing border crisis, Texas is the number three state in terms of job growth, creating more than 20,000 jobs in August alone, with an unemployment rate of just 5.3%. So, what is Texas doing right? […] (President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Richard) Fisher explained that Texas is way ahead of much of the nation economically largely due to its highly diversified economy, pro-business government and lack of income tax. …

For folks who are trying to ignite inflation, this sure isn’t working out very well. It’s been hoped by the country’s central bankers that the massive quantitative easing program along with near-zero interest rates will touch off a wave of inflation that if not exactly the same thing as boom times, will at least give the appearance of a strengthening economy. However, month after month inflation in the goods that the Fed cares about seems muted. Now this month we had the horrid news that official inflation numbers are falling not rising.

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s assets rose in value by at least 8 percent during 2013, raising their total to between $5.3 million and $14.1 million, according to her latest financial disclosure released Thursday. Yellen’s biggest asset is a trust fund she set up in 1992 with her husband, George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. The value of the trust fund is estimated at between $1 million and $5 million. Yellen’s assets have likely been driven up in value by a rebounding economy and a rising stock market. In 2012, her disclosure form estimated her assets at between $4 million...

<p>Markets could soon face a fall of up to 60 percent, two experts told CNBC on Wednesday.</p> <p>A jolt to international confidence in central banks will lead to a 30 to 60 percent market decline, David Tice, president of Tice Capital and founder of the Prudent Bear Fund, told CNBC's "Power Lunch." When this happens, he said, markets will face a "period of extreme turmoil."</p>

A majority of economists believe the Federal Reserve is doing the right things to help repair the U.S. economy, according to a survey released Monday by the National Association of Business Economists. The survey also showed that a vast majority of economists believe the U.S. economy is at little risk of inflation in the coming years. In the association’s semiannual survey, 53 percent of economists said the Fed’s stimulus programs were “on the right track” for the U.S. economy while 39 percent thought the Fed was doing too much. …

".......Ms. Yellen broke little new ground in her speech. She reiterated the Fed’s basic guidance after its July meeting that holding short-term interest rates near zero remains necessary and useful to increase employment. She said the gap between current conditions and a return to full health was still “significant.”..... .......... A small group of demonstrators made the trek to the remote resort hotel in the middle of Grand Teton National Park to urge Fed officials to continue the stimulus campaign. They formed a receiving line for policy makers in the lobby outside the conference, dressed in green T-shirts emblazoned: “What...

The “Iron Maiden." She was the staunch and sturdy leader of Great Britain who once held up F. A. Hayek’s masterwork “Road to Serfdom” and declared “This is what we believe in.” Hayek’s work is a road map for what could go wrong when individual freedoms are lost and central planning becomes the answer for every ill. When truth is bent to meet the moment and government decision making is the proposed cure all, “serfdom” is the destination. Margaret, in believing Hayek’s cautionary, also declared that Socialism cannot sustain itself. Socialism can not last because eventually “you run out of...

G.K. Chesterton’s Prophetic Look at National Health Care Dale Ahlquist | 2-20-2012 | American Chesterton Society Blogweb.archive.org/web/20130811135205/http://www.chesterton.org/2012/02/a-prophetic-look-at-national-health-care-2/G.K. Chesterton considered himself a member of the Liberal Party until 1912. As he would later say, he did not leave the Liberal Party. It left him. He believed in something called liberty, the idea that people should be able to make most decisions for themselves, especially the most basic and most important decisions, and not have such decisions made for them by anyone else, especially by the government. He believed, as a liberal, that the State’s role was to preserve liberty, not take...

Call it doomsday prepper economics. For more than five years, many Republicans and conservatives have warned that catastrophe is nigh. Washington's deficit spending and the Federal Reserve's excessive money printing will lead to a financial crisis worse than the Great Recession, they prophesied. Inflation will skyrocket, the dollar will collapse, and the Chinese will dump treasuries, they swore. As Ron Paul, the libertarian former GOP congressman and presidential candidate, said back in 2009: "More inflation is absolutely the wrong way to go. We're taking a recession and trying to turn it into a depression. We're going to see a real...

Paul Craig Roberts: The entire U.S. gold hoard is now goneFormer U.S. Treasury official Dr. Paul Craig Roberts told King World News the entire United States gold hoard, including gold supposedly held at the Fed for other countries, is now gone. This is very bad news for Germany and other countries which have trusted the Fed to safely store their gold. Excerpts from the interview: Eric King: Dr. Roberts, I know you’ve seen the report on Bloomberg about Germany supposedly being happy with storing their gold at the New York Fed. It seemed to be a propaganda piece. What was...

Still No Halbig v. Burwell Ruling, But Plenty of Halbig Chatter By Michael F. CannonThe latest bit of chatter about a someday-forthcoming ruling from the D.C. Circuit in Halbig v. Burwell is the banter between myself and Washington & Lee University law professor Timothy Jost. (For a quick primer on the Halbig cases, click here. For a comprehensive reference guide to the cases, click here.) Or as my email traffic has described it, “The subtle repartee between Michael Cannon and Tim Jost continues.” And, “What a summer! Argentina vs. Germany, Cannon vs. Jost. What’s next?“ Jost’s contribution appeared on the...