Free Republic

An injunction issued against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by federal judge Leigh Martin May could spell the beginning of the end for Administrative Law Courts and with them, 80 years of unconstitutional abuse of power by the Executive branch. Administrative Law “…allows for the creation of public regulatory agencies and contains all of the statutes, judicial decisions, and regulations that govern them.” These regulatory bodies include the EPA and the SEC. Many came into being during the reign of Franklin Roosevelt, the one president more arrogant and power hungry than Barack Obama. The law itself “…is created by...

A court ruled Monday that the federal government was “unduly harsh” in its takeover of AIG during the financial crisis, but refused to award the company’s former head any damages. The ruling draws to a close the high-profile lawsuit against the federal government, brought by Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the former head of the insurance giant, and other AIG shareholders under the umbrella of Starr International. In his ruling, Judge Thomas Wheeler determined the federal government violated the Constitution by stepping in and effectively seizing the insurance company during the crisis, even if the takeover was intended to save the company...

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said a Social Security Trust Fund does not exist and that the U.S. is “way underestimating” the size of its national debt. “The notion that we have a trust fund is nonsense – that trust fund has no meaning whatsoever except for the fact as an all private fund to benefit programs, if it runs out of money, you can only pay out in cash flows that come in but the probability that will happen is not particularly high,” Greenspan recently told the Fiscal Summit held by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation,...

Dear American Consumer, This is The Wall Street Journal. We’re writing to ask if something is bothering you. The sun shined in April and you didn’t spend much money. The Commerce Department here in Washington says your spending didn’t increase at all adjusted for inflation last month compared to March. You appear to have mostly stayed home and watched television in December, January and February as well. We thought you would be out of your winter doldrums by now, but we don’t see much evidence that this is the case. You have been saving more too. You socked away 5.6%...

Either Ted Cruz is hip or rap is dead. I am not sure which. It has to be one of the two. A group called We Are Watchmen, a Christian rap group from the Chicago suburb of Westchester, has made what can be loosely described as a “rap paean” to Ted Cruz. It is entitled “Set It On Fire.” It is about four minutes long, and if you listen to it enough times, every ounce of hipness drains from your body and you become Donny Osmond. (VIDEO-AT-LINK)The title is misleading. The gist of the song is that you should vote...

A team of researchers at the Federal Reserve are pointing fingers at more than a handful of states they say are actively undermining the government's attempts to curb income inequality. According to a new paper, the federal tax code works to compress income inequality across the U.S., a problem that has been growing since 1980. The general idea is that high earners should be taxed at higher rates, allowing a good portion of that revenue to go into programs that help lower-income people. In contrast, some states have instituted "regressive" tax policies that offset federal taxes and widen the growing...

The uneven results of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy since the financial crisis should cause new thinking about how to conduct interest rate policy, said St. Louis Fed President James Bullard on Thursday in advocating for a new, controversial target. Standard economic theory predicted that the Fed’s decision to leave rates at zero and buy trillions of dollars of bonds would result in a consumption boom and above-average inflation, but that has not happened, sending economists back to the drawing board. Under Bullard’s proposal, the Fed would set an overall inflation target. In good times, the central bank would keep...

Received wisdom about the 2008 financial crisis has not been faring well lately. Peter Wallison, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, demonstrates in a new book that the subprime housing boom was fostered mainly by federal housing politics and policy, not by the rampant "deregulation" that many have imagined out of whole cloth. Another revelation: The New York Fed staff, as we belatedly learned last year, prepared an analysis showing that Lehman at the time of its collapse was theoretically solvent after all... OK, what about "too big to fail"? Nobody has found an email from a CEO saying,...

In total, 39 English language books were found at bin Laden's Pakistan compound along with a wealth of other written materials: The 2030 Spike by Colin Mason A Brief Guide to Understanding Islam by I. A. Ibrahim America's Strategic Blunders by Willard Matthias America's 'War on Terrorism' by Michel Chossudovsky Al-Qaeda's Online Media Strategies: From Abu Reuter to Irhabi 007 by Hanna Rogan The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast The Best Enemy Money Can Buy by Anthony Sutton Black Box Voting, Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century by Bev Harris Bloodlines of the Illuminati by Fritz Springmeier...

"From 1947 when [the] Bretton Woods System really got operating to 1971, when the dollar was convertible into gold at a 35th of an ounce, unemployment in America averaged 4.7 percent. And then we got rid of the Bretton Woods system — we defaulted on it — we went to fiat money, and in the years from 1971 to today, unemployment has averaged significantly above 6 percent. Low unemployment: gold standard. High unemployment: fiat money. But it’s not just unemployment. The bankruptcy rate which Elizabeth Warren likes to focus on was one point something per thousand for years, and suddenly...

It's interesting and important to note that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's comment about a stock market potentially built upon "irrational exuberance" did not coincide with a drop in the markets. In fact, it took years before the truly irrational stock market, built upon the emerging web technology world, fell apart. But comments this week by the current Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen that equity "are quite high" reminded many of a more muted version of Greenspan's observations years earlier. In the case of Greenspan, his comments were more speculative and were rooted in the theoretical of what could happen...

Fed chief Janet Yellen rattled the stock market Wednesday when she said "equity market valuations at this point generally are quite high," saying that raises "potential dangers." She added that she doesn't see "the hallmarks of a bubble," but stocks retreated from opening gains and traded lower, though the major averages closed off intraday lows. Are stocks overvalued? After a six-year bull market, a correction should be expected, although the odds favor a more garden variety downturn of 20% or so over a period of several months, not the painful free-falls of 2000-02 or 2008. Wednesday's selling prompted IBD to...

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Wednesday described stock market valuations as high and said the central bank was carefully monitoring their impact on financial stability. "I would highlight that equity market valuations at this point generally are quite high," Yellen said in conversation with Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, at an economics conference. Coupled with weak economic reports in the morning, her remarks drove stocks broadly lower in Wednesday trading. Yellen added, however, that the overall risks to financial stability are "moderated, not elevated" and she does not see the hallmarks of any bubbles. She...

The Federal Reserve could well raise interest rates as soon as June, two top U.S. central bankers said on Friday, so long as economic data strengthens as expected from a dismal first quarter. That view—from the hawkish-leaning chief of the Cleveland Fed and from the centrist head of the San Francisco Fed—is at odds with the view of many traders, whose bets in the interest-rate futures markets suggest they have all but discounted a June rate hike and now expect the Fed to wait until December before raising rates for the first time since 2006. The Fed has kept interest...

Ah: I see that there was a Twitter exchange among Brad DeLong, James Pethokoukis, and others over why Republicans don’t acknowledge that Ben Bernanke helped the economy, and claim credit. Pethokoukis — who presumably gets to talk to quite a few Republicans from his perch at AEI — offers a fairly amazing explanation: B/c many view BB as enabling Obama’s spending and artificially propping up debt-heavy economy in need of Mellon-esque liquidation Yep: that dastardly Bernanke was preventing us from having a financial crisis, curse him. Actually, there’s a lot of evidence that this was an important part of the...

In the seventh year of Barack Obama's administration, the economy is still getting failing grades that have been the hallmark of his trouble-filled presidency. While he continues to go about the country telling voters that his policies are working, this week's dreary economic data tell a far different story. The bleak headlines in the nation's major newspapers tell the story in its bluntest terms. "Stocks fall on disappointing economic data," said USA Today. "U.S. stocks fall on weak economic data," blares The Wall Street Journal, with this subhead: "Private payrolls rise less than expected in March, adding to concerns about...

Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen called for more research into widening inequality in the United States during a speech at the Federal Reserve Community Development Research Conference in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. “How do some places advance economically and create circumstances in which residents in turn are more likely to thrive?” Yellen said at one point in her speech, giving an example of the type of question she would like to see answered by “further research.” “According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, the gap between rich and poor now ranks as a major concern in the minds of...

The Bank of England's website says that the "effective lower bound" for the interest rate it sets, Bank Rate, is the current rate of 0.5%. This is the level, according to the Bank, "below which it cannot be set" - the lowest practicable official interest rate. But on this important issue the website is behind the thinking of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, which sets Bank Rate as its main tool to keep inflation on target. The Bank of England's website says that the "effective lower bound" for the interest rate it sets, Bank Rate, is the current...

Last week was a bad one for the US dollar, but good for stocks. The greenback had its worst five days of trading in four years, but the Dow rose another 168 points on Friday. This action took place after Madame Janet Yellen, proprietress of the House of the Rising Stockmarket, said she would not be impatient about raising rates. She would not be patient either, she warned. Investors drew the obvious conclusion: She has no idea what she is doing. […] The world of today is not the same world it was 50 years ago. We have a new...

I don't know too much about Jim Rickards, just found this to be an interesting video about the overall economy and some tidbits about what our government agencies are up to. The video is a 45 minutes long interview of sorts and discussion. Just posting in the event other are interested.