Free Republic

Federal Reserve Bank of New York officials secretly conducted real-time exercises during the 2011 and 2013 debt-limit crisis that demonstrated the federal government could function during a temporary shutdown by prioritizing spending, even as Treasury Secretary Jack Lew publicly claimed many times that such efforts were “unworkable,” according to a new report by the House Financial Services Committee obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The staff report, to be released Tuesday, charges that Lew and other Obama administration officials deliberately misled Congress and the public during the federal budget and debt limit showdowns in both years. The committee will...

U.S. stocks moved back into the red Wednesday after the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged and said "economic growth slowed" since its last meeting in December. "Inflation is expected to remain low in the near term," the Fed said in new, more cautious language, that suggests the central bank won't be quick to raise interest rates again. "Lower oil prices and weak global economic growth would make the Fed more cautious about its tightening policy. The second interest rate increase in March has become unlikely," said Jia Liu, research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research in emailed...

At the end of Obama's second term, it is estimated the national debt will be 20 trillion dollars. Most of this money has gone to frivolous spending by the Federal government, as well as been stolen by various government officials, using the excuse that astronomical sums of money are missing. In the computer age, it would be impossible to lose a trillion dollars, unless it was purposely lost to cover the theft of it. In looking at the numbers, we find that most of the 20 trillion debt is accountable in lost funds. Since 9-11, the US has spent 6...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau remains "the most out-of-control, unaccountable, and nontransparent agency in the federal government... And we can say that without reservation because this is one of the only agencies that literally operates outside of congressional oversight," added Wise, whose Virgina-based organization "works to protect consumers' right to access free-market goods and services." The CFPB, created under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, is funded largely by fees banks pay to the Federal Reserve. While its director, Richard Cordray, has bragged that his bureau has levied more than $141 million in fines used for CFPB education programs or reparation to...

Criticism Mounts Vs. Fed As Stocks, Economy BuckleOutput, Retail Sales Slide Central bank hiked rates as economy barely grew;  fallout is felt worldwide It's becoming clear that the Federal Reserve ran out of patience and pulled the trigger on the first rate hike... New data out Friday showed that retail sales fizzled...   ... factories slowed further, leading economists to mark down Q4 growth estimates. The Q1 outlook isn't a whole lot better. With oil prices and global stock markets plunging, criticism of the December rate hike is mounting. "Consumers are still keeping their purse strings tight, producers are reducing activity...

The recent market jitters have a lot of people saying that the Fed might have made a yuge mistake by raising rates. I’ve been a vocal proponent against raising rates, but I am not convinced that this was a policy error (just yet). The risk/reward doesn’t look great in a world where the US economy is fairly weak and global growth is clearly slowing. Here’s my thinking: The risk with rate hikes is creating an extreme divergence in global policy approaches where the US Central Bank, the world’s most important central bank, is tightening policy into a global slowdown. The...

"The Senate on Tuesday rejected Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) controversial proposal to audit the Federal Reserve, turning aside a bill that has drawn the ire of the business community and the White House. The Senate voted 53-44 on taking up the presidential hopeful’s Audit the Fed measure. Sixty votes were needed to move forward. Paul won some bipartisan support for the legislation, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), another presidential candidate, voting in favor. Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin (Wis.) backed the bill as well. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who is also running for president, supported moving forward with Paul's legislation, while...

The verdict is in. On Friday, jurors found 56-year-old Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow guilty on all 162 charges against him, including murder, conspiracy to murder, racketeering, trafficking in stolen goods and 154 counts of money laundering. Though the FBI and U.S. attorney's office may feel vindicated by the verdict, the guilty verdict also serves as an indictment of the federal criminal justice system's standard operating procedure. It was the feds, after all, who chose to let Chow out of prison despite his long criminal career. In 2003, the feds freed Chow, who was serving a 160-month sentence on racketeering charges...

The Dow Jones lost over 1,000 points this week. It's down 9 percent over the past year. The broader S&P 500 also got clobbered, and is down 7 percent in the past year. What's going on? Is the world coming to an end? Is it 2008 all over again? Will the U.S. import recession from a falling Chinese yuan? Are hard-working middle-class wage earners about to drive up the inflation rate? No, no, no, and no. First up, the drop in the Chinese currency is about 6 percent since last August and the offshore (Hong Kong) yuan has fallen 7.5...

...So what is Mr. Cruz's "one big problem"? It turns out to be that he's for honest money, ideally a dollar defined in terms of gold. That is, he's got the same problem that dogged those notorious losers like, to name but a few, Geo. Washington, John Adams, Thos. Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, Wm. McKinley, Thos. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan.This is a bizarre argument that puts the Huffington Post - the dispatch is by its senior political economy reporter, Zach Carter - in the company of, say, Richard Nixon. It was Nixon...

The inspector general for the Federal Reserve is warning that a key database at the central bank needs more cybersecurity protections, according to a summary report. Compiled in the wake of a security control review of the board's Statistics and Reserves system, known as STAR, the report finds that overall, "the Division of Monetary Affairs and the Division of Information Technology have taken several steps to implement information security controls." But the inspector general staff warned that there are several cybersecurity deficiencies in the system. "We found that improvements are needed in the Board's security governance of STAR to ensure...

Stocks rose Wednesday following the Federal Reserve's announcement of the first interest rate increase since 2006. However, stocks fell just two days later. One reason the positive reaction to the Fed's announcement did not last long is that the Fed seems to lack confidence in the economy and is unsure what policies it should adopt in the future. At her Wednesday press conference, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen acknowledged continuing "cyclical weakness" in the job market. She also suggested that future rate increases are likely to be as small, or even smaller, then Wednesday's. However, she also expressed concerns over...

Nothing is more bungled in Washington than the role of money in our economy- and that's saying a lot. Almost no one understands how our dollar policy works, and those that say they do are the ones who screwed things all up. The Fed has today bid farewell to seven years of its zero interest rate policy. Hooray. Wall Street is petrified because investors have become hyper-dependent on this zero rate scheme and the floods of dollars injected into the economy just as an addict craves crack cocaine. But the high from easy money, just as with any hallucinogenic drug,...

For a Republican, Ted Cruz has a unique criticism of the Federal Reserve. The conservative Texas senator and contender for the GOP presidential nomination argues that the central bank is responsible for causing the financial crisis and recession because it kept money too tight in 2008. Cruz's criticism of the Fed is nearly the opposite of the one typically voiced by Republicans, who generally fault Chairwoman Janet Yellen and her predecessor Ben Bernanke for their efforts to ease money. GOP complaints about the Fed have grown since the central bank lowered interest rates to zero and started quantitative easing programs....

The racially charged protests that have roiled 23 universities from Yale to the University of Missouri in recent weeks reached Princeton on Wednesday. Members of the Black Justice League left their classes and occupied historic Nassau Hall, which houses the Princeton administration's offices. They demanded that officials acknowledge the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson - who was president of Princeton before becoming president of the United States and expunge his name from anything named after him. They further demanded "cultural competency training" for anyone teaching at Princeton, courses on the "history of marginalized people," and a designated public space for...

Today, the House overwhelmingly passed the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act (STRR) to much fanfare.The six-year, $325-billion bill reauthorizes highway and transit funding from the federal Highway Trust Fund that was set to expire on November 20. The bill is being heralded as no less than a historic “long-term” measure, emerging after “ten years of short-term band-aids and extensions.”But make no mistake: Despite the bill’s name and the exhortations of its admirers, STRR is another status quo bailout, plain and simple.It follows in a long line of short-term bailouts that do nothing to fix the chronic overspending and misallocation...

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Wednesday pointed to a possible December interest rate "liftoff" but said rates would rise only slowly from then on to nurture the U.S. economic recovery. [...] Her remarks pushed bond yields higher and stocks lower. They also caused investors to reset their expectations of a December rate hike above 60 percent, a sign that markets are finally taking the Fed's language seriously after a period in which U.S. central bankers were frustrated by the gap between their own outlook and market bets about their likely course of action. ...

Most economists and investors readily acknowledge that the current period of central bank activism, characterized by extended bouts of quantitative easing and zero percent interest rates, is a newly-blazed trail in economic history. And while these policies strike some as counterintuitive, open-ended, and unimaginably expensive, most express comfort that our extremely educated, data-dependent, central bankers have a pretty good idea as to where the trail is going and how to keep the wagons together during the journey. But as it turns out, there really isn't much need for guesswork. As the United States enters its eighth year of zero percent...

Was the dismal September jobs report the nail in the coffin for a 2015 interest-rate rise? Markets are acting as if it were, even as some economists think Federal Reserve officials see things differently. Monthly job gains, which had averaged over 200,000 for most of the year, plunged to 142,000 in September and a downwardly revised 136,000 in August. Private hiring was the weakest in three years. The workweek and labor-force participation rates also declined even further. Meanwhile, other data showed U.S. manufacturing and retail sales nearly stalled last month... *** There's Always Next Season An hour after the jobs...

In a world in which the Cold War is a fading memory, North Korea and Cuba endure as museums of communism, so no one will forget how criminally insane it always was. In a world haunted by the specter of persistently falling prices, some countries are creating severe inflation, so we can be grateful for its virtual disappearance. One of the governments providing this public service is that of Venezuela, where the currency has lost so much value that even robbers reject it. A recent carjacking victim told The New York Times his armed captors had no interest in his...