Free Republic

The chief of the International Monetary Fund [IMF] says the U.S. government’s stalemate over spending and its debt limit is “very, very concerning” and could roll back economic progress around the world. Christine Lagarde, who took over the financial watchdog-and-rescue organization in 2011, said global finance ministers assembled for meetings in Washington last week feeling like Japan had finally turned the corner and that economies in the U.S. and Europe were on the upswing. “And then they found out that the debt ceiling was the issue,” she said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “They found out that the government...

Eurozone officials have reacted tersely to the International Monetary Fund’s insistence that Greek debt be restructured, suggesting that Europe and the Washington-based organization are drifting further apart on how the Greek bailout should proceed. A number of top eurozone figures – including European Central Bank executive board member Joerg Asmussen, head of the European Stability Mechanism Klaus Regling and European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn – are in Washington for discussions with IMF officials. The Europeans, however, seemed annoyed by comments from IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde in which she urged the eurozone to provide Greece with debt...

Regulators should boost oversight of the largest real-estate investment trusts that use borrowed money to invest in mortgage-backed securities because rising interest rates may push the firms into asset sales that destabilize markets, the International Monetary Fund said. A version of that scenario occurred during the rise in rates that began in May, the IMF said. Repercussions might roil the REITs’ lenders, disrupt the $5.3 trillion market in which they invest and damage the broader U.S. economy, according to its Global Financial Stability Report released today. Here is the report. Mortgage REITs have suffered since the May 1 surge in...

The International Monetary Fund Oct. 8 lowered its global growth forecast for this year to 2.9 percent and to 3.6 percent in 2014, from 3.1 percent and 3.8 percent it had in July. The U.S. economy is “at the center of events,” the fund said. The damage to the world’s largest economy from a longer federal government shutdown “could be quite harmful” while “the failure to promptly raise the debt ceiling, leading to a U.S. selective default, could seriously damage the global economy,” the IMF warned in its new “World Economic Outlook”. Bear in mind that the IMF has had...

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Monday that President Obama is putting the economy at risk by refusing to negotiate with Republicans over spending and the debt ceiling. "The president's refusal to negotiate is hurting our economy and putting our country at risk," Boehner said on the House floor. Boehner expressed disbelief at reports that Obama would rather see a debt default than talk to Republicans. "This morning, a senior White House official this morning said that the president would rather default than to sit down and negotiate," he said. "Really?" "The American people expect when their leaders have differences, and...

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said Thursday that a failure to raise the U.S. debt ceiling could "very seriously damage" the global economy. "The government shutdown is bad enough, but failure to raise the debt ceiling would be far worse, and could very seriously damage not only the U.S. economy, but the entire global economy," Lagarde said in a speech at George Washington University ahead of the 2013 World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings. "So it is 'mission-critical' that this be resolved as soon as possible," she added. Referring to the anticipated tapering of Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program, Lagarde...

(I'm paraphrasing, so I highly recommend listening to the podcast, beginning about half-way through.) In his 10/3/13 broadcast, Mark warns that, based upon Obama's inflammatory rhetoric regarding the debt ceiling, and the supposedly impending "default" on our debt, that Obama plans on acting unilaterally to over-spend the debt limit. Mark correlates a couple of facts. The first is that Obama is harping on "default." Most pundits are reading this as a means of "talking down" the economy, in order to blame the "Republican shutdown" for a weakening economy. But Mark believes that Obama is laying the groundwork for overspending the...

Tuesday morning, seven National Park Service employees were seen erecting and tending to a barricade around the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C. One NPS employee was operating a forklift. There usually aren't any NPS employees working at the World War II memorial. A couple hours later, when an Honor Flight of World War II veterans arrived, accompanied by Democratic and Republican members of Congress, the fences blocking the memorial were easily moved away, allowing the veterans to enter. But the barriers are still at the memorial, and they've been reinforced. This morning, I walked by the memorial and...

Karen Hudes is a graduate of Yale Law School and she worked in the legal department of the World Bank for more than 20 years. In fact, when she was fired for blowing the whistle on corruption inside the World Bank, she held the position of Senior Counsel. She was in a unique position to see exactly how the global elite rule the world, and the information that she is now revealing to the public is absolutely stunning. According to Hudes, the elite use a very tight core of financial institutions and mega-corporations to dominate the planet. The goal is...

On the Friday before Christmas, President Obama announced that he was appointing Mohamed A. El-Erian, the CEO of Pacific Investment Management Company, as the chairman of his Global Development Council. The announcement didn’t get much attention, but it should. It exemplifies what’s wrong with Obama’s approach to economic policy, which amounts to: insult rich people as “fat cats,” raise their taxes, and then choose a favored few of them for special access. If you’re not familiar with El-Erian, you must not be watching CNBC or attending the World Economic Forum at Davos. The son of an Egyptian ambassador to France...

As the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) meetings begin for an EU/US merger, Europeans are increasingly dissatisfied with the EU superstate that's destroying their sovereignty. EU Official: Pooling Sovereignty, Once "Unthinkable," Now "the Model" The New American 12 July 2013 As reported here this week, the first round of Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations has been underway in Washington, D.C. with European Union and American officials, along with a select group of business, banking, environmental, and union "stakeholders." President Obama has placed this planned political and economic merger of the EU and the United States on...

The cost of inaction is too high. On Tuesday, I unveiled a new national plan to confront climate change. It's a plan that will reduce carbon pollution to prevent the worst effects of climate change, prepare our country for the effects we can't stop, and lead the world in combating the growing threat of a changing climate. ... This plan will cut the dangerous carbon pollution that contributes to climate change. ... We will be judged as a people, as a society, and as a country by where we go from here. The plan I put forward to reduce carbon...

The head of Europe’s bailout fund says the region should eventually aim to do without help from the International Monetary Fund. Klaus Regling’s comments in Friday’s edition of Germany’s daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung add to recent hints from other European policymakers that the bloc should aim to handle future emergencies on its own. …

Mea Culpas: translated....Here are a few mea culpas from the final section of the IMF report (p49 and 50), to ponder... 1) With regard to Fund involvement, the view expressed was that it would have been better if the crisis could have been resolved within the EU/euro zone, but neither the authorities nor the EC or ECB had the required program experience. The Fund’s experience in crisis resolution made it a necessary part of the process. Translation: We'd rather have not been there at all. But they'd have done an even worse job without us. 2) Later, the possibility of...

The Obama administration has warned British officials that if the UK leaves Europe it will exclude itself from a US-EU trade and investment partnership potentially worth hundreds of billions of pounds a year, and that it was very unlikely that Washington would make a separate deal with Britain.

The head of the International Monetary Fund arrived in the dock of a Paris courtroom today as she braced herself to be formally charged with embezzlement and fraud. Christine Lagarde’s humiliation is not only a massive personal blow which could lead to her resignation, but one which will plunge the world’s banking system into further ignominy. The clearly nervous 57-year-old said nothing to reporters as she entered the Court of Justice of the Republic, a special tribunal set up to judge the conduct of France’s government ministers, shortly after 8.30am. Lagarde faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in jail...

<p>The International Monetary Fund on Monday said the United States was getting carried away with a government austerity drive, offering some of the institution's bluntest criticism yet of Washington's rush to cut its budget deficit.</p> <p>Despite high unemployment, Washington is on track to slash its budget shortfall this year by the most in nearly a half century.</p>

More than five years after the onset of the financial crisis, you might have thought economic policy makers would know what to do next. Well they don't. Or at the very least, there is nothing like the kind of consensus that prevailed before the financial crisis. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been hosting a conference on rethinking economic policy, organised by four experts in the area, including the IMF's own chief economist. One of the other organisers - the Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof of the University of California - had a vivid analogy for the state of uncertainty...

Yields on European sovereign bonds plummeted today in the expectation of another round of global monetary easing. In particular, the PIGS (minus Greece) fell over 10 basis points. Greece actually rose. Japan’s 10 year sovereign yield rose today by 2.9 basis points. However, the Japanese sovereign curve remains below the level when the Bank of Japan announced their mega-easing. Here is a different look at the yield surface for Japan: On this side of the Pacific Ocean, the US 10 year Treasury fell 1.2 basis points to remain under 1.7%. And Bankrate’s 30 year fixed average has fallen to 3.51%...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told global policymakers he sees no risk to inflation in the United States, European Central Bank Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny said on Saturday. Summing up presentations to an International Monetary Fund meeting, Nowotny told reporters Bernanke had given a "very optimistic" portrayal of the U.S. outlook. "They see absolutely no danger of an expansion in inflation," Nowotny said. Bernanke had said U.S. inflation should be 1.3 percent this year.