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Politics: You'd think a Republican debate on the economy would be a perfect time to blast Obama policies as an unmitigated disaster. Yet Obama escaped largely unscathed. Whom do these folks think they're running against? If aliens landed Tuesday night and managed to find the GOP debate on Bloomberg TV, they might think the GOP candidates were running against Ben Bernanke, someone named Dodd-Frank, Obama-Care and China. Newt Gingrich focused his ire, for example, on Bernanke, saying he's "the first person to fire." Michele Bachmann went on about Dodd-Frank, calling it "the jobs and housing destruction act." Rick Santorum said...

I'm in the 1%. But I support the 99%Last year, I earned a million dollars on Wall Street, but I'm sick of this society that skews the rewards for work so grotesquely Brad Maher Friday 14 October 2011 12.04 EDT **SNIP** I've chosen this life, of course, and I'm compensated for that financially. But I'm not part of the truly rich for whom taxes are optional, and for whom ever-increasing property prices are a source of entrenching their wealth. Thank God, my earnings permit me to live without the fears of the next energy bill, or phone bill, or medical...

Republican Leaders Warn Bernanke Against QE3 Zeke Miller Sep. 20, 2011, 7:13 PM | Top Republican lawmakers in both chambers of Congress warned Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke against pursuing another round of quantitative easing after tomorrow's meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee. Questioning the efficacy of the first two rounds of monetary easing, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said they are concerned another round of QE could "exacerbate current problems or further harm the U.S. economy." Here's...

Dear Chairman Bernanke, It is our understanding that the Board Members of the Federal Reserve will meet later this week to consider additional monetary stimulus proposals. We write to express our reservations about any such measures. Respectfully, we submit that the board should resist further extraordinary intervention in the U.S. economy, particularly without a clear articulation of the goals of such a policy, direction for success, ample data proving a case for economic action and quantifiable benefits to the American people. It is not clear that the recent round of quantitative easing undertaken by the Federal Reserve has facilitated economic...

In the run-up to the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve fueled the housing bubble with its easy money policy. Now, we know that after the crisis struck, the Fed secretly propped up elite bankers all the way from Wall Street to Brussels to the Central Bank of Libya. A Bloomberg news investigation found that while the Treasury Department was pumping $700 billion into banks under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Fed was covertly operating its own bailout program — the biggest in American history. The Fed's Shadow TARP issued $1.2 trillion in loans to domestic and foreign banks from...

FOR the last three years we have been told repeatedly by government officials that funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to large and teetering banks during the credit crisis was necessary to save the financial system, and beneficial to Main Street... --snip-- Bloomberg reported that the Fed had provided a stunning $1.2 trillion to large global financial institutions at the peak of its crisis lending in December 2008. --snip-- In 2008, the Royal Bank of Scotland received $84.5 billion, and Dexia, a Belgian lender, borrowed $58.5 billion from the Fed at... --snip-- Mr. Todd also questioned the Fed’s decision to...

Rising greenhouse emissions may tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report for Nasa It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim. Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain. This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by scientists at Nasa and Pennsylvania State...

Extra, extra read all about it (hat tip Andrew Bolt): Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists Rising greenhouse emissions may tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report for Nasa Is it April Fools’ Day, or is someone playing the alien card? The scare report was brought to us by the Guardian’s science correspondent, Ian Sample. One threat – preemptive strikes: The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have...

The Case for MORE Spending to Prevent a Recession By Matt Nesto | Breakout – 3 hours ago It took Jimmy Buffett three verses to admit it in Margaritaville, but even he figured it out eventually. "Some people claim that there's a woman to blame, But I know, it's my own damn fault." Get the idea? Dean Baker sure does. He's the Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and a believer of the theory that we are our own worst enemy when it comes to getting the country back on its feet, financially speaking. "We're worsening the...

Ron Paul's recent idea on how to ease the national debt is hardly original but none the less worthy of consideration. He has proposed what leftist critics of the status quo monetary system have been proposing for decades: that money printing should be used to fund the government. To give Ron due credit, he is not proposing exactly that. More precisely, he is proposing that the Fed should tear up a bundle of its Treasury securities, which would lower our overall debt total bringing us below the current debt ceiling. Still, the mechanics are identical, if not in reverse order....

General Motors CEO Dan Akerson said his company and his industry would be helped, not hurt, if consumers paid higher gas taxes. In an interview published in Tuesday's Detroit News, Akerson floated the idea of a $1 a gallon increase in the gas tax as a way to encourage buyers to purchase smaller, more fuel efficient cars. Greg Martin, spokesman for GM's Washington office, confirmed that the quotes reflect Akerson's and GM's view. Akerson said he would support a jump in the gas tax if it came instead of tighter fuel economy regulations that GM (GM, Fortune 500) and other...

Lawmakers have taken a step to make California more relevant in presidential politics, voting to give the state's electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. The state Assembly passed AB459 on Thursday on a 43-18 vote, sending it to the state Senate. . . .

Amid questions about the authenticity of Obama's posted birth records raised by the registration number, a researcher has discovered a possible explanation. The Post and Email blog, which has focused on the Obama eligibility controversy, features a report by an unnamed researcher who discovered the record of a girl born the same day as the president who died a day later that could have been the source of Obama's birth certificate. The find is significant because of questions about the plausibility of the registration number indicated on the images of short-form and long-form birth certificates for the president posted on...

NEW YORK — The next big question on the federal debt limit could be whether to start selling the government’s holdings of gold at Fort Knox — and at least one presidential contender, Ron Paul, has told The New York Sun he thinks it would be a good move. The question has been ricocheting around the policy circles today. An analyst at the Heritage Foundation, Ron Utt, told the Washington Post that the gold holdings of the government are “just sort of sitting there.” He added: “Given the high price it is now, and the tremendous debt problem we now...

Fed head Ben Bernanke, at his first-ever news conference on Wednesday, slammed the door shut on any new QE3 pump-priming. The $600 billion QE2 program to purchase bonds will end on target at the end of June, and that will be that. Mr. Bernanke also suggested that the Fed’s “extended period” for the near-zero federal funds target rate could end in a couple of meetings. Perhaps these announcements suggest a bit-less-easy monetary policy. Perhaps. But Mr. Bernanke had no defense of the sinking dollar, or the inflation it brings, or the drop in middle-class living standards it causes. So it’s...

A game of 20 questions with the Fed Chairman... 1. The rescue packages in 2008-2009 were all aimed at restoring CONFIDENCE to the financial system. Yet from 2001 to 2011 the DXY is down 41.5 and gold is up 473%. Does this not equate to a loss of confidence in the US monetary system? If not how would you explain this phenomena? 2. In March of 2009 you said the ONLY reason you care about Wall Street is because of the affect it has on Main Street. You wanted to become Fed Chairmen to make things better "for the average...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Persistent Federal Reserve critic Representative Ron Paul plans to hold a hearing on the U.S. central bank's emergency loans to the branches of non-U.S. banks, his spokeswoman said on Saturday. "I was surprised and deeply disturbed ... to learn the staggering amount of money that went to foreign banks," Paul said in a statement. "These lending activities provided no benefit to American taxpayers, the American economy, or even directly to American banks," he said.

Economic lunacy abounds, and often the most learned, including Nobel Laureates, are its primary victims. The most recent example of economic lunacy is found in a Huffington Post article titled "The Silver Lining of Japan's Quake" written by Nathan Gardels, editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, who has also written articles for The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post. Mr. Gardels says, "No one -- least of all someone like myself who has experienced the existential terror of California's regular tremors and knows the big one is coming here next -- would minimize the grief,...

A company that tracks roughly half of all U.S. home loans has no right to transfer mortgages, a ruling that could significantly affect the foreclosure process nationwide, a federal bankruptcy judge concluded. Merscorp Inc, a private company known as MERS and owned by large banks and mortgage processors, cannot act as an agent of the banks that own mortgages, wrote Judge Robert Grossman of the U.S. bankruptcy court in Central Islip, New York, located on Long Island. MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, tracks more than 60 million mortgages, and has filed thousands of foreclosure actions on behalf...

<p>Global inflation is far higher than official statistics reveal, Marc Faber, editor and publisher of the “Gloom, Boom and Doom” report told CNBC on Wednesday, with increases in the cost of living amounting to between five and eight percent in the United States and just below that in Europe.</p>