Free Republic

On Monday night urban radio show host Tavis Smiley told Megyn Kelly Barack Obama has failed black Americans as president. Megyn Kelly: On the subject of race, are we better off today that seven years ago? Tavis Smiley: I'm not sure we are and I think ultimately the president missed a moment... On every leading economic issue, in the leading economic issues Black Americans have lost ground in every one of those leading categories. So in the last ten years it hasn't been good for black folk. This is the president's most loyal constituency that didn't gain any ground in...

The continued collapse of The Baltic Dry Index remains ignored by most - besides we still have Netflix, right? But, as Dollar Vigilante's Jeff Berwick details, it appears the worldwide 'real' economy has ground to a halt!! Last week, I received news from a contact who is friends with one of the biggest billionaire shipping families in the world. He told me they had no ships at sea right now, because operating them meant running at a loss. This weekend, reports are circulating saying much the same thing: The North Atlantic has little or no cargo ships traveling in its...

Bill Clinton flew to New Hampshire and unsealed an indictment against Obama's economy. Campaigning in Exeter, Hillary's "secret weapon" told Granite State voters Monday, "I think this election is about restoring broadly shared prosperity, rebuilding the middle class, giving kids the American Dream back." The former president may have seemed to hammer some far-Right Republican president who gleefully impoverishes average Americans while enriching his fellow plutocrats. However, a far-Left Democrat has been president for seven years this month. Thus, the economic stagnation that Clinton critiqued is Obama's. In Obama's first or second year, Clinton might have managed to blame Baby...

The first week of 2016 has brought sinking temperatures and stocks-and now weaker estimates of economic growth for the fourth quarter. Before Monday, the U.S. economy appeared to have ended 2015 on solid, though unspectacular, footing. Many economists were estimating that the nation's gross domestic product-or the sum of all goods and services produced-grew at an annual pace of roughly 2% in October through December. That would match the third quarter's pace and fall roughly in line with average growth throughout the current expansion. But those estimates are falling, due to weak readings Monday morning on the nation'd manufacturing and...

Why aren't people saving? Millions of Americans are struggling with student loans, medical bills and other debts, says Andrew Meadows, a San Francisco-based producer of "Broken Eggs," a documentary about retirement. Central bankers hiked their short-term interest rate target last month to a range of 0.25% to 0.50% from near-zero, but that's still a small return for savings left in bank accounts. Indeed, personal savings rates as a percentage of disposable income dropped from 11% in December 2012 to 4.6% in August 2015, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis , and now hover at 5.5%. More money and education...

US factory orders have never dropped this far for so long without the US economy overall being in recession. November's 4.2% YoY drop is the 13th consecutive monthly drop. Revisions to durable goods data shows a 1% drop in new orders ex-defense in November after rising 1.4% in October.. and as a reminder, this data was buoyed by a 46.9% surge in defense aircraft and parts orders to all-time highs. Factory Orders are flashing deep red recessionary indicators...

I'm in the Automobile business and have been for about 25 years. Believe it or not the Auto business has gotten into the internet age. Big time! Heck, our dealership has only had a website for....maybe 8 years? Something like that. We don't have an internet dept. Salespeople receive internet leads based on a round robin type of thing. When an internet lead is sent then the first thing sent is an auto response. Then the salesperson responds with a template and if a phone number is included, a call. Here's the thing. As of today, sales people are required...

Manufacturing activity in the U.S. contracted at the fastest pace since July 2009 in December, dampening optimism over the strength of the economy and adding to uncertainty as to how fast the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates next year, industry data showed on Monday. In a report, the Institute for Supply Management said its index of purchasing managers fell to 48.2 last month from a reading of 48.6 in November. Analysts had expected the manufacturing PMI to inch up to 49.0 in December. The New Orders Index registered 49.2, an increase of 0.3 points from the reading of 48.9...

ALBANY, N.Y., Jan. 3 (UPI) -- On Sunday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order require all homeless people to seek shelter when temperatures drop below freezing. The order directs state agencies -- including police, social services and others -- to take "all necessary steps to identify individuals reasonably believed to be homeless and unwilling or unable to find the shelter necessary for safety and health in inclement winter weather, and move such individuals to the appropriate sheltered facilities." The directive goes into effect Tuesday. A 2015 count tallied 88,250 homeless people in New York, statewide -- the...

<p>As Wilbur Ross so eloquently noted, for Puerto Rico "it's the end of the beginning... and the beginning of the end," as he explained "Puerto Rico is the US version of Greece." However, as JPMorgan explains, for some states the pain is really just beginning as Municipal bond risk will only become more important over time, as assets of some severely underfunded plans are gradually depleted.</p>

The number of Americans filing for US unemployment insurance benefits jumped to a nearly six-month high last week during the Christmas holiday season, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Initial jobless claims rose by 20,000 to 287,000 in the week ending December 26. That marked the highest level of new claims, a sign of the pace of layoffs, since the first week of July. ...

link only - Bloomberg

Lower Jobless Claims Don’t Point to Robust Labor Market ERIC MORATH Dec. 24. The fewest Americans since 1973 will seek new unemployment benefits this year, but that doesn’t mean the labor market is back to full health. In total, less than 15 million American will make first-time requests for government assistance this year—about half as many claims as were made in 2009—and far fewer than the number filed during the 1980s and 90s when the economy was expanding at a stronger clip. But “the labor market is certainly not the healthiest it’s been since 1973,” said Goldman Sachs economist Zach...

Theory du jour: the new Star Wars movie is sucking in whatever meager disposable lucre remains among the economically-flayed mid-to-lower orders of America. In fact, I propose a new index showing an inverse relationship between Star Wars box office receipts and soundness of the financial commonweal. In other words, Star Wars is all that remains of the US economy outside of the obscure workings of Wall Street — and that heretofore magical realm is not looking too rosy either in this season of the Great Rate Hike after puking up 623 points of the DJIA last Thursday and Friday. Here...

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,...

The math is pretty simple: A lack of purchasing power for consumers has led to a lack of pricing power for companies. When it comes to the U.S. economy big-picture outlook, the ramifications are more complicated, and not particularly pleasant. Wednesday's producer price index reading, showing a monthly decline of 0.5 percent, demonstrates a larger problem: At a time when policymakers are hoping to generate the kind of inflation that would indicate strong growth, the reality is that deflation is looming as the larger threat. Declining prices often would be treated as a net positive by consumers, but income weakness...

RUSH: Los Angeles. This is the LA Times: "LA to Declare 'State of Emergency' on Homelessness, Commit $100 Million -- Los Angeles elected leaders," as opposed to the unelected leaders, "announced yesterday that they would declare a 'state of emergency' and devote up to $100 million" toward housing and other services for homeless people. I know. I mean, there's all kinds of lines here just waiting. Why don't they disguise themselves as immigrants? Why don't they go pitch their tent or their shopping cart, whatever, near the border like they're immigrants. "The proposal, which was presented at the City Hall...

Employers are leaving a bigger chunk of the bill for care to workers who use their health insurance, and benefits experts see few signs of this trend slowing. Most companies now offer health coverage that requires employees to pay an annual deductible before insurance kicks in, and the size of that deductible has soared in the past decade, according to a survey released Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Health Research & Educational Trust. The average general deductible for workers with single coverage totaled $1,077 this year, compared to only $303 in 2006. That deductible has climbed nearly seven...

FRED = Federal Reserve Economic Data This is the perfect handout for just about discussion of the Democrats' libtard agenda!

The August jobs report was hardly reassuring.  On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported net job creation of 173,000, far below estimates.  There's no way to sugar-coat it, though White House officials attempted to do just that.  They pointed out that the unemployment rate had fallen to 5.1%.  But that was because another 200,000 workers had simply given up trying to find a good job. Good jobs are not being created because economic expansion has stalled.  And expansion has stalled because Obama has presided over the greatest assault on free enterprise in our nation's history.   It didn't...