Free Republic

President Trump lauds job numbers he once impugned. He is now owns the bubble burst and resulting collapse with less than two months in office.

Part One of the House GOP’s official plan to repair/undo/fix/replace Obamacare was released this week, to utter shock and dismay. The authors say that everything America needs will be in the full packet, so it’s unfair to judge Part One without seeing the rest. That may be true, so here, let’s just look at the big picture, whether it’s one part, two parts, three or ten. America had a healthcare financing problem a decade ago. Conservative solutions, such as malpractice/tort reform, extending the tax-deductibility that employer-provided health insurance gets to individual policies too, and closing the borders to reduce the...

Economist-mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb contends that there is a global riot against pseudo-experts After predicting the 2008 economic crisis, the Brexit vote, the U.S. presidential election and other events correctly, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the Incerto series on global uncertainties, which includes The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is seen as something of a maverick and an oracle. Equally, the economist-mathematician has been criticised for advocating a “dumbing down” of the economic system, and his reasoning for U.S. President Donald Trump and global populist movements. In an interview in Jaipur, Taleb explains why he thinks the...

BILLINGS -- As bipartisan crowd-pleasers go, few get Montanans nodding more approvingly than calls for a balanced federal budget, which is why U.S. Sen. Steve Daines recently offered a bill forcing his peers to go unpaid unless they reign in spending. “As I travel around Montana, as I did in December wrapping up a 56-county tour, when I talk about this bill, it’s a bill that will literally bring applause from across the state,” Daines told The Gazette. The state of Montana balances its budget. The federal government should do the same, or so goes the narrative that literally every...

Reflections on the future of retail… As the new year began, right in the midst of outgoing Resident Barack Obama’s ever-more-urgent pleas for a “legacy,” two announcements hit the news: the family of Sears and K-Mart will close yet another 109 K-Marts and another 41 Sears’ stores in 2017, and Macy’s will close another 68 of theirs. It was to be expected, of course. The analysts say that these stores are of an old breed that hasn’t kept up; they still use brick and mortar, unlike the darlings of the new age of retail, Amazon and Etsy et al, which...

Paul Krugman has already had to walk back his prediction of a global recession following Donald Trump’s presidential victory last night. His initial post on the New York Times’ website was confidently apocalyptic about the prospects of Donald Trump plunging the world into a depression: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” He concluded by saying, “So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened.” Markets rebounded in...

His presidency-to-be isn’t starting well. News that Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States has sent global stock markets plunging, with U.S. markets on track for a loss of 5% or more when they open the day after Election Day. Trump has promised to unravel free-trade deals, roust undocumented workers out of the country and perhaps even send Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen packing. This is bad news for big companies, small companies, ordinary investors and perhaps even the very workers Trump says he aims to help. When Moody’s Analytics analyzed Trump’s economic plan over the...

CAMBRIDGE – Although the United States economy is in good shape – with essentially full employment and an inflation rate close to 2% – a world of uncertainty makes it worthwhile to consider what could go wrong in the year ahead. After all, if the US economy runs into serious trouble, there will be adverse consequences for Europe, Japan, and many other countries. Economic problems could of course originate from international political events. Russia has been acting dangerously in Eastern and Central Europe. China’s pursuit of territorial claims in the East and South China Seas, and its policies in East...

While everyone fixates on the U.S. election, developments in the world economy threaten to create problems for the next president and, possibly, trigger a major financial crisis. A little-noticed study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) delivers the bad news. It finds that global debt -- including the debts of governments, households and non-financial businesses -- reached a record $152 trillion in 2015, an amount much higher than before the 2008-09 financial crisis. What's worrisome about this is that the global economic recovery has assumed widespread "deleveraging" -- the repayment of debt by businesses and households. Initially, the theory went,...

Currently economists and market watchers roughly fall into two camps: Those who believe that the Federal Reserve must begin raising interest rates now so that it will have enough rate cutting firepower to fight the next recession, and those who believe that raising rates now will simply precipitate an immediate recession and force the Fed into battle without the tools it has traditionally used to stimulate growth. Both camps are delusional, but for different reasons. Most mainstream analysts believe that the current economy can survive with more normalized rates and that the Fed's timidity is unwarranted. These people just haven't...

<p>Bank of America has a recession warning that's downright 'scary'</p> <p>There's a chilling trend in the market, and it could wreak havoc on your portfolio, a top market watcher said.</p> <p>"We are seven years into a full-fledged, all out, central bankers doing everything they can to stimulate demand," Bank of America-Merrill Lynch's head of U.S. equity and quantitative strategy Savita Subramanian recently warned on CNBC's " Fast Money ."</p>

The U.S. economy didn’t pick up much speed in the third quarter. The U.S. economy got off to a roaring start in the third quarter, statistically speaking, but the glow has clearly faded. The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow chopped its forecast for U.S. growth to 2.2%... ...source of the reduced performance? Retail sales, consumer spending, manufacturing and construction were all weaker than expected toward the end of the quarter. Now, 2.2% growth isn’t terrible... ...Still, such a modest growth rate assures the U.S. economy will fail to reach the 3% mark for an unprecedented 11th straight year. The last time...

Julian Robertson, the legendary hedge fund manager behind Tiger Management, thinks central banks are fueling bubbles throughout financial markets. "We don't have negative rates here in the States yet, but I think it's tragic that we've taken rates down this far," Robertson said this week at Bloomberg's Surveillance Primetime event. "I know the Federal Reserves all over the world are trying to ensure prosperity, but in doing so I think they are ensuring a huge bubble, which will be pricked, and we will all be hurt by it." Negative and near-zero interest rates from central banks have allowed increased borrowing......

On the debate stage Monday night, Hillary Clinton smugly repeated the big lie that Democrats have been telling with something close to impunity since 2008. “We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s,” said Hillary. “That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.”

Debt terrifies people but the paradox of macro-economics is that sometimes borrowing even more is the best way out Credit: Jon Elswick An ominous paper by the US Federal Reserve has become the hottest document in high finance. It was intended to reassure us that the world's hegemonic central bank still has ample firepower to overcome the next downturn. But the author was too honest. He has instead set off an agitated debate, and rattled a lot of nerves. ... ...federal debt is already 105pc of GDP - up from 54pc... ...nagging question is what happens at the onset of...

The number of announced layoffs by U.S.-based companies fell in August to the lowest level since May, global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported Thursday. U.S. employers announced they planned to hand out 32,188 pink slips last month, a 29 percent decline from July. The August total was also 22 percent below the number of job cuts at this time last year. The computer sector was the biggest job-cutter, with Cisco Systems accounting for most of its 6,103 payroll reductions. The maker of networking equipment announced it would let go 5,500 employees last month.

If Republican nominee and real estate billionaire mogul Donald Trump pulls out an impossible victory against Hillary Clinton in November then prepare yourself for a global recession. This is the latest warning from Citigroup. The financial institution believes that markets would enter into chaos and the global economy would collapse because of policy uncertainty. Here is what Citi Chief Economist Willem Buiter opines (courtesy of Bloomberg): “A Trump victory in particular could prolong and perhaps exacerbate policy uncertainty and deliver a shock (though perhaps short-lived) to financial markets. Tightening financial conditions and further rises in uncertainty could trigger a significant...

1. The economy is merely “trudging along” at stall speed, so stocks are vulnerable This misperception is forgivable, given that U.S. GDP growth came in at around 1% for the first and second quarters. But to really understand the economy, you have to drill down on a lot more numbers than just GDP. And when you do so, the weak GDP numbers seem fishy. They just don’t jibe... * Employment growth is strong ... * Loan growth is robust... * Wage growth is solid. * Consumer spending is strong... The upshot? “Concern over the economy’s performance is running high, but...

Should we be worried if the stock market doesn’t seem to be? We get the oddest mixed signals from the economy sometimes, don’t we? In recent months, we have learned of 95 Ruby Tuesday restaurants that will be shutting their doors… and that Macy’s will be closing a hundred department stores… and that 255 Hancock Fabric stores will be closing… and that Sports Authority will close virtually all 450 of its locations… the list goes on and on. Every week, there’s another such announcement, and yet the Dow Jones Industrial Average keeps setting record highs. And so, some of us...

Poor Hillary Clinton. She's trying so fervently to come up with at least one new and inspiring idea to jump-start a moribund economy and help the financially stressed middle class. But the left's idea cupboard is empty. They have nothing to offer except: tax; spend; spin; hit the button again. So in her speech on Thursday on the economy, she proposed last week's leftover cold porridge. And it doesn't taste any better today than when President Obama first served it up. Clinton touted her proposed jobs program, which she has said she will launch "in (her) first 100 days (in...