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CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Texas Gov. Rick Perry turned his rhetorical fire on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke here Monday night, saying that the chairman would be committing a “treasonous” act by ordering the printing of more money and said doing so would amount to a political decision to help President Obama win reelection in 2012. “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what you all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas,” he said of the possibility of another round of so-called quantitative...

FLORENCE, Alabama | FLORENCE, Alabama (Reuters) - The risk of a new U.S. recession has risen over the last couple of months, but an outright contraction will most likely be avoided, Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank President Dennis Lockhart said on Monday. Lockhart said there is plenty the central bank could do if the economy does deteriorate further, including ramping up asset purchases or shifting their composition. Recent market volatility, driven in part by concerns of slowing economies both in the United States and Europe, threatens consumer confidence and could put a crimp on spending, Lockhart told a Rotary Club meeting....

During a stop tonight at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Texas Gov. Rick Perry fired a warning shot at the Obama Administration and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Perry was asked to comment on “the Fed,” and while he said he didn’t really want to take on the Fed question right now, he did have some blunt comments about the rumored possibility of the Federal Reserve printing a lot more money between now and November 2012 to make the economy appear better than it really is. Perry said: “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what...

NEWS last week that the Federal Reserve would keep interest rates near zero until mid-2013 was welcomed by many investors, but the bleak message about the economy still came through loud and clear. The Fed has spent several years trying to kick-start the economy with low rates and other policies, with little success. Which raises this question: Will more of the same help now? Among the doubters is Thomas M. Hoenig, the soon-to-be former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Mr. Hoenig, at the helm of the Kansas City Fed for the last 20 years, has thought...

On Twitter, Nouriel Roubini declares that the latest currency interventions from Switzerland and Japan represent the start of QE3, ultimately ending in more Fed easing.

James Pethokoukis of Reuters published a chart Tuesday demonstrating exactly why all the hysteria about a debt default or missing Social Security check payments is a bunch of nonsense. If America's news outlets were actually interested in disseminating the truth rather than fear-mongering, this chart or something like it would be part of every report involving the debt ceiling: What this chart created by the securities firm Goldman Sachs perfectly demonstrates is that there are ample tax receipts coming to the Treasury in August to pay the interest on our debt, Social Security, Medicare, and "essential" defense costs.

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....

Determining when the next great liquidation will occur is impossible to predict with any degree of certainty; nevertheless it is fair to say the sooner the better.  Economic liquidation is a restorative process that corrects the harm done by inflationary policies.  If accepting of this premise, then liquidations or deflationary depressions cannot be considered the disease in need of cure which unfortunately has been the position of economic interventionists since the early 1920's. Instead, they are a necessary and unavoidable adjustment after years of excessive credit expansions have destabilized the economy.  Efforts to further delay these self-corrections by instituting a...

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...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee on Wednesday left its key interest rate at an historic low range of 0% to 0.25% and said its $600 billion bond-buying program would end as scheduled on June 30. Inflation has picked up and the Fed now says the economic recovery is proceeding at "a moderate pace," but the central bank still said the inflation pickup will be temporary and the jobs market is still a concern. The decisions were widely expected. The FOMC made only few changes to the language of the policy statement it issued in March...

We’ve always wondered why there is so much debate about the rate of inflation. It seems like such a simple thing to track. You go in the store. You buy a box of Wheaties. You write down the price. Next month, you do the same thing. What’s so hard about that? But what if the box is smaller next month? What if the Wheaties are twice as good? What if you can get the same enjoyment from a box of Wheatie-Puffs at half the price? What’s the real rate of inflation? It depends on how you figure it. The Labor...

There was nothing special about the press conference Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke held about the economic projections and reports for the rest of 2011. The Fed is predicting gradual economic growth, a slow rise to inflation, and a small reduction in the unemployment rate.The whole press conference was dull and boring. No one really challenged Bernanke on the Fed's monetary policy. Just because you hold a press conference doesn't mean you are showing transparency. The mainstream media likes to ask the sweet, simple questions instead of the tough, difficult questions. Ron Paul should have been one of the reporters...

The big question as Chairman Bernanke gets set for his first quarterly press conference is how Sarah Palin was able to figure out sooner than everyone else that the Federal Reserve’s campaign of quantitative easing wouldn’t work. Disappointment in the Fed’s policies is being reported this morning at the top of page one of the New York Times. It reports that “most Americans are not feeling the difference” from the Fed’s “experimental effort to spur a recovery by purchasing vast quantities of federal debt.” It reports that “a broad range of economists say that the disappointing results show the limits...

The morning Tom Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve's regional bank here, announced that he would retire Oct. 1, newspapers nationwide reported that henceforth the Fed's chairmen will hold quarterly news conferences. This is probably both regrettable and inevitable. The Fed is called "independent" because it was created to insulate monetary policy from political pressures. But it was created by Congress, which can do what it wants with the Fed... --snip-- Is it, he is asked, mere coincidence that the Great Depression was (a) America's longest slump and (b) the one combated by the most government activism? Hoenig answers: "There...

While all the focus is now on the three-ring circus in Washington vis-a-vis passing the fiscal 2011 budget the Democrats failed to pass in 2010, up in New Hampshire this weekend at Bretton Woods, the Institute for New Economic Thinking is convening a very important conference, "CRISIS and RENEWAL: International Political Economy at the Crossroads." It's no accident they're meeting on the very same site as the Bretton Woods Conference -- formally United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference -- that met from July 1-22, 1944, during World War II to plan the postwar financial world after the expected defeat of...

Barack Obama recently issued an executive order imposing a wave of sanctions against Libya, not only freezing Libyan assets, but barring Americans from having business dealings with Libyan banks. So raise your hand if you knew that the United States has been extending billions of dollars in aid to Qaddafi and to the Central Bank of Libya, through a Libyan-owned subsidiary bank operating out of Bahrain. And raise your hand if you knew that, just a week or so after Obama’s executive order, the U.S. Treasury Department quietly issued an order exempting this and other Libyan-owned banks to continue operating...

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.

A U.S. senator says he wants answers to why the Federal Reserve provided more than $26 billion in credit to an Arab intermediary for the Central Bank of Libya. Sen. Bernie Sanders , D-Vt., sent a letter to the Federal Reserve that also demands to know why the Libyan-owned bank and two of its branches in New York were exempted from sanctions that the U.S. slapped on other Libyan businesses to isolate Col. Muammar Qaddafi. "It is incomprehensible to me that while credit-worthy small businesses in Vermont and throughout the country could not receive affordable loans, the Federal Reserve was...

WASHINGTON, March 29 (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury's bank bailout program will move into a profit for the first time on Wednesday with the expected repayment of $7.4 billion in taxpayer funds, Treasury officials said. The transfers to the Troubled Asset Relief Program will push recoveries from banks to $251 billion in repayments of capital, dividends, interest and other income. It invested $245 billion in banks during the financial crisis to help avert a U.S. financial system collapse. The officials did not identify the banks expected to repay funds. But SunTrust Banks Inc and Key Corp said on March 18...

NEW YORK, March 25 – With the economy on firmer footing the Federal Reserve Bank is unlikely to extend its bond-buying stimulus program beyond a planned $600 billion, several top Fed officials said on Friday. Members of the more hawkish wing of the Fed went further, with Philadelphia Fed Bank President Charles Plosser saying the U.S. central bank will have to reverse its easy money policy in the "not-too-distant future" to avoid sowing the seeds of inflation. The Fed has kept short-term rates near zero since December 2008 and has bought more than $2 trillion in long-term securities to push...