Free Republic

What's up with so many Democrats wanting missile strikes on Syria, while Republicans balk? I'm told Republicans are the war party. Is this just hypocrisy? Politicians change their position on military intervention when their own party controls the White House? Historian Thaddeus Russell says it's not. He says it's always been "progressive" Democrats who led America into war: Woodrow Wilson in World War I, FDR in World War II, Truman in the Korean War, Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam and Bill Clinton in Somalia and Kosovo. Russell says the progressives like "nation-building" because it fits their view that government can...

It seemed like their growth was unstoppable... With a billion-person strong workforce and a vast quantity of resources at their bidding, China seems like an economic powerhouse... One that could overtake even the U.S. economy. It was an unseemly miracle — from a poor dictatorship to one of the fastest-growing capitalist systems in the world. But all is not well in the Middle Kingdom... Corruption. A massive housing bubble. A barrage of bad loans. Things are not looking good for China's economic future. Are we witnessing the end of a Chinese era, or is this just a bump in the...

This is the Weekly Investment & Finance Thread (Sept.-9-13 edition)----  Trying to focus on the markets for today and each day and the economic news  This is where you can exchange some investment opinions and advice If you see another FR economic thread you like and want to link to it here, please doPost your favorite economic site links. Your favorite economic blogs and precious metals blogs and sitesPing list -- on or off let me know here or via freep-mail. If I missed you then Freep-mail me I might ping you to other interesting economic threads a few times a...

This is the Weekly Investment & Finance Thread (Sept.-3-6 edition)----  Trying to focus on the markets for today and each day and the economic news This is where you can exchange some investment opinions and advice If you see another FR economic thread you like and want to link to it here, please doPost your favorite economic site links. Your favorite economic blogs and precious metals blogs and sitesPing list -- on or off let me know here or via freep-mail. If I missed you then Freep-mail me I might ping you to other interesting economic threads a few times a week....

"I was under the impression that the African slave trade was the sole responsibility of the Christian Europeans, the White race, that is until I started exploring the subject in great depth..."

Eye-catching numbers have emerged on the expected trade boom from the Arctic route to Europe for Chinese business.Cosco Shipping - part of China's state-owned shipping giant Cosco Group - announced its maiden voyage with a multi-purpose vessel last week. 'The ship left Dalian port in Northeast China's Liaoning province and is scheduled to take 33 days to reach Europe,' reported China Daily. 'It is the first time a Chinese merchant ship has travelled to Europe via the Arctic Northeast Passage. The total deadweight tonnage of the multipurpose vessel is 19,461 tons. The ship is expected to arrive in the Bering...

Monthly U.S. headlines trumpeting the death of inflation hide a painful truth for American families: rapidly rising food prices. News reports rarely mention this pain because economists' preferred inflation metric, so-called "core CPI," omits both food and energy due to concerns about their volatility. Although this omission might make sense from a purely economic perspective, it does a disservice to voters because several federal government policies that enrich a few special interests have conspired to keep American grocery bills high and rising. There can be little doubt that food prices have spiked in recent years, especially in relation to other...

The World Trade Organization reports that the growth rate of global trade fell sharply from over 5% in 2011 to around 2% in 2012. [snip]...the U.S.’ “Buy American” initiative on government procurement (folded into the Obama stimulus package in 2009) probably restrained trade flows in a near-negligible way. No doubt that’s true, since it’s confined to certain categories of construction procurement and has more than a few loopholes. But does this mean that Buy American, or Buy French, or Buy Japanese, or Buy Madagascar stipulations on procurement are harmless after all?[snip]... the Dean Baker analysis reduces “Buy American” to the...

When will Republicans wake up to the way U.S. jobs are betrayed by Barack Obama and the corporate interests that hide under the moniker "free trade"? It's an embarrassment that Republican powers-that-be have joined with the Obama Democrats to push the new Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. We should have recognized free trade as bad news when Obama hammered on it in his State of the Union message. He probably looks upon it as another strategy to redistribute the wealth of our country, which is a major goal of his administration. In 2012 when Congress was passing the Korea-U.S. Trade...

In fact, Barack Obama "fired" the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, as he thanked him first for the great job all these years."This was really impressive. I nearly fell off my chair, when I heard the president's comment", said the former commander of the Federal Reserve, Larry Meyer for CNBC.However, the question is who will take the reins of the world economy in such a critical period?[snip]

Chinese Trade Numbers Come In Massively Below Forecasts Fran Wang, Agence France Presse June 8, 2013, 6:07 AM Reuters China on Saturday reported a sharp slowdown in exports in May compared to the previous month while imports unexpectedly dropped, as the world's second largest economy grapples with slowing growth and sluggish overseas demand. Overseas shipments rose just one percent to $182.8 billion last month, far lower than 14.7 percent recorded in April, customs authorities said in a statement. It also missed a medium forecast of 5.6 percent expansion in a Dow Jones Newswires' poll of economists. Imports dropped 0.3 percent...

Nicaragua has awarded a Chinese company a 100-year concession to build an alternative to the Panama Canal, in a step that looks set to have profound geopolitical ramifications. The president of the country's national assembly, Rene Nuñez, announced the $40bn (£26bn) project, which will reinforce Beijing's growing influence on global trade and weaken US dominance over the key shipping route between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The name of the company and other details have yet to be released, but the opposition congressman Luis Callejas said the government planned to grant a 100-year lease to the Chinese operator. The national...

IF you were the leaders of the State of California and you were hemorrhaging businesses, with entire industries leaving as fast as they could pack and taking jobs with them, what would you do? Assist with job training? Offer tax credits? Ease regulations? Wrong. The State of California didn't do that. Instead, they looked at the few still struggling industrial businesses dumb enough to want to still operate in this hostile environment and asked why? Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/california_to_industry_get_lost.html#ixzz2VRWtWLXw Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Barack Obama With His Hand On The Resolute DeskDid you know that Barack Obama has been secretly negotiating the most important trade agreement since the formation of the World Trade Organization? Did you know that this agreement will impose very strict Internet copyright rules, ban all "Buy American" laws, give Wall Street banks much more freedom to trade risky derivatives and force even more domestic manufacturing offshore? If you have not heard about this treaty, don't feel bad. Obama has refused to even give Congress a copy of the draft agreement and he has banned members of Congress from attending...

<p>The VAT is used as a trade strategy to accomplish the same benefits as currency devaluation. The VAT strategy is called “fiscal devaluation” and I’ll explain it at the bottom. It took me three years to understand the power of the VAT in trade strategy, so I understand why it takes others a while to think through it. But the price differential result (as between domestic and imported products) is substantial. And we need it to neutralize what other countries have done.</p>

Like most academics, professors of economics are not generally stupid people, IQ-wise. But they do have a remarkable ability to lose sight of basic realities. I’ve seen this over and over again. I just had an extended e-mail exchange with one Ron Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, about the trade deficit. Now I’m not going to offer any comment on it, and will just let the reader judge for himself who’s right in the back-and-forth below. (Feel free to post a comment or e-mail me if you think I was mistaken.) ************* Dear Mr. Fletcher: I...

The Smoot-Hawley tariff passed in 1931 is the silver bullet of Free Trade advocates. All other arguments do not matter for them because they say the Smoot-Hawley tariffs either were part of the cause of the Great Depression or were responsible for continuing the depression by reducing international trade. This reasoning does not hold up to close inspection. Smoot-Hawley did not cause the Great Depression, nor did it extend the Depression. ... In general, the statistical arguments made by current Free Traders are deceptions. They generally say something like, "the United States economy grew after NAFTA." That may be true,...

When economic patriotism died Pat Buchanan agrees with the pope about ' the dark side of globalism' “This is called slave labor,” said Pope Francis. The Holy Father was referring to the $40 a month paid to apparel workers at that eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that collapsed on top of them, killing more than 400. “Not paying a just wage … focusing exclusively on the balance books, on financial statements, only looking at personal profit. That goes against God!” The pope is describing the dark side of globalism. Why is Bangladesh, after China, the second-largest producer of apparel in...

For anybody disheartened about years of disappointing economic news, Japan's recent announcement that it intends to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) offers a real reason to celebrate.Free trade agreements (FTAs) historically are some of the most surefire ways to open up new markets to U.S. exporters while enhancing American interests abroad. They create economic growth by fostering innovation and efficiency and, as a bonus, they generally produce invaluable political benefits.As FTAs go, Japan's participation in TPP makes this trade pact the Super Bowl and the World Cup of trade agreements wrapped into one. It's a game changer.It will give American...

A study of the Bitcoin exchange industry has found that 45 percent of exchanges fail, taking their users' money with them. Those that survive are the ones that handle the most traffic -- but they are also the exchanges that suffer the greatest number of cyber attacks. Computer scientists Tyler Moore (from the Southern Methodist University, Dallas) and Nicolas Christin (of Carnegie Mellon University) found 40 exchanges on the web which offered a service of changing bitcoins into other fiat currencies or back again. Of those 40, 18 have gone out of business -- 13 closing without warning, and five...