Free Republic

At first glance, Senator Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi Nelson Cruz, seems to be just the sort of person the Tea Party supporters who celebrate her husband’s anti-establishment positions love to hate. A vegetarian with a Harvard M.B.A., Mrs. Cruz is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, one of the Wall Street firms that helped set off the populist rage that ushered Mr. Cruz into the Senate in 2012. She works for Goldman in Houston, where she lives with the couple’s two young children, and as her husband’s fame has increased — depending on the audience, he is among the most...

American Consumer Culture = Debt Slavery A lot of concern – well founded, in my opinion, centers around the skyrocketing growth of our national debt. To everyone with a solid grounding in economics and history, this is a dark, ominous cloud hanging over America. I’ve noted that our grandchildren will despise us for bequeathing to them a collective burden of taxation and stifled economic growth that will be theirs from birth. But there’s an equally fearful debt problem that doesn’t attract nearly as much attention, even among conservatives. That’s our consumer spending culture driving the accumulation of personal debt. How...

Reports are that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is engaged in a massive, covert military buildup. An article in the Associated Press in February confirmed an open purchase order by DHS for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. According to an op-ed in Forbes, that’s enough to sustain an Iraq-sized war for over 20 years. DHS has also acquired heavily armored tanks, which have been seen roaming the streets. Evidently somebody in government is expecting some serious civil unrest. The question is, why? Recently revealed statements by former UK prime minister Gordon Brown at the height of the banking crisis...

Political Director of ABC News, Rick Klein pleaded with investors today to tank the stock market in order to “shake things loose” in the GOP ranks. In his ABC’s The Note piece today, Klein seriously proposed a stock sell-off designed for the express purpose of breaking the will of Republicans. When does Wall Street cast its vote? Bipartisan meetings are nice, and new plans that depend on the other side budging certainly can’t hurt at this stage of a standoff. But there may be only one way to jolt the system: SELL. Klein’s rationale: recent talks with beltway strategists suggest the GOP is...

It is rare, indeed, that a president bad mouths his own economy to Wall Street - no matter what Congress is doing. In fact, I have a hard time coming up with any precedent for it. But here was the president yesterday, urging Wall Street to be "concerned" (panic) because of the shutdown.  CNBC:  Wall Street needs to be genuinely worried about what is going on in Washington, President Barack Obama told CNBC in a White House interview Wednesday. While gridlock in D.C. is nothing new, "this time I think Wall Street should be concerned," Obama said. "When you have a...

WASHINGTON -- Top Wall Street chief executives met with President Obama on Wednesday and warned of severe economic consequences if the standoff over the federal budget and debt limit is not ended soon. Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein said the bankers were not taking sides in the partisan fight that triggered the continuing partial government shutdown, noting they met with Republican leaders on Capitol Hill as well. But speaking to reporters outside the White House, Blankfein backed Obama's position that Republicans should not be withholding an increase in the nation's $16.7 trillion debt limit as part of negotiations over...

“Corporate Profits Lose Steam.” That was the headline atop a recent Wall Street Journal article. For those that become indignant about highly successful and profitable corporations, this should be really great news – right? But nobody is celebrating. In fact, the sagging profits reports of the past several weeks are thought to be such a bad thing that some believe they have brought about the downward shifts on the stock market as of late (could it be that the business uncertainty caused by our U.S. government could be the problem on Wall Street instead?). Companies as diverse as Krispy...

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday the Justice Department is nearing decisions on several cases involving large financial institutions, and he plans to announce new prosecutions stemming from the 2008 economic meltdown. “My message is, anybody who’s inflicted damage on our financial markets should not be of the belief that they are out of the woods because of the passage of time,” Holder told The Wall Street Journal. “If any individual or if any institution is banking on waiting things out, they have to think again.” Holder declined to discuss specifics or say when such cases would be announced, but...

<p>If Wall Street thinks things are bad now, just wait — they’re about to get worse.</p> <p>The US financial sector is facing an epic round of layoffs that could hit 100,000 workers as the big banks wrestle with a global contraction and a sluggish economic recovery in the US, according to prominent analyst Meredith Whitney.</p>

dhensley813 wrote: The city of Chicago really had no option but to curtail the benefits of retirees. It's not as bankrupt as Detroit, but it was getting there. Obamacare wasn't so much the reason the city cut retiree insurance, as the excuse it gave them to say that they weren't really being dropped. - Obama Solves Mass-Layoff Problem by Laying Off Mass-Layoff Statistics Guys at BLS Dear Comrade 813, I think they had no choice once they negotiated a contract that allowed retirees to have benefits that the city knew it couldn’t afford. That’s outrageous enough. But to make matters...

I grew up in a country where the rule of law was supreme. Or at least it seemed that way. But somewhere along the line the varnish of polite society has been worn off so that the brass now shows through. That’s why today nobody is really surprised that the DOJ has sent rapid response teams to Florida to organize African-Americans to protest against the government. That’s why, as a man fights for his life in a court room in Florida, like George Zimmerman does, no one seems very surprised when the judge intercedes to try to throw the trial...

A look at how the stock markets have performed over the last year in countries where Central Bankers have ruled the roost, versus countries where Central Bankers have not. If you ain't got Ben Bernanke or the Bank of Japan on your team, better of keeping your ball and bat and staying home.

Corzine off the crook - No criminal charges It’s official. Jon Corzine will not be cuffed over MF Global’s improper handling of customers’ funds leading up to the commodity brokerage firm’s spectacular collapse in late 2011, The Post has learned. Federal investigators have found no evidence that the disgraced Wall Street titan broke the law. “After 18 months of investigation, the criminal probe into Jon Corzine is now being dropped,” a person with knowledge of the probe told The Post. “There is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing,” this person said. The Justice Department’s decision to drop the case is sure...

hal_incandeza wrote: "In May of 2012, the Heartland Institute hosted its biggest ever- and seventh ever-International Conference on Climate Change..." Right, that's why they are discontinuing their conference for lack of funding. What a great success. Dear Comrade Hal, Your comment would be interesting if it was actually true. But like a lot of things that liberals talk about it’s not accurate; wishful thinking maybe, but not correct. In fact, Heartland just held their 8th annual Climategate conference in Europe. As Joe Bast from Heartland blogs: “Our Eighth International Conference on Climate Change, held in Munich on November 30-December 1,...

No matter how many monetary officials try to sugarcoat it with damage control, the fact remains that the Ben Bernanke Fed wants to end its quantitative-easing bond-buying operations over the next year. That was Bernanke's statement at his last press conference, and I've seen nothing to contradict it. As everyone knows, stocks and bonds collapsed right after Bernanke let the cat out of the bag. Fortunately, markets have stabilized since then. But my hunch is that unless the economy really falls back into a quasi-recession, the Fed is going to go ahead and end its bond purchases. The central bank...

While many waited for Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to take the weight of the world markets on his Ivy League shoulders by declaring QE-4EVR-LOL!, the real economists at the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco came up with a more detailed explanation for the poor, dragging, sluggish U.S. economy. What they found will astonish you. And yes, this is a true story. “[D]espite all the attention federal spending cuts and sequestration have received,” wrote Brian Lucking and Daniel Wilson in the FRBSF Economic Letter, “our calculations suggest they are not the main contributors to this projected drag [on U.S....

On June 17, Barack Obama had one of his most awesome reality TV events of the year when he fired central bank chairman Ben Bernanke on PBS with liberal mope and host Charlie Rose moderating. “He essentially fired Ben Bernanke on the spot and gave him a fairly tepid testimonial afterward,” said former Fed Governor Laurence Meyer, in an interview on CNBC the next day. And the bankers have been in revolt ever since.  The government, meanwhile, has revised the economy’s performance downward. The newest do-over by government economists comes three months after they gave the economy one of the...

D’ja hear the great news? The economy continues to suck. The stock market rallied nicely yesterday after the Commerce Department changed its mind about how the economy did in the first three months of 2013. After thinking the US economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.4 percent in the quarter, Commerce revised the number downward — saying growth had actually been only 1.8 percent. There are several things you need to understand before I continue. First, even 2.4 percent growth isn’t good. An economy that’s pumped up with the amount of liquidity the Federal Reserve has created should be...

The “Help Wanted” sign is out again in America. But it’s not what you think. A report from the newswire Reuters says that massive hiring is in effect for Obamacare with state and federal agencies hiring both directly and issuing grants to community organizations to act as kind of insurance agents, signing up as many people to Obamacare as possible under the law. “State offices that will run insurance exchanges are hiring tens of thousands,” reports Reuters, “either on staff or through outsourcing firms. Federal agencies that are key to implementing the law, such as the Internal Revenue Service, plan...

Hundreds of federal employees were given advance word of a Medicare decision worth billions of dollars to private insurers in the weeks before the official announcement, a period when trading in the shares of those firms spiked. The surge of trading in Humana’s and other private health insurers’ stock before the April 1 announcement already has prompted the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Wall Street investors had advance access to inside information about the then-confidential Medicare funding plan. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) told The Washington Post late last week that his office reviewed...