Free Republic

Comparative Economies: This just in from the International Monetary Fund: China could pass the United States as the world's largest economy as early as 2016. With all due respect, the IMF has it wrong again. A new IMF report blithely forecasts that the "Age of America" will end as the U.S. economy is overtaken by China. And on the surface, it's tough to argue the point. Officially, China's GDP is growing at 10% while ours is expanding at about 3%. At those rates, China's economy doubles every seven years, America's about every 24. But such forecasts are based on a...

Disregard all hysteria. The ailing Greenback will not collapse this year, not in ten years, not in twenty years, not in half a century. There is no credible currency against which it can collapse. (Unless you count gold). None of the world's rival power blocs have the economic and demographic depth to challenge American dominance. Yes, we have a dollar rout on our hands. The markets have suddenly begun to discount a nasty crunch in the US as the subprime debacle spreads through the credit markets. The prospect of rate cuts by the Federal Reserve is drawing closer, knocking away...

If you have an IRA or are an investor with American Century Investments, please be aware that the Stowers Family (who own American Century) are mightily involved in the stem cell referendum in Missouri, which will be voted on Tuesday. They have put up over $29M of their own money to the "Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures" to get this initiative passed, and are holding their Stowers Institute for Medical Research almost as a hostage to this bill. If this initiative does not pass, they're inferring they'll close down their medical research center. The language of the bill is also...

Without him, there would not have been a happy endingTHE DEATH OF RONALD REAGAN brings to a close the most surprising political life of the 20th century. A century that through 1979 was notable for world wars, ideological mass murder, and the relentless advance of statism had a happy final act no one but he expected. If he had not lived and succeeded, the 20th century would not have been, in the fullest sense, the American century it turned out to be.Reagan was utterly American. He dreamed vast optimistic dreams, and lived to see some of the most unlikely ones...

BY the time you read this, Christmas will be over and we will be looking into the fourth year of what we call here the American century. It is therefore time to reflect and take stock of the earth shaking events that have taken place among us, and how American influence will affect even the farthest parts of the earth. The idea, now called the Bush doctrine, started in 1991, in brief among young Republicans, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz (now Deputy Defense Secretary) and Richard Pearle, an advisor on security matters. In typical American fashion, they wanted to change...

Toogood Reports [Tuesday, February 25, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/ For over forty years, America pursued the foreign policy, first developed in an anonymously penned, 1947 article by George Kennan (as "X," in what was probably the most important article ever published in the journal Foreign Affairs), of the "containment" of Soviet communism. One of the factors that made containment workable was the very bifurcation of the world that the policy addressed. A world without an Iron Curtain, is a world without containment. Containment Theory was heavily influenced by World War II, in which Nazi Germany toppled one European country...