Free Republic

A top economic adviser to US President Donald Trump bashed Germany for exploiting an undervalued euro to take advantage of its trading partners, the Financial Times reported Tuesday. The public rebuke of a major trading partner is the latest example of the brash tactic that has become a feature of the new US administration, with Trump himself using public attacks and Twitter to criticize businesses and allies, including Mexico. Peter Navarro, who advised Trump during the campaign and heads the White House’s new National Trade Council, said in an interview with the FT that Germany “continues to exploit other countries...

This is as good as it gets for Germany and Europe. Previously, it was the debt of the eurozone’s peripheral countries that was of concern to the markets. But in an interview with Business Insider, Geopolitical Futures founder George Friedman proclaimed that Europe now has a much bigger problem: Germany. And at the heart of the looming issue for Germany and Europe is the Italian banking system. “[Problems in Italian banks are] going to spill over into the Netherlands, it’s going to spill over into Germany,” Friedman said. “Germany is the new PIIG. Germany depends on exports and its markets...

German private households collectively hold more wealth than ever before, according to a report released by the German Federal Bank on Monday. A strong labor market and comfortable incomes have helped German households’ financial assets to rise by €140 billion in the first quarter of the year, according to the report, climbing to €5.212 trillion—a record high. […] Germans still showed an “ongoing high level of risk aversion” and did not take advantage of low interest rates by taking out significant loans. […] But such wealth is not necessarily shared equally across the country. A study last year revealed that...

Britain receives less than half the money it puts into the EU back as subsidies thanks to the ongoing Eurozone crisis, a new report has found. The report also found that British households could be as much as £933 a year better off if Britain left the EU. The think tank which compiled the report advised that staying within the EU poses “serious risks”.The comprehensive new report from Business for Britain, runs to a mammoth 1,032 pages, has found that, between 1976 and 2003 the average return from Britain’s financial input into the EU was 68 per cent, meaning that,...

Storage withdrawals and falling rig count have been the main sources of hope that U.S. tight oil production will fall and that oil prices will rebound. That hope is fading as it is now clear that recent withdrawals from U.S. crude oil storage are because of price, not falling supply, and that the drop in rig count has stalled. Figure 1 below shows the relationship between U.S. crude oil storage inventory and WTI price. The thinking around recent withdrawals from storage is that this reflects depleting supply. The data, however, reflects that traders were storing crude oil during the price...

Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has described his country as the most bankrupt in the world and said European leaders knew all along that Athens would never repay its debts, in blunt comments that sparked a backlash in the German media on Tuesday. A documentary about the Greek debt crisis on German public broadcaster ARD was aired on the same day euro zone finance ministers met in Brussels to discuss whether to provide Athens with further funding in exchange for delivering reforms. "Clever people in Brussels, in Frankfurt and in Berlin knew back in May 2010 that Greece would never...

To many on the outside, Germany looks like a big, rich country enjoying the benefits of being Europe's largest economy. Inside, Germans know that looks can be deceiving. As in any nation, parts of Germany suffer from poverty, and Germans have always assumed they knew which parts: the west is rich and the east is poor. But a new report reveals the truth isn't that simple. The wealth imbalance in Germany isn't just between east and west; there are also large regional differences between the country's north and south. And across the country there are pockets of poverty more crushing...

The United States should not let friction over economic and trade policies undermine the hugely important business relationship with China, Vice President Xi Jinping said in an interview published before a scheduled U.S. visit. Xi, widely viewed as China's president-in-waiting, told the Washington Post via written answers to questions that China was of huge economic benefit to the United States. "As economic globalization gathers momentum, China and the United States have become highly inter-dependent economically," Xi said, according to a transcript posted on the newspaper's website on Monday. "Such economic relations would not enjoy sustained, rapid growth if they were...

In 1974, the military became all volunteer. In the 1980s, the Reagan tax cuts began a huge transfer of wealth to the already wealthy, top 1 percent of American society. Normally we don't connect these two events, but with the passage of time, I suspect we may come to see them together as the moment when the wealthy checked out of America and moved into physical and mental gated communities. I've already talked about how over the last 30 years, the proportion of wealth going to the top 1 percent has gone from 10 percent of annual national income to...

A society always gets more of whatever it subsidizes, whether it's corn, tobacco or the idle rich. And subsidizing spoiled heiresses at the expense of, well, everyone else is the goal of those members of Congress who are pushing to greatly reduce, or even repeal, the federal estate tax. Despite reams of data that show that the estate tax only touches the top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers, and despite the fact that the Mom and Pop businesses and family farms of the sort that earn our sympathy simply are not affected by this tax, the repeal has already passed...