Free Republic

Oil prices tumbled over 4% today, reaching a 3-year low as trader sentiment continued to sour ahead of tonight's highly anticipated U.S. Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, with bearish sentiment sinking to multi-year lows as traders continue overreacting to any negative development and ignoring relatively healthy fundamentals.

Hurricane Ian “rapidly transformed from a relatively weak storm into a strong one, [a] phenomenon that has become more common” due to climate change. So reported the New York Times in its daily email newsletter. It also said, “Ian embodies several of the major hurricane trends in recent years, as the world copes with the effects of climate change. It’s a strong storm -- and strong storms are becoming more common in the Atlantic Ocean, as its surface water has warmed. . . . Unfortunately, the tragedy is compounded by climate-change activists who are using it for political purposes. They...

"Fossil fuels are a dead end and the only sustainable future for the planet is accelerating the energy transition, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Wednesday, launching the State of the Global Climate 2021 report, which showed that four key climate change indicators set new records last year. . . . "

White House issues an "executive order" requiring financial regulators and government budget managers to weigh "climate risk" in issuing regulations and making investment decisions.

For a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, most Americans and Europeans regarded Marxism as an enemy that had been defeated once and for all. But they were wrong. A mere 30 years later, Marxism is back, and making an astonishingly successful bid to seize control of the most important American media companies, universities and schools, major corporations and philanthropic organizations, and even the courts, the government bureaucracy, and some churches. As American cities succumb to rioting, arson, and looting, it appears as though the liberal custodians of many of these institutions . . .

Everyone knows that we live in a time of constant acceleration, of vertiginous change, of transformation or looming disaster everywhere you look. Partisans are girding for civil war, robots are coming for our jobs, and the news feels like a multicar pileup every time you fire up Twitter. Our pessimists see crises everywhere; our optimists insist that we’re just anxious because the world is changing faster than our primitive ape-brains can process.

What is Trump’s end game in the China trade stand-off? I admit China has been ripping off US intellectual property for years and has been gaming the free enterprise system by exporting products manufactured with cheap, coerced labor and apparently have prevented US exports from competing fairly with their own domestically produced goods. The results have been loss of manufacturing and other blue collar work to outsourced labor in foreign markets. The Chinese have also been able to reverse engineer/steal/purchase technology that has a direct impact on US national security. This has to stop. However, so many inefficiencies have been...

US President Donald Trump fired another shot across OPEC’s bow on Wednesday, a day before the oil cartel is set to meet in Vienna to discuss possible production cuts. “The World does not want to see, or need, higher oil prices!” the Tweet read, in part.

The assumption generally held is that lower oil prices generally benefit the US economy. A closer look shows this is not necessarily the case.

President Trump recently took credit for the plunge in oil prices since early October. As I noted in a recent article, it’s true that the President’s actions have contributed to the drop in oil prices, but at a cost that has been largely ignored. This week the President decided to share the credit for lower oil prices on Twitter: (tweet omitted) President Trump thanks Saudi Arabia for low oil prices. How President Trump Affected Oil Prices. Let’s review. The trade war with China resulted in China halting imports of U.S. oil. Prior to that, U.S. oil producers had been shipping...

What is going on with DRUDGE REPORT? The news selected seems designed to dishearten conservatives. He continues highlighting the Nate Silver prediction that the democrats have an 86% chance of taking the house. This is very different from what I am seeing elsewhere. Is the site under different editorial/management from past elections? Has anyone else noticed this too?

Looking for substantive business and financial content.

The news reports just say cancer, but not what type. Just curious.

In the debt limit/government shutdown debacle, the Republicans have yet to make the somewhat obvious argument that when trying to avoid a default, it is contra-intuitive to make the debt even bigger. It is like paying the minimum payment on one credit card off with another credit card with a higher credit limit. Since when does going deeper into debt avoid a default? To me that logic is compelling. It may be that our mass population is incapable of understanding such a basic concept, or it may be just a built in assumption that the feds have to borrow more...

I keep hearing in the media that the unemployment rate is down below 8% due to a reduction of the total number of workers participating in the labor force. It seems to me that if there are fewer people in the labor force, and the number of unemployed goes up or remains constant, the unemployment would be higher, not lower. If there are 5,000,000 unemployed out of 50,000,000 labor force, the unemployment rate is 10%, but if the labor force is only 40,000,000, then the unemployment rate would be 12.5%. Right? Yet I continually hear on Rush and elswhere that...