Free Republic

In 2016, the Federal Reserve will pay at least $12.2 billion to U.S. and foreign banks to keep the money created via its quantitative easing programs out of the economy. If the Fed raises rates as expected next year, the amount nearly doubles to $23.1 billion. From 2008 to 2015, the Fed purchased over $4 trillion worth of bonds to stimulate growth in the economy. Risk markets responded, as is demonstrated by the close correlation between the S&P 500 and growth of the Fed's balance sheet through its bond purchases.

WASHINGTON - Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is rolling out a plan to slow down the impact of climate change, vowing to cut U.S. carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030. The Democratic presidential candidate said in a proposal released Monday that he would seek to impose a tax on carbon dioxide pollution, long a non-starter with majority Republicans in Congress, and aim to slash carbon pollution in the U.S. by 80 percent by 2050 compared to levels in 1990. The proposal, he said, would put "people before the profits of polluters." Sanders has made efforts to reduce global warming a...

The Treasury Department has unveiled new regulations aimed at reeling in tax-dodging U.S. corporations trying to take advantage of friendly international tax codes. Snip "U.S. companies are currently taking advantage of an environment that allows them to move their tax residence overseas in order to avoid paying taxes in the United States without making significant changes in the nature of their overall business operations," Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told reporters Thursday as he announced his department's new corporate inversion guidelines. Snip Those on the right generally want to avoid sweeping tax increases for American corporations, while proposals brought forward by...

The rich aren't taxed enough and the middle class is taxed too much. As for your taxes, you probably think they're too high as well. Those are the results of an Associated Press-GfK poll that found that most people in the United States support President Barack Obama's proposal to raise investment taxes on high-income families. The findings echo the populist messages of two liberal senators — Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont — being courted by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to run for president in 2016. The results also add weight to Obama's new...

We will find out the answer to the question posed in the title in the outcome of the contest between the new Greek government, formed by the political party Syriza, and the ECB and the private banks, with whose interests the EU and Washington align against Greece. The Spartans, whose red cloaks and military prowess struck fear into the hearts of both foreign invaders and Greek opponents in the city-states, are no more. Athens itself is a ruin of its historical self. The Greeks, who were once to be contended with, who were able with 300 Spartans, supplemented with a...

Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, estimates that the U.S. added a mediocre 180,000 jobs to the economy in April. “We have a little problem here, we still have the weather issue to be sorted out,” he says. He thinks it’s possible that the unemployment rate inches down to 6.6% but “we haven’t had any fundamental changes, you just always see a little bouncing around.” “People don’t realize this, but we spend a lot of money on prescription drugs,” he says. “The reason we do that is because the government is giving drug companies patent...

According to a new study, the 401(k) savings account isn't adequately providing for people's retirement and is adding to the nation's growing wealth inequality. The report from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning public policy think-tank, illustrates how the shift from pensions to individual savings accounts has affected retirees. The authors find that it is the wealthiest workers who are benefiting the most because they can actually contribute enough to make 401(k) plans work for retirement. "401(k)s were never designed to replace pensions for most workers. They serve primarily as a tax shelter for high earners," said economist Monique Morrissey,...

For the first time in its 27-year history, a prestigious award for enhancing the global food supply has gone to a creator of genetically modified crops, a top scientist at Monsanto. The choice is likely to add more heat to an intense debate about the role biotechnology can play in combating world hunger. Robert T. Fraley, Monsanto’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, will share the $250,000 World Food Prize with two other scientists who helped devise how to insert foreign genes into plants: Marc Van Montagu of Belgium and Mary-Dell Chilton of the United States. The announcement was...

LONDON, June 19 (Reuters) - The world should stop arguing about whether humans are causing climate change and start taking action to stop dangerous temperature rises, the president of the World Bank said on Wednesday. Kim Jim Yong Kim said there was 97 to 98 percent agreement among scientists that global warming was real and caused by human activity. "If you disagree with the science of human-caused climate change you are not disagreeing that there is anthropogenic climate change. What you are disagreeing with is science itself," Kim told a Thomson Reuters newsmaker event in London.

While most people would agree with the sage advice not to drink and drive, the same could generally be said for mixing drinking with just about any activity. Former senior broker at PVM Oil Futures Steve Perkins learned this the hard way. The broker managed to spend $520 million of company funds on oil futures the night of June 29, 2009, despite having no authority to do so. The following morning, when asked about the expenditure by an admin clerk, Perkins had no recollection of the purchase. A recently released report by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) concluded the trades...

It's been a third of a century since benefits consultant Ted Benna helped bring attention to a new but obscure provision of the federal tax code known as 401(k), which was meant to provide a tax break for folks with deferred income. As co-owner of the Johnson Cos., Benna was redesigning the retirement program for Philadelphia-based Cheltenham National Bank when he realized that the provision allowed employers to use salary deductions as tax-deferred contributions to employee retirement plans. To be sure, Benna was not the only one looking at the possibilities afforded by the 401(k). Among other firms, healthcare-products giant...

COMMENTARY | Dianne Knox, a state employee in California, objected to paying her part of an assessment by the SEIU, the labor union representing many of her co-workers. She filed suit and started a legal battle than went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in her favor on Thursday. Knox's actions were selfish. The fee Knox objected to is called a "fair share fee." It's a fee paid by non-union employees in union shops to support the union. Right-wing politicians, pundits, big businesses and other union-busters object to these fees because they're charged to non-members. There's just...

Cancer death rates are continuing to fall, dropping by 1.8 percent per year in men and 1.6 percent per year in women between 2004 and 2008, according to the American Cancer Society's annual report on cancer statistics released on Wednesday. Advances in cancer screening and treatment have prevented more than a million total deaths from cancer since the early 1990s, according to the report. But the influential cancer group said new cases of seven less-common cancers rose in the past decade, suggesting more could be done in America's 40-year war on cancer. his year, the cancer group projects 1,638,910 people...

Milton Friedman shows the stupidity of tariffs.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal regulators bowed to pressure from big banks seeking a quick exit from the financial bailout program and did not uniformly apply the government's own conditions set for repaying the taxpayer funds, a new watchdog report says. The report was issued Friday by the office of Christy Romero, the acting special inspector general for the $400 billion taxpayer bailout of the financial industry and automakers. It found that regulators, to varying degrees, "bent" to pressure from the banks in late 2009 and relaxed the requirements put in only weeks earlier. The regulators also were motivated by a...

After the March 11 earthquake and tsunami off Japan damaged the Fukushima Daichi nuclear reactor, the Japanese government was presented with a scenario which would have required the evacuation of half of Tokyo and the entire width of the main island of Honshu, former Prime Minister Naota Kan says in an interview with Kyodo News. The evacuation zone would have covered all areas within 200 to 250 kilometers (125 to 155 miles) of the nuclear reactor, meaning about 30 million people in Tokyo and its surrounding areas would have needed to be moved, according to the Kyodo report in The...

‘To economists reading this essay in 2010, perhaps the most remarkable single fact to note about monetary policy at the end of the interwar period” — the author, Columbia University economist Charles Calomiris, is of course also talking about the end of the Great Depression — “is that its architects were, for the most part, quite pleased with themselves. Far from learning about the errors of their ways during the interwar period, Fed officials congratulated themselves on having adhered to appropriate principles, and to the extent that they were self-critical, it was because they thought that they had been too...

WASHINGTON, March 29 (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury's bank bailout program will move into a profit for the first time on Wednesday with the expected repayment of $7.4 billion in taxpayer funds, Treasury officials said. The transfers to the Troubled Asset Relief Program will push recoveries from banks to $251 billion in repayments of capital, dividends, interest and other income. It invested $245 billion in banks during the financial crisis to help avert a U.S. financial system collapse. The officials did not identify the banks expected to repay funds. But SunTrust Banks Inc and Key Corp said on March 18...

As states struggle to meet their budgets, public pensions are on the chopping block, but they needn’t be. States can keep their pension funds intact while leveraging them into many times their worth in loans, just as Wall Street banks do. They can do this by forming their own public banks, following the lead of North Dakota—a state that currently has a budget surplus. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, whose recently proposed bill to gut benefits, wages, and bargaining rights for unionized public workers inspired weeks of protests in Madison, has justified the move as necessary for balancing the state's budget....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Federal Reserve is paying a record $79.3 billion to the U.S. government after the central bank earned a record amount of money last year from programs aimed at boosting the economy. The Fed says its payment to the Treasury Department for 2010 is 67 percent higher than $47.4 billion it paid in 2009, the previous record.