Free Republic

STATESVILLE, NC—Bernard von NotHaus, 67, was convicted today by a federal jury of making, possessing, and selling his own coins, announced Anne M. Tompkins, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina. Following an eight-day trial and less than two hours of deliberation, von NotHaus, the founder and monetary architect of a currency known as the Liberty Dollar, was found guilty by a jury in Statesville, North Carolina, of making coins resembling and similar to United States coins; of issuing, passing, selling, and possessing Liberty Dollar coins; of issuing and passing Liberty Dollar coins intended for use as current...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Minuscule amounts of radiation from Japan's stricken nuclear plant have reached the west coast but federal and state officials say it poses no health risk. They said Friday that the doses of radiation that a person normally receives from rocks, bricks, and the sun are 100,000 times the dose rates detected at a monitoring station in California and another in Washington state.

Inflation spooked the nation in the early 1980s. It surged and kept rising until it topped 13 percent. These days, inflation is much lower. Yet to many Americans, it feels worse now. And for a good reason: Their income has been even flatter than inflation. Back in the '80's, the money people made typically more than made up for high inflation. In 1981, banks would pay nearly 16 percent on a six-month CD. And workers typically got pay raises to match their higher living costs. No more. Over the 12 months that ended in February, consumer prices increased just 2.1...

Last month, when the conservative Republican Study Committee released its plan for $2.5 trillion in budget cuts over the next ten years, one enormous item of wasteful government spending was conspicuously missing — farm subsidies. Perhaps that reflects the fact that 24 of the RSC’s 165 members sit on the House Agriculture Committee, the notorious overseer of farm-welfare programs. Total direct government farm payments to the districts of those 24 representatives alone costs taxpayers more than $1 billion per year. Numerous other RSC members hail from farm states, and therefore have a vested interest in protecting payments to their constituents....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve reported on Monday its earnings jumped by more than 50 percent in 2010 to a record $80.9 billion on its massive holdings of securities, and it is turning the bulk of it over to the U.S. Treasury Department. The $78.4 billion that the Fed is remitting to Treasury is also a record and is $31 billion more than a year earlier. In 2009 the Fed had net income of $53.4 billion.

In the new Congress, Ron Paul (R-Texas) will head the House committee that oversees the Federal Reserve. Thanks to the title of his book, we know he wants to end the Fed and paper money. But what will he replace it with? The short answer: metal-based currencies. I recently participated in a hour-long radio debate on the Progressive Radio Network's Freedom News Hour with two Paul supporters who wanted to take me up on the challenge of being proven wrong in my disagreements with seven of Paul's points about the Fed. I really enjoyed this debate and learned some important...

What kind of Republican supports high tariffs on imports, dubious green tax credits, and consumption mandates to prop up unprofitable environmental darlings? The ethanol-loving midwestern kind, especially the ones running for president. Currently, imported ethanol is slapped with a 54-cent-per-gallon tariff, while oil companies receive a 45-cent tax credit per gallon of ethanol blended into their gasoline. Both the tariff and the tax credit have just been extended for another year, thanks to a bipartisan push from Cornbelt politicians. In case these provisions aren’t enough to help the industry hobble its way to satisfying profits, lawmakers also decided to mandate...

Treasury said Tuesday in its two-year retrospective on the Troubled Asset Relief Program that the net cost of TARP's AIG (AIG) bailout at current market prices is $5.1 billion. The cost of the AIG bailout has been subject of considerable head scratching in recent days, with TARP winding down and the terms of federal assistance to AIG changing for the umpteenth time....... After the proposed restructuring of AIG, TARP will hold 1.09 billion shares of AIG common stock, plus preferred equity interests in SPVs of approximately $22.3 billion, against a cost basis of $69.8 billion. Valuing the common equity at...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Federal Reserve revealed details Wednesday of trillions of dollars in emergency aid it provided to U.S. and foreign banks during the financial crisis. New documents show that the most loan and other aid for U.S. institutions over time went to Citigroup ($2.2 trillion), followed by Merrill Lynch ($2.1 trillion), Morgan Stanley ($2 trillion), Bank of America ($1.1 trillion), Bear Stearns ($960 billion), Goldman Sachs ($620 billion), JPMorgan Chase ($260 billion) and Wells Fargo ($150 billion). Many of the individual loans they took were worth billions and had short durations but were paid back and renewed many...

LOS ANGELES (TheStreet) -- Countrywide's former Chairman, CEO and co-founder Angelo Mozilo and two other top ranking officials will pay a combined $73 million to settle with the Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading investors as the subprime mortgage crisis emerged. Without admitting any wrongdoing, Mozilo, 71, agreed to repay $45 million in "ill-gotten" gains to settle the SEC's disclosure violation and insider trading charges against him and another $22.5 million in civil penalties, the SEC said on Friday.

While local banks are held in check by the new banking czars in Basel, Wall Street’s “shadow banking system” has hardly been curbed by regulators at all; and it is here that the 2008 credit crisis was actually precipitated. The banking system’s credit machine is systemically flawed and needs a radical overhaul. On September 13, the Bank for International Settlements issued heightened capital requirements that will make lending even more difficult for local banks, which do most of the consumer and small business lending today. The new rules are ostensibly designed to prevent a repeat of the 2008 credit collapse,...

Americans may be dissatisfied with the economy but don't look for Republicans to sweep control of the House and Senate. Voters have good reason to not be enamored with both parties. Democrats have pushed through President Obama's agenda -- more than $800 billion in stimulus spending, health care reform and new financial regulations -- yet the economy remains sluggish and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tells us unemployment will linger near 10% for many months. The Republican chant of less regulation and lower taxes is just not credible after the Wall Street meltdown of 2008, and with a $1.5 trillion budget...

He failed as a day-trader and barely survived in New York on a beer budget, but Marcos Esparza Bofill has been hit with a $172 million tax bill by the IRS. "Who's the IRS?" Esparza Bofill, a twentysomething Spanish émigré, asked a friend who alerted him to his astronomical back taxes. Esparza Bofill moved to New York from his native Spain in 2006 to try his hand at day-trading. When he nearly went bust after a year, he moved back home. "He lost money while he was here. He couldn't afford rent," said friend Adam Baruchowitz of Brooklyn. Esparza Bofill...

If Republicans win the House this fall, Rep. Darrell Issa will wield the majority’s sharpest investigative tool: the subpoena pen. “Cabinet officers, assistant secretaries, directors — I will be able to take on everybody that the president hires and relies upon; the people who tell him that everything is fine,” pledges Issa, the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in an interview with National Review Online. For months, Issa, a California Republican, has been delving into allegations of bureaucratic abuse and political foul play, prepping for the committee chairmanship should the chance come. A relentless critic...

Virg Bernero, the mayor of Lansing, Michigan, just won the Democratic nomination for governor of his state, making a state-owned Bank of Michigan a real possibility. Bernero is one of at least a dozen candidates promoting that solution to the states’ economic woes. It is an innovative idea, with little precedent in the United States. North Dakota, currently the only state owning its own bank, also happens to be the only state sporting a budget surplus, and it has the lowest unemployment rate in the country; but skeptics can write these achievements off to coincidence. More data is needed, and...

“We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government. . . . Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson . . . and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business.” — William Jennings Bryan, Democratic Convention, 1896...

While individuals, businesses and governments suffer from a credit crisis created on Wall Street, the banks responsible for the crisis are tapping into nearly-interest-free credit lines and using the money to speculate or to make commercial loans at much higher rates. By forming their own banks, states too can tap into very low interest rates, and can buffer themselves from another Lehman-style credit collapse. Keeping interest rates low is considered the first line of defense for central banks bent on easing the credit crisis and getting banks to lend again. The Federal Reserve’s target for the federal funds rate --...

Wall Street banks have been saved from bankruptcy by governments that are now going bankrupt themselves; but the banks are not returning the favor. Instead, they are engaged in a class war, insisting that the squeezed middle class be even further squeezed to balance over-stressed government budgets. All the perks are going to Wall Street, while Main Street slips into debt slavery. Wall Street needs to be made to pay its fair share, but how? The financial reform bill agreed to on June 25 may have carved out some protections for consumers, but for Goldman Sachs and the derivatives lobby,...

As the states’ credit crisis deepens, four states have initiated bills for state-owned banks, and candidates in seven states have now included that solution in their platforms. “Hundreds of job-creating projects are still on hold because Michigan businesses and entrepreneurs cannot get bank financing. We can break the credit crunch and beat Wall Street at their own game by keeping our money right here in Michigan and investing it to retool our economy and create jobs.” --Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero in the Detroit News, March 9, 2010 Struggling with 14% unemployment, Michigan has been particularly hard hit by the nation’s...

A lot of people are very upset about the rapidly increasing U.S. national debt these days and they are demanding a solution. What they don't realize is that there simply is not a solution under the current U.S. financial system. It is now mathematically impossible for the U.S. government to pay off the U.S. national debt. You see, the truth is that the U.S. government now owes more dollars than actually exist. If the U.S. government went out today and took every single penny from every single American bank, business and taxpayer, they still would not be able to pay...