Free Republic

DNI Ratcliffe was scheduled to release his explosive report on Friday. But the Deep State just blocked it. They screwed Trump again. They are not going to release this report on foreign interference on time.

Search says this hasn't been posted yet. Seems like a pretty big deal witness testimony. "One very credible witness described how he personally observed dozens of USB cards being uploaded to voting machines which resulted in 50,000 votes for Joe Biden in a short period of time"

(ref: How Banks Bought the Tea Party) Seriously folks. The 15 freshmen Republican representatives in the House Tea Party Caucus each ran in 2010 on a populist anti-Wall Street message, highlighting their opposition to bank bailouts like the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and criticizing Washington for enabling the banking sector as it became “Too Big to Fail.” After winning, all fifteen received significant PAC contributions from the banking industry — and have become a reliable vote and mouthpiece for the financial industry, a ThinkProgress analysis of campaign contributions, voting records and public statements reveals. It would be nice...

3/1/2011 WASHINGTON - Today, Mary Miller, Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, issued the following update regarding the projected dates by which the United States will reach the statutory debt limit: “The Treasury Department now estimates that the United States will reach the debt limit between April 15, 2011 and May 31, 2011. As announced at the February Quarterly Refunding, Treasury will update this projection at the beginning of each month.”​

After in the past week, the blogosphere had been hobbled by one after another mindless oped claiming that the US can easily avoid default by just paying the interest on its obligations, and thus does not have to worry about the debt ceiling, we decided to put some sense to this debate when we pointed out that the "US Debt-to-Deficit Difference Hits Fresh Record, As Treasury Continues To Issue 50% More Debt Than Needed To Fund Deficit" meaning that i) it is not a debt ceiling, it is a debt target (© Lizzie363), and ii) the hundreds of billions of...

Well, folks, it's official - mark November 22, 2010 in your calendars - today is the day the Ponzi starts in earnest. With today's $8.3 billion POMO monetization, the Fed's official holdings of US Treasury securities now amount to $891.3 billion, which is higher than the second largest holder of US debt: China, which as of September 30 held $884 billion, and Japan, with $864 billion. The purists will claim that the TIC data is as of September 30, and that as the weekly custodial account shows UST buying continues the data is likely not correct. They will be wrong:...

Confirming once again that the clueless government would rather risk a populist backlash than actually cutting costs (recall that federal worker compensation has surged in the past 5 years), it appears that the long-stirring debate over a value added tax may be about to materialize into something tangible. Per Bloomberg, "Alice Rivlin, a member of President Barack Obama’s deficit-reduction commission (and former Fed vice chairwoman), is trying to stir a debate over imposing a national sales tax to reduce the deficit. Rivlin, as part of a separate 19-member group sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, offered a plan...

... My perspective, as with those of all other members of the FOMC, was given a thoughtful and fair hearing at the table. After deliberation, the majority of the committee concluded that under current and foreseeable conditions, the better approach was to purchase $600 billion in Treasuries between now and the end of the second quarter of next year, on top of the amount projected to replace the paydown in mortgage backed-securities. The math of this new exercise is readily transparent: The Federal Reserve will buy $110 billion a month in Treasuries, an amount that, annualized, represents the projected deficit...

In the latest amusing discrepancy to come out of the BLS, today's reported unemployment data by state indicated that at the end of September, there was a total of 129,699,600 people employed across the various states. Not very surprisingly, the biggest deterioration occurred in California which lost 63.5 K jobs, followed by New York at 37.6K (Wall Street layoffs?) and Massachusetts at 20.9K. The total change from August's 129,923,400 employed was a drop of 223,800. Well, this is a little confusing as the NFP number for September indicated that total jobs lost were 95,000, a slightly more than 50% improvement...

Democrats in the Senate on Thursday held a recess hearing covering a taxpayer bailout of union pensions and a plan to seize private 401(k) plans to more "fairly" distribute taxpayer-funded pensions to everyone. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee heard from hand-picked witnesses advocating the infamous "Guaranteed Retirement Account" (GRA) authored by Theresa Guilarducci. In a nutshell, under the GRA system government would seize private 401(k) accounts, setting up an additional 5% mandatory payroll tax to dole out a "fair" pension to everyone using that confiscated money coupled with the mandated contributions....

By now everyone 'knows' that the US consumer is hunkering down, paying down debt and performing other mythological tasks. Alas, as the WSJ points out today, this is not exactly true... In fact not true one bit. The reality is that over the past two years, US consumers have not been deleveraging as a voluntary act of eliminating debt, but have been actually aggressively leveraging more and more until the bank providing them credit puts them into involuntary bankruptcy, cutting off the money spigot. This is a startling realization, confirming that the average American is actually hyperleveraging to the point...

■ Unfunded pension liabilities are approximately $2.5 trillion, compared to the reported amount of $493 billion. ■ Unfunded liabilities for health and other benefits are $558 billion, compared to the reported $537 billion. ■ Thus, total unfunded liabilities for all benefit plans are an estimated $3.1 trillion — nearly three times higher than the plans report. To put these liabilities in context, state and local governments’ reported unfunded obligations under pension and other benefit plans amounting to 7.1 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2008. When adjusted using a more appropriate discount rate, however, states’ unfunded obligations were...

Stock prices stabilized on Friday, but it felt like the selling ended more because of exhaustion than because of some return of optimism. Since early May, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost almost 10% of its value — officially known as a market correction. But the big question on everyone's mind: Is this just a correction or the start of something worse, a new bear market? Despite Friday's rally, the Dow ended the week down 4% and firmly in the red for the year. The results were just as bad for the Nasdaq Composite (down 5% for the week)...

Well, if nothing else, we now know officially just how great those tax receipts were, and yes. We were right. April's tax deficit of $83 billion was the highest April deficit on record. America is now more bankrupt than ever. Income was $245.3 billion, 8% below the total recorded last April. Spending was $328.0 billion, up 14% year-over-year. A year ago in April the deficit was $20.9 billion. And here is the data: tax receipts down 7.9% YoY, Individual Income Tax down 21.5% YoY, and more importantly, spending: Total spending up 14.2%, National defense up 17%, Medicare up 39.4%, Social...

You have to love it.... U.S. posts record $82.69 billion deficit in April, 19th straight month of budget shortfalls - Reuters Nonsense. Here's the REAL table of numbers from Treasury itself, including the theft from the FICA and Medicare accounts: (click for the larger copy) If I did accounting like this I'd go to prison. $82 billion my butt. The real number is $175.6 billion, more than double the reported amount, and the cumulative year-to-date (calendar years) is $637.4 billion, or a run rate (annualized) of $1.912 trillion. If you're wondering why the "stock market" has been generally supported (even...

First, just in case you were wondering, today's melt up episode #xyz is being orchestrated by the HFTs on no volume as per the norm. There is no volume period. The volume only appears when the Dow is down 1000 points. At that point everyone tries to front run everyone else as we saw last Thursday. It happened then, it will happen again. In the meantime nothing will change, except the launching station for the 30% drop straight down will be marginally higher (one would hope). And as for the fundamentals justifying the market going right back up to 2010...

And.... Here.... We..... Go! Two state representatives called on Gov. Pat Quinn Sunday to deploy the Illinois National Guard to safeguard Chicago's streets. Chicago Democrats John Fritchey and LaShawn Ford said they want Quinn, Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis to allow guardsmen to patrol streets and help quell violence. Weis said he did not support the idea because the military and police operate under different rules. "Is this a drastic call to action? Of course it is," Fritchey said. "Is it warranted when we are losing residents to gun violence at such an alarming rate? Without...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Existing home sales jumped 6.8% in March, with home buyers racing to get a tax credit that expires in April, according to a real estate industry report released Thursday. The National Association of Realtors reported that existing home sales rose last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.35 million units, up from the revised rate of 5.01 million in February. Sales year-over-year were up 16.1%.

<p>WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- As economic worries persist, U.S. consumer sentiment dropped in early April, according to media reports on Friday of the Reuters/University of Michigan index.</p>

IMF Prepares For Global Cataclysm, Expands Backup Rescue Facility By Half A Trillion For "Contribution To Global Financial Stability" And all the pundits thought that the IMF would be on the hook for just €10 billion... The IMF has just announced that it is expanding its New Arrangement to Borrow (NAB) multilateral facility from its existing $50 billion by a whopping $500 billion (SDR333.5 billion), to $550 billion. The current lending participant group of 26 entities will be increased by 13 new members all of whom will contribute token amount of capital to the NAB. The one country most on...