Free Republic

Listening to Tuesday’s State of the Union speech, it was hard not to lose hope in the future of the country and the American experiment. It was delivered with grandiose delusion by a stammering, brain-addled octogenarian. When he wasn’t tripping over words or making stuff up (how he is taming inflation, as if the president controls interest rates), Joe Biden was being a petulant scold, sounding as if he was ­really angry that someone misplaced his dentures. He wants to raise taxes, expand the welfare state, all because he thinks he knows what’s best even though he barely knows what...

Despite the hype, CNN’s Internet streaming service, CNN+, has already tanked in its first month online after hiring the likes of left-wing “sports” commentators Jemele Hill and serial fabulist Rex Chapman. CNN’s streaming service launched only two weeks ago to great fanfare, but now it is being reported that the company is already gutting its investment into the service by millions. Even left-wing Axios noted that the “dramatic cut” is being made “in response to low adoption,” i.e., disastrously low subscription levels. CNN is now owned by WarnerMedia just as it is merging with Discovery, and some of the execs...

The revolving door between Washington and Wall Street always stirs passionate objections from progressive good-governance groups — except, it appears, when it involves corporate wokeism. For proof, all you need to do is ­unpack the Biden administration’s so-called Environmental Social Governance agenda and its ties to BlackRock, the world’s biggest money-management company headed by Larry Fink, which manages more than $9 trillion in assets. BlackRock has been an active cheerleader for White House policy toward ESG — the practice of prodding industries to enact climate-control measures and adopt other lefty shibboleths such as board diversity as part of their business...

Hysteria, groupthink and a fair amount of hypocrisy are the key ingredients in a ­ruinous cocktail that has managed to intoxicate some formerly profit-focused boardrooms. One day, it’s the Adena Friedman-led Nasdaq stock market demanding that its US-listed companies have fully diverse boards even as it ignores a Chinese company’s treatment of the oppressed Uighur ethnic minority. The next, it’s Larry Fink of BlackRock pushing President Biden’s green-energy agenda while hawking high-priced funds that invest in such boondoggles. The latest episode of this farce involves Georgia’s new voter law, which we’re supposed to believe is the second coming of Jim...

SCOOP via @LJMoynihan : On the ground intel from the @JoeBiden campaign—they’re increasingly worried about Pennsylvania and that’s why Biden is still campaigning there now. The campaign is concerned Trump could pull out a victory if the election comes down to PA and is contested. Charles Gasparino @CGasparino

Fox Business Network reporter Charles Gasparino said Wednesday that former Vice President and potential 2020 candidate Joe Biden is “seething” behind the scenes at Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), whose campaign he believes is behind media scrutiny of him getting too close for comfort with myriad women.

If Joe Biden does run for president Opens a New Window. , it will be the culmination of two years of weighing the issue while meeting with donors, many of them Wall Street executives -- and nearly duking it out with one of them along the way. Of course, the former vice president's path to run for president in 2020 Opens a New Window. didn't literally begin on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in lower Manhattan. But as FOX Business has reported, financial sector donors have been at his side from nearly the moment he began thinking about...

Jeb Bush says he released 33 years of tax returns this week because he wants to be the most transparent candidate to run for president in 2016. But if that’s really the case, why is he continuing to obfuscate some of his most lucrative and potentially controversial business dealings he had before announcing his candidacy, like his work as an “adviser” for investment bank Lehman Brothers? So, if Jeb won’t tell you what Jeb exactly did while working on Wall Street, in the interests of transparency and disclosure, I will try. Not much is known about what Bush actually did...

<p>Consider what passes for a scandal in New York City these days: The rich, conservative Koch family funding a wing of a city hospital. Wall Street types financing charter schools for poor kids in the South Bronx and Harlem. Non-union Walmart trying to open a store in a low-income neighborhood, which would deliver both cheaper goods and jobs to the locals.</p>

Gasparino actually said in plain English: 1. The 2008 Real Estate Bubble was caused in large part by the three ratings agencies 2. That Warren Buffet had ownership of Moody's and made millions at the time. 3. That the Lubrizol purchase was a continuation of a trend that Buffet has shown toward these sorts of ethical lapses in very large, economy moving transactions. So far, this is the very first time that anyone in the MSM has uttered such things, and the last place I thought I'd see it was on a Fox channel. Kudos to Gasparino for actually reporting...

Meredith Whitney continues to take it from all sides! The latest attacker is Charlie Gasparino, who accuses her of causing a muni market panic that caused the recent sell-off, thus costing taxpayers millions. In a HuffPo column, he demands that Whitney release her gigantic report detailing why, exactly, she expects the market to crash this year. Of course, its her proprietary research, and it's her right to keep it for her paying clients, but it is interesting since last week on CNBC she said one of the reasons for doing this research was to illuminate the issue of municipal debt....

[Excerpt] "Sometimes our technology, in creating these securities, outpaces our ability to cope with them." That's what Larry Fink told the New York Times in May 1987 when asked about Howie Rubin's trading disaster. In the past, Fink would have made that statement to a reporter and then celebrated with his team the fact that one of his competitors, particularly one like Merrill Lynch, which he saw as a pesky upstart in the field he aimed to dominate, was now being nailed with massive losses. But Fink wasn't celebrating, because, much like Howie Rubin, he had just gotten his first...