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[C]onsumer credit became so pervasive that paying cash became passé. Want a new $32,530 Dodge Ram Crew pickup? Take a lease. Sick of your old house? Get a 100 percent mortgage and trade up. Face lift? Round-the-world cruise? New PC? Three-hundred dollar sushi dinner at Nobu? Whip out that plastic. It was this behavior—the endless willingness of lenders to lend and borrowers to borrow—that kept the consumer economy humming uninterrupted from the early 1990s, straight through the brief recession of 2001, until the credit meltdown of 2007. But many of the lenders who extended credit recklessly are now acting like...

As hedge funds go, it's 1998 all over again--but with a key difference. Markets are significantly less volatile now than they were nine years ago, when the Russian government bond default sent shock waves through global financial markets and doomed the once high-flying fund Long-Term Capital Management. That's what the New York Federal Reserve Bank says in a report Wednesday about the risks in the market because of the proliferation of hedge funds, which now manage $1.5 trillion of assets and make up more than half of the average trading volume in stocks and bonds. High correlations among hedge fund...

Rudy Giuliani's legacy is that he was the luckiest mayor we have had in a long time. He was blessed by being mayor when we had a great national upsurge in the economy. He was blessed by being mayor when we had a national downturn in crime. He was blessed because he had very little to do with either phenomenon in New York, but most New Yorkers and most tourists will think he did. Most celebrants of Rudy Giuliani seem mesmerized by the disappearance of the squeegee men. As I wrote in my book "Rudy," the issue of the squeegees...

MEMORANDUMFROM: BC'04 POLICY DEPARTMENTIntroductionJohn Kerry is traveling the nation on his misery tour, inundating voters with his pessimism about America's economy.  What voters may not realize, however, is that the growing economy that Kerry continues to talk down is remarkably similar to the economy Bill Clinton touted during his 1996 reelection campaign and that Kerry speaks of in glowing terms.  Unemployment was 5.6 percent in May 1996, the exact same level as it is now.  The average monthly payroll growth from January to May 1996 was 233,000 jobs, and from January to May 2004 the economy created an average...

The Clinton Administration has argued that economic policies it sponsored in large part "explain" the robust economic performance witnessed in recent years. The 1999 Economic Report of the President, for example, argues that the recent economic successes "are the result of an economic strategy that we have pursued since 1993… Our new economic strategy was rooted first and foremost in fiscal discipline ...the market responded by lowering long-term interest rates."5 The centerpiece of the Administration's 1993 "fiscal discipline" was increased tax rates. These tax increases, or tight fiscal policy, purportedly reduced the budget deficit, and from a Keynesian perspective, lowered...

Recession Began With Clinton, Says JEC Posted Oct. 15, 2002 Published: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 The death-drop of the stock market did not begin with the Bush administration in January 2001, says the congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC), but in March 2000 under the Clinton administration when it began its all-out attack on the entrepreneurs of the booming U.S. high-tech industry. Indeed, The Economist reports that this poisoning of the economic stream even may have begun in the late 1990s. According to JEC Chairman Rep. Jim Saxton, "The 2000 NASDAQ collapse also corroborates a variety of other data indicating that...

While reporters usually pretend that Bill and Hillary Clinton's legal problems are behind them, Mrs. Clinton seems to know better. That is, at least judging by the way she's handling the latest lawsuit filed against her. Sen. Clinton's office spent a significant part of this week dodging media questions about Stan Lee Media co-founder Peter Paul, who claimed in court documents filed in Los Angeles last week that she and her husband accepted $2 million from him and reported only a tiny fraction to the Federal Election Commission. "Clinton's Senate staff did not respond to the Associated Press' repeated...

The moral crisis afflicting the nation's economic system continues to deepen. For example: During the late 1990s, corporate officials at Xerox used fraudulent accounting to overstate the company's profits by $1.4 billion, which in turn helped to drive up the company's stock price, which in turn made company executives rich through stock options and bonuses. But last week, justice was supposedly done when six former Xerox executives settled a federal lawsuit by agreeing to cough up $19 million in excess compensation from that era. Except . . . not really. You see, they get to keep the money. The funds...

New York (AP) - Former President Clinton, in his first televised mini- debate with Republican Bob Dole on Sunday, said that a tax cut at a time that war is looming in Iraq is "bad economics." Dole, Clinton's opponent in the 1996 presidential election, said the Bush administration has launched a global war to protect the American way of life, "which means, among other things, the freedom to save or invest our own money." The retired politicians have agreed to revive the "Point-Counterpoint" segment on "60 Minutes," television's most popular newsmagazine. In the two-minute debate, the two will face off...

RNC RESEARCH BILL CLINTON TO EXPLAIN HIS RECESSION ON CBS’ “60 MINUTES” Months Before Final 60 Minutes Ran Out On Clinton Administration, The Economic Recession Had Already Begun _______________________________________________________ “President Bush’s main economic policy -- the large tax cut of last year was not responsible for any of the current damage [to the economy]. Indeed, given the twin shocks of 9/11 and the post-Enron stock market decline, the short-term stimulus created by the tax cuts has turned out to be fortuitously well timed.” (Editorial, “Negative Al Gore,” The Washington Post, October 5, 2002) ECONOMIC DATA CONFIRMS SLOWDOWN BEGAN UNDER CLINTON...

<p>New York, Dec. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Toys ``R'' Us Inc., Sears Roebuck & Co. and other retailers will offer after-Christmas discounts of as much as 80 percent, trying to salvage what may be the worst holiday shopping season in more than three decades.</p>

WASHINGTON--In 2002, Rep.- elect Michael Michaud, D-Maine, was a genuine exception among Democratic House candidates: a blue-collar, dues-paying union member who had worked in the paper mill for 28 years, who is pro-life, and who, in a district previously represented by moderate Republicans--won. All this after Michaud publicly embraced the Man Republicans Love to Hate, former president Bill Clinton. Here, according to the estimable columnist E.J. Dionne, is what candidate Michaud had to say to Clinton in October before 2,500 Maine citizens in Augusta: "The country's economy was in the ditch, and you made the hard decisions and turned things...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. AIM Management Group Inc. plans to let go about 120 employees, or 5 percent of its 2,450 workers, as difficult market conditions force the company to make job cuts for the first time in its 26-year history. Like others in the industry, the Houston-based investment manager has been hit by a reduction in fee income as its assets under management have been shrunk by the prolonged bear market. AIM is outlining a mid-November window for the workforce reductions to come to a head as it extends voluntary severance packages, with right...

Prediction is very difficult," Niels Bohr once remarked, "especially about the future." Lately, predicting the economy's recent past has proved to be difficult, too. Actually, determining last quarter's or last year's growth in gross domestic product has always been difficult and subject to error and revisions. The daunting task of computing G.D.P — the total value of economic output — for an ever-evolving $10 trillion economy falls on the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a nonpartisan agency in the Commerce Department. The bureau bases its estimates on information from a diverse set of sources, not all of which are instantly available....

In an odd way, I eagerly await the next could-be scandal that the left will attempt to hang around the neck of George W. Bush. It has become a perverse type of spectator sport for me. Granted the current "corporate greed" thing hasn't run its course and it may yet "have legs", irrespective of any truth behind it. No matter, should it die out tomorrow, whatever the next big problem may be, we can all rest assured that it will be Bush's fault. If we're to accept the rhetoric of the Democrats and the blazingly irresponsible headlines in the...