Free Republic

Few Americans have heard of credit default swaps, arcane financial instruments invented by Wall Street about a decade ago. But if the economy keeps slowing, credit default swaps, like subprime mortgages, may become a household term. Credit default swaps form a large but obscure market that will be put to its first big test as a looming economic downturn strains companies’ finances. Like a homeowner’s policy that insures against a flood or fire, these instruments are intended to cover losses to banks and bondholders when companies fail to pay their debts. The market for these securities is enormous. Since 2000,...

The dollar fell to a record low versus the euro on Tuesday after the Federal Reserve cut its key interest rate by an aggressive half a percentage point to prevent the U.S. economy from weakening further on turmoil in the credit and housing markets. Policy-makers reduced the benchmark lending rate between banks by the most since November 2002 to 4.75 percent, the lowest level since May last year. It was the first rate cut in four years. The Fed also lowered the discount rate it charges for direct loans to banks by a half-point. Traders sold the dollar as lower...

If you live in the Bavarian region of Chiemgau, you can exist for months at a time in a euro-free zone of hills and lakes with a population of half a million people. Restaurants, bakeries, hairdressers and a network of supermarkets will accept the local currency: the Chiemgauer. Notes are exchanged freely like legal tender. You can even use a debit card. Petrol stations are still a problem, but biofuel outlets are signing up. Dentists are next. The Chiemgauer is one of 16 regional currencies that have sprung into existence across Germany and Austria since the launch of the euro...

Courtesy of Cis Spook Besides the monuments and plaques, Belgians remember U.S. troops from World War II in other ways. The annual Tanks in Town rally in Mons, Belgium, which is the capital of Hainaut Province, drew hundreds of participants this year, many of whom dressed in WWII garb. A Belgian military association is organizing a three-day camping trip that may be of great interest to Americans, particularly servicemembers. But there’s more to the trip than a full cooler and a flaming campfire. The association, Je Me Souviens, which means “I Remember,” will stage an outdoor re-enactment called “A...

If our cultural past isn't worth defending, why should our future be? ---------------------- Five years after the (a) all too predictable blowback to U.S. foreign policy born of decades of poverty and desperation or (b) controlled explosion by Bush-Cheney-Halliburton-Zionist agents (delete according to taste), I get a lot of mail on the lines of: C'mon, man, cut to the chase--are we gonna win or lose? Well, let me come at that in an evasive non-chase-cutting manner and circle around to it very gradually. I gave a speech in Sydney last month and among the audience was a lady called Pauline...

The goals of Freerepublic are "to champion causes which further conservatism in America.". I have noticed there are a couple of posters on this forum who are actively promoting another country/supranational organization's (super-)national interests which are opposite of Ameirca national interests. For instance, there is a well-known Euro poster from Spain who, from what he posts and supports, is an ardent and enthusiastic supporter of the anti-American European Union. Since such posters clearly disagree with the stated goals of this forum as expressed by the founder as "pro-God, pro-life, pro-family, pro-Constitution, pro-Bill of Rights, pro-gun, pro-limited government, pro-private property rights,...

But for most, a missile was too distant, too unlikely a threat to interrupt their daily lives. ``A better question is when's the next earthquake,'' Ernie De Matteis said as he flipped through a newspaper in San Francisco.

TEHRAN, May 15 (UPI) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced Friday that in July Iran will abandon dollar payments for its oil and natural gas exports in favor of euros. The move comes amid a standoff between Tehran and Washington over Iran's nuclear fuel enrichment program. The Bush administration insists the program is cover for a nuclear weapons program, a charge that Iran denies. All current international oil transactions on the New York Mercantile Exchange and London's International Petroleum Exchange are priced in dollars. Middleeastforex.com reported May 13 that Ahmadinejad announced the change Friday during a visit to Baku, Azerbaijan....

At the height of the morning commute on March 11, 2004, ten bombs exploded in and around four train stations in Madrid. Almost 200 Spaniards were killed, and some 2,000 wounded. The next day, Spain seemed to be standing firm against terror, with demonstrators around the country wielding signs denouncing the “murderers” and “assassins.” Yet things did not hold. Seventy-two hours after the bombs had strewn arms, legs, heads, and other body parts over three train stations and a marshaling yard, the Spanish government of José María Aznar, a staunch ally of the United States and Great Britain in Iraq,...

EUROPE DAY Did you know there was a "Europe Day"? A day to celebrate the EU? Me neither. But May 9th is it. Here's some thoughts of mine on the poor doomed European Union: Question: What do you get when you take two world wars, add the two most malign ideologies of the century, throw in genocide, the collapse of religious institutions, radical secularism, a political elite sealed off from opinions it finds distasteful, spiraling social costs, deathbed demographics and growing numbers of an unassimilated immigrant population? Answer: You get Europe in the new millennium - mired in aggressive pacifism,...

The idea Canadians have replaced doxology with doughnuts is less Timmy than tinny ------------------------------ The other week, the Toronto Star assigned Kenneth Kidd to do a big story on Tim Hortons as an icon of Canadian identity. This was a couple of days before that odd incident with the fellow going into the men's room and blowing himself into a big bunch of Timbits, so nothing tricky was required, just the usual maple boosterism. And naturally the first thing Kidd did was call up the Canadian media's Mister Rent-A-Quote, Michael Adams, the author of Fire And Ice and American Backlash,...

Two days before Christmas, I was in a store in Vermont buying a last-minute gift when the owner’s twentysomething daughter walked in. “Thanks for the sweater, mom,” she said. “Kevin really liked his present, too.” “But it’s only the 23rd,” said the bewildered lady. “Mom,” sighed the kid, wearily. “How many times do I have to tell you? We always open our presents on the solstice.” A couple of weeks later, a neighbor of mine in New Hampshire got married. He’s a biker and a tattooist, and he’s deeply spiritual. So he and his bride were married in the middle...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Morten Messerschmidt, a member of the Council of Europe and of Denmark's Parliament for the Danish People's Party. He is involved in the debate about the effects of Muslim immigration to Europe, Islam and terrorism. FP: Morten Messerschmidt, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Messerschmidt: Thanks. FP: Tell us the impact that Muslim immigration is having on Europe. Messerschmidt: We are seeing over the entire continent how the extreme groups of Islam are trying to impose their fundamentalist ideology, which has created awful results in the Middle East, to our part of the world. We see it...

Asia Rising Donald Rumsfeld infamously made a distinction between Old Europe and New Europe. He has been scored ever since for his sweeping and impolitic language, but he wasn't sweeping enough: In geopolitical terms, all of Europe is old, the world's most tourist-friendly museum piece. For the future of high-stakes U.S. diplomacy and of great-power politics, look no further than Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to the U.S. It is Asia that should occupy an outsized place in our strategic thinking, and it is Europe that should be the relative afterthought, not the other way around. The media and foreign-policy...

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Wednesday denounced what he called widespread fraud at Italy's general election and demanded his center-left rival Romano Prodi be stripped of victory. Prodi immediately condemned Berlusconi's efforts to overturn the results of the April 9-10 election, the closest in modern Italian history, and his allies warned that the prime minister was stoking dangerous political tensions. The stand-off between the leaders of Italy's two main coalitions pushed Europe's fourth largest economy into uncharted waters and toward a full-blown crisis. "The election result has to change because there was widespread fraud," Berlusconi told reporters after meeting President...

've had a recurring experience in the last few months. I'll be reading some geopolitical tract like Sands Of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards Of Global Ambition by Robert W. Merry, and two-thirds of the way in I'll stumble across: "With the onset of the Iraq War and European opposition, many Americans embraced a severe anti-European attitude. 'To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history,' wrote Mark Steyn in the Jewish World Review, 'we must add the European Union and France's Fifth Republic.' "

A number of Middle Eastern central banks said on Tuesday that they would seek to switch reserves from the US greenback to euros. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) said that it was considering moving one-tenth of its dollar reserves to the euro, while the governor of the Saudi Arabian central bank condemned the decision by the United States to force Dubai Ports World to transfer its ownership to a "US entity", the UK Independent reported. "Is it protectionism or discrimination? Is it okay for US companies to buy everywhere but it is not okay for other companies to buy the...

Iran and Venezuela joined forces to undermine the U.S. dollar. Last year, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced that his country's plans to move its foreign-exchange holdings out of the dollar into the euro, calling for the creation of a South American central bank designed to hold in euros all the foreign-exchange holdings of the participating countries. On the other hand, Iran started since 2003 demanding oil payment in euros, not dollars, although the oil itself was still priced in dollars. The Islamic Republic has already announced plans of opening the Iranian Oil Bourse in March, challenging by that the NYMEX...

It is easy to damn the 1930s appeasers of Hitler — such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain in England and Edouard Daladier in France — given what the Nazis ultimately did when unleashed. But history demands not merely recognizing the truth post facto, but also trying to reconstruct the rationale of something that now in hindsight seems inexplicable. Appeasement in the 1930s was popular with the European public for a variety of reasons. All of them are instructive in our hesitation about stopping a nuclear Iran, or about defending the right of Western newspapers to print what they wish...

In the decade since they voted to join the European Union the islanders of the Aland archipelago in the Baltic Sea have been outvoted and overruled by Brussels, time and again.Now Aland, a unique, autonomous region of Finland, is about to teach Brussels a lesson in democracy it may never forget. Shopkeeper Alf-Erik, in Aland, a revolt by islanders has been brewing for some time Thanks to a quirk of early 20th-century history, Aland's 26,000 people are essentially sovereign co-rulers of their home nation of Finland. As such, they can veto any international treaty that Finland wants to enter, including...