Free Republic

Cuban President Raul Castro is paying an historic state visit to France, seeking to develop business and tourism ties as the Caribbean island opens up its economy. The trip comes after a breakthrough deal was reached in Paris in December to lighten Cuba's foreign debt - and days after France hosted the leader of another long-time pariah state: Iran. Castro, 84, is on his first official trip to Europe since taking over from his elder brother Fidel in 2006. The Cuban president briefly stopped to Rome last year to meet with Pope Francis. ...

(Vladimir Putin, right, with his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani in 2014.) Iran is ditching the dollar. Iran is no longer using the US dollar in foreign-trade transactions and is replacing it with other currencies, t he deputy governor at the Iranian Central Bank Gholami Kamyab said, according to Sputnik News. "In trade exchanges with the foreign countries, Iran uses other currencies including Chinese yuan, euro, Turkish lira, Russian ruble, and South Korean won," Kamyab reportedly said. He also reportedly added that Iran was considering bilateral currency-swap agreements, which would allow partners to exchange one foreign currency for the equivalent...

Americans presumably realize by now that living in a bubble economy, while exhilarating as long as the champagne lasts, is not a good move. Therefore it is worth understanding why the biggest bubble of all may be yet to pop. I refer to America's trade imbalance with the rest of the world. As I explained in a previous article, our trade deficit with the rest of the world means that we must a) borrow money and b) sell existing assets in order to cover the yawning gap between our imports and our exports. And while a rich nation can indeed...

Free trade has been the conventional wisdom in the U.S. for so long that many people have forgotten that it is even possible to challenge its fundamental assumptions. It is supposedly a settled truth of economics that free trade is always best and that anyone who questions it is either merely ignorant or the spokesperson of some special interest. Protectionism supposedly belongs to the dark past —despite the fact that we ourselves accuse some of the world’s most successful economies, like China, of practicing it in the 21st century. But in reality, free trade is not generating rising prosperity, rather...

International relief and development organization Oxfam says Foreign ministers meeting in Montreal today should agree to cancel Haiti’s $890 million international debt in the wake of the devastating earthquake. Debt cancellation is one of Oxfam’s five priorities for Haitian reconstruction.

China reduced its holdings of US government debt by the largest margin in nearly nine years in June, according to data from the US Treasury.

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- The United States will sign an agreement Tuesday to forgive nearly $30 million in Indonesian debt in return for the large Southeast Asian country agreeing to protect forests on Sumatra Island, which is home to endangered tigers, elephants, rhinos and orangutan. The deal is the largest so-called debt-for-nature swap the U.S. government has organized so far under the U.S. Tropical Forest Conservation Act and its first such pact with Indonesia, which has one of the fastest deforestation rates in the world, losing an area of forest the size of Switzerland annually. Under the deal, Indonesia will pay...

On April 21, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected (see the World Economic Outlook, pp. 36-37) that the US foreign debt will increase from about 4.5% of world GDP in 2007 to about 9% in 2009. Given that the US foreign debt was 17.7% of US GDP at the end of 2007, this means that our foreign debt will be about 35% of US GDP by the end of this year as shown in the red line on the graph below. US foreign debt tends to increase when the United States runs a trade deficit on goods and services using...

NEW YORK, March 16 (Reuters) - Foreign central banks were large net sellers of U.S. debt in the latest week, with hefty sales of Treasury debt overwhelming purchases of U.S. agency securities, Federal Reserve data showed on Thursday. The Fed said its overall holdings of Treasury and agency debt kept for overseas central banks fell $10.299 billion in the week ended March 15, to stand at $1.588 trillion. The breakdown of custody holdings showed overseas central banks sold $16.691 billion in Treasury debt, but bought $6.390 billion in securities from government-sponsored agencies like Fannie Mae (FNM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and...

Karim Rahimi, the spokesman for the Afghan president, said yesterday the Afghan government might demand that Russia compensate for the ten-year-long occupation of the country by the Soviet troops. The idea was voiced in Afghanistan before but never on the official level. Sources of Kommersant at the Russian Foreign Ministry state that Kabul mentioned the compensation in response to Moscow’s move to discuss the repayment of Afghanistan’s $10 billion debt for the USSR. Karim Rahimi made the statement in an interview with the Chinese Xinhua news agency timed to an anniversary of the Soviet-led invasion in Afghanistan. A special...

As the Fed continues its inflation campaign, most have yet to come to grips with the reality of America’s uniquely precarious situation. In an act of prestidigitation that would impress Harry Houdini, the Fed is now attempting to hide evidence of the most inflationary monetary policy in its history by no longer publishing data on the growth of M3, while mystifying the public with phony CPI statistics. However, the relentless rise in the price of gold is evidence that fewer people are being fooled by the Fed’s slight of hand. Gold’s recent rise to just under $500 per ounce, gaining...

Welfare reform was enacted in the 1990s on the premise that no one should feed from the government trough forever. But a huge welfare state still exists -- 8,000 miles away. For 30 years, Israel has been pocketing about three billion dollars a year. It owes the U.S. a debt of about $100 billion. At Israel's request, most of the money is called a loan with repayment waived. Israel doesn't want U.S. oversight of how it spends U.S. taxpayer money, as would be required for a grant. And in a break from longstanding U.S. practice, Israel does not have to...

Gov't 25-year debt repayment: NIS 116,000 per capitaProjected payments on loans and deposits between January 2004 and December 2028 amount to a record NIS 630.4 billion. Zeev Klein 28 Sep 04 15:52Payment on the government's total domestic and external debt over the next 25 years, through December 2028, are estimated at NIS 408,900 per family, or NIS 116,000 per person. The figures are from an analysis of Ministry of Finance and Bank of Israel figures by economic ministries in Jerusalem. Israel's population is currently 6.7 million people in 1.9 million households. If the shekel-dollar exchange rate reaches NIS 5.00/$, Israel's...