Free Republic

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...

Companies used to be in business to make money, sell stuff and employ people. They were run by executives who were proudly capitalist and believed in the country’s founding principles. No longer, it seems. Big businesses’ support of green-energy legislation, various social-justice edicts and the silencing of right-wingers on Twitter have become so routine it’s almost not news anymore. The question is, why? People who work at these companies regularly complain to me that most employees view their employers’ new corporate leftism with disdain. They believe it’s a nuisance pushed by a vocal fringe of the workforce. Companies cave, they...

Donald Trump may drop out of the 2020 presidential race if he believes he has no chance of winning, a Republican Party operative reportedly told Fox News. The claim comes in a report in the president’s favourite news outlet that cites a number of GOP insiders who are concerned about Mr Trump’s re-election prospects amid abysmal polling numbers. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, currently holds an average lead of nine points over the incumbent, according to a tracker of 2020 polls by RealClearPolitics. Crucially, Mr Trump has lost support from older white voters — typically a bedrock of support for the...

Conventional wisdom among corporate executives who lean left is that Joe Biden will be our next president, and they’ve begun eying various posts in the new administration that they or their friends would want to fill. But they’re forgetting one big obstacle to their path to power: the economy. That’s right, the economy. Yes, our economy appears to be in really bad shape and is working horribly for many Americans, particularly those in the hospitality, travel and restaurant industries hardest hit by the coronavirus shutdowns. The ­racial unrest and looting of neighborhoods across the nation didn’t help. Small businesses —...

President Trump and the Republican political establishment are certainly talking a good game when it comes to their proposed changes to the tax codes. On paper, the new tax plan would cut onerously high rates for companies that force businesses to move overseas. Individuals and, most importantly, middle-class families get some much- needed tax relief. The whole messy tax system would also become less complicated if the president has his way. Now our fearless leaders need to translate words into action, and it won’t be easy. First, Trump deserves credit for at least crafting the outlines of a plan that...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” network senior business correspondent Charlie Gasparino explained that Wall Street is concerned over real estate mogul Donald Trump’s rise in the presidential polls to guest host Charles Payne.

The right is dropping the ball when it comes to Thomas Piketty’s much heralded and totally flawed book on inequality, “Capital in the 21st Century.” This long and lugubrious opus is really an open sore, replete with so much absurdity that shooting it down should be like shooting fish in a barrel. The left has embraced this rant against capitalism — and conservatives should be tying them to it, to expose where all the class-war rhetoric would really bring us.

James Biden isn’t a big name in the business of residential housing development, so what exactly qualifies him to work at a construction company and share in the winnings of a $1.5 billion project to build affordable homes in Iraq? If you said it has something to do with his last name, the one shared by his older brother Vice President Joe Biden, you wouldn’t be far off. At least that’s the guess of some Wall Street analysts who cover the Marlton, NJ-based company Hill International and think they’ve seen yet another sordid tale of crony capitalism. Hill has been...

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...

So much for hope and change. With the economy growing worse and worse, the grand promises of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign have faded as the reality of malaise takes hold. Mr. Obama has vowed to spend $1 billion in advertising dollars to counteract the effect his policies have had on the nation. The GOP’s campaign chief met with The Washington Times on Friday to discuss why that’s not going to work. “I think this [election] is a referendum on Barack Obama,” said Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus. “The people in this country are going to ask themselves a...

It's looking more and more likely that Congress will not hit the August 2 deadline, but according to Charlie Gasparino you should have no fear. He reports that in secret, the administration has been making calls to Wall Street, telling bankers that the administration will find a way to avoid no matter what. It's not clear what that means: Payment prioritization, the 14th Amendment option, or perhaps some new special measure Geithner could pull out to conserve cash? That being said, the Administration reportedly does believe that a downgrade is still likely without a deal that cuts costs. A lot...

I Have seen the future, and it doesn't work... The reason is pretty simple: The Bernie Madoff-like Ponzi scheme of big government has been squeezing the productive class and redistributing its tax dollars and innovation to everyone else for years -- and is finally reaching its boiling point. And the way things are going, we're probably not far behind. Barcelona met the new year with the sort of subdued celebration that only 40 percent unemployment can bring. Once-swanky shops and restaurants along grand boulevards such as the Avinguda Diagonal remain vacant... Across Europe, private-sector jobs are disappearing, while governments face...

Ben Bernanke is emerging as a high-profile scapegoat as critics ridicule his new "quantitative easing" policy. Charlie Gasparino on why mocking the non-partisan Fed chair is bad for America. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Here's how you know Ben Bernanke, the mild-mannered chairman of the Federal Reserve, a scholar of the Great Depression once considered a sage for saving the banking system during the 2008 bank meltdown, has suddenly found himself a target of ridicule lumped in with the financial morons and evildoers like Dick Fuld, Lloyd Blankfein and the rest of the fat cats of Wall Street. Go to YouTube.com, and one of...

Conventional wisdom on the right and left has been that President Obama and the Democrats will pay a heavy price in the November mid-term elections for passing the deeply unpopular health care reform bill. But Fox Business Network's Charlie Gasparino isn't so sure. Gasparino appeared on the network's "Imus in the Morning" on March 25. "They can all get even in November then," Imus said of conservatives and Republicans. But Gasparino pointed out the indispensable weapon liberals have their side: the "cheerleading" news media. "You know, listen - there's not a lot of good reporting on this stuff, and that's...

[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...

SO maybe Eliot Spitzer did kill AIG, after all. Nobody doubts the in surance giant is basically kaput, or that the promix ate cause is billions in losses in obscure instruments known as credit-default swaps, or CDSs. But American International Group didn't go deadly deep into CDSs until after New York Attorney General Spitzer had forced out Maurice "Hank" Greenberg out as CEO. GO back to March 2005, just days after Spitzer scored his biggest scalp during his eight-year tenure as the Sheriff of Wall Street by compelling Greenberg's departure. The new CEO, long-time AIG executive Martin Sullivan, held an...

SO maybe Eliot Spitzer did kill AIG, after all. Nobody doubts the in surance giant is basically kaput, or that the promix ate cause is billions in losses in obscure instruments known as credit-default swaps, or CDSs. But American International Group didn't go deadly deep into CDSs until after New York Attorney General Spitzer had forced out Maurice "Hank" Greenberg out as CEO. GO back to March 2005, just days after Spitzer scored his biggest scalp during his eight-year tenure as the Sheriff of Wall Street by compelling Greenberg's departure. The new CEO, long-time AIG executive Martin Sullivan, held an...

Bernard L. Madoff was once the chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He was one of the most important market makers on Wall Street. And he managed what was, by some estimates, the largest hedge fund on the planet.

Why isn't TV news giving the Fannie Mae scandals the same level of coverage that it gave to Enron? Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage association, has been battling a mounting scandal since last year. It has accounting errors of about $11 billion. That's more than 19 times larger than Enron's $567 million error. Fannie faces a Justice Department inquiry, an SEC investigation and an Office of Federal Housing Enterprise complaint. The mess has caused the departure of CEO Franklin Raines and several other top executives. And Fannie Mae stock has dropped roughly 30 percent, from nearly $80 a share to...