Free Republic

Joy Tiz ©2010 We’ve tried 19 months of government-as-community organizer. It hasn’t worked. Our fresh start needs to begin now. -John Boehner House minority leader, John Boehner called out the community-organizer-in-chief for his calamitous management of the nation’s economy. "I have had enough – and the American people have had enough – of Washington politicians talking about wanting to create jobs as a ploy to get themselves re-elected while doing everything possible to prevent jobs from being created." Not that the moribund media would tell you, but Boehner delivered his remarks at a speech before the City Club of Cleveland....

Dollar Plunges As Everyone Now Figures Return Of Quantitative Easing Is A Done Deal Joe Weisenthal Aug. 24, 2010, 10:45 AM Today the weak economic data is not prompting a flight-to-the-dollar. Today the weak economic data is causing dollar selling, because it's becoming crystal clear to folks, as ForexLive notes, that quantitative easing II is now a done deal. No more baby steps or holding the balance sheet steady. There's no excuse for the Fed Board of Governors to be have an unclear picture of the economy's direction anymore. And we may not have to wait for very long. Bernanke...

Revised numbers from the Labor Department show negative job growth during June 2010. For each job opening, there were five persons looking for work, and 300,000 fewer workers were hired in June than in May. The ride down continues. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Geithner, erstwhile cheerleader for the Obama economic team, announces that unemployment rates could rise "for a couple of months." "Of course we want to do what we can," says Geithner, but what we're doing is just not working. Still, "large parts of the private sector continue to strengthen," Geithner wrote in the New York Times on August 3....

The Obama Administration nudges Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to the front of the class to present Pollyanna statements on subjects apparently not fully understood by the President or many of his advisors. Millions react with little more than frowns of confusion. The skeptical population is exposed to too many scripts on the economy written in rose-colored ink, read through rose-colored lenses. Listening to Geithner, leads one to wonder if he’s read the news lately. Actually seeing him, leads one to doubt that he cares. Down the road, Bernanke does as he’s told by the bankers who have little concern for 17%+...

Timothy F. Geithner has been misidentified as a former Wall Street insider from Goldman Sachs so many times since he became the Treasury secretary that he and his advisers had taken to joking about it. Then the joke backfired. Earlier this month, Mr. Geithner had breakfast in Manhattan with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Robert Steel, a deputy mayor and former Treasury official in the Bush administration who had previously worked at Goldman. Facetiously, a Geithner aide said Mr. Steel and Mr. Geithner knew each other from the investment bank. Later that day at a public event, the mayor in...

Remember when Timothy Geitner was the ONLY ONE who could get us out of the financial crisis? If your memory doesn't go back that far, a Google search came up with an interesting summary of Liberal opinion by the invaluable Rush Limbaugh: RUSH: Here's Andrea Mitchell with Mika Brzezinski today on Scarborough's show on MSNBC. Mika Brzezinski says, "Tim Geithner, is this a big problem, some tax issue for the guy?" ANDREA MITCHELL: He is hugely smart, they need him right away on the job, I think both senators in the -- Democrats and Republicans from the finance committee say...

It is “financial jihad,” explained Yusuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s sharia compass — and the man Feisal Rauf, the brains behind the proposed Ground Zero mosque, admires as “the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.” It was 2002 and Qaradawi, who endorses suicide bombing and the targeting of American personnel operating in Islamic countries, was giving a lecture on the need to use the international financial system to support Islamist goals — like Hamas’s war to destroy Israel. The financial jihad has now achieved its greatest coup so far: It has co-opted the U.S. government as...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Bush administration's "misguided" policies are to blame for huge U.S. budget deficits, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner charged on Wednesday as he sought to build an election-year case for ending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. With congressional elections looming in November, Geithner sought to regain the high ground on the issue of who bears responsibility for record budget gaps and to counter Republican labeling of Democrats as tax-and-spend, bailout-happy liberals. Geithner said extending the Bush-era tax cuts for top income earners, as Republicans want, would force more borrowing to cover lost revenues and crimp more-effective remedies...

A day after Ben Bernanke said rising wages would likely spur household spending, a spate of weak economic reports is painting an entirely different picture. While the US has "a considerable way to go" before the economy fully recovers, the Federal Reserve chairman said on Monday that rising demand from households and businesses should sustain growth. Undercutting Bernanke's optimistic outlook was a series of economic reports yesterday showing consumer spending was flat in June as personal income growth ground to a halt. "The data confirm the growth momentum doesn't look good," said economist Bill Cheney at John Hancock Financial Service,...

You can say all of the right things, but at the end of the day reality still exists. Tax cheat Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner spoke with George Stephanopoulos about the “tough economy.” Geithner was very optimistic about the future of the economy and confidently stated that unemployment will go up a little then fall. I do not dispute the “its darkest just before dawn” idea, but I am curious as to what support Geithner had to suggest that things will be getting better in the near term. GDP is lower, consumer confidence is lower, unemployment is higher, debts and deficits...

Fiscal Policy: Timothy Geithner thinks tax hikes will help the economy dig its way out of the hole. Can we really afford two more years of this kind of thinking? Appearing Sunday on ABC News' "This Week," the secretary of the treasury said he had no problem with letting tax cuts expire for wealthy Americans. "It's responsible to let the tax cuts expire that just go to 2% to 3% of Americans, the highest-earning Americans." Responsible? Quite the contrary. Indeed, letting taxes rise on the most productive Americans is the most irresponsible thing our government could be doing right now....

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Sunday disputed claims that allowing a portion of the Bush tax cuts to expire will choke economic growth, saying the government needs to do the "responsible" thing and show the world it is capable of tackling the deficit

<p>BOSTON (AP) — Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry is docking his family's new $7 million yacht in neighboring Rhode Island, allowing him to avoid paying roughly $500,000 in taxes to his cash-strapped home state.</p> <p>If the Isabel were kept at the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee's summer vacation home on Nantucket or in Boston Harbor near his city residence, he would be liable for $437,500 in one-time sales tax. He would also have to pay $70,000 in annual excise taxes.</p>

Treasury Secretary Says Letting Bush Tax Cuts for Rich Expire Will Not Slow Economic Growth July 24, 2010 6:00 PM In an exclusive interview on ABC News’ "This Week" to air Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner said the White House would push to let the Bush tax cuts expire for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and families making more than $250,000, but keep them for middle and lower income Americans. “We think that's the responsible thing to do,” Geithner said, “because we need to make sure we can show the world that they're willing as a...

Does Barack Obama have a learning disability (LD)? It seems like an outlandish question to ask, but the actions of President Obama suggest that he may suffer from one. Consider: Learning Learning is "the cognitive process of acquiring skill or knowledge." Intelligence is defined as capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc. or 1 a (1) : the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason; also :the skilled use of reason (2) : the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate...

Following comments from Senate Democrats expressing willingness to extend Bush tax cuts, the White House dispatched Tim Geithner to kill the buzz. Tim just announced Obama's plans to let the tax cuts expire for wealthy Americans in January, according to WSJ. Which is what people expected all along. WSJ: Mr. Geithner said there is "still some uncertainty about how strong the recovery is going to be," which may be impacting spending decisions by businesses and individuals. But he discounted that as a reason to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for top earners, saying most private forecasts show moderate economic growth...

sury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Thursday said a Republican repeal of the Obama administration’s financial overhaul law is “inconceivable.” 
House and Senate Republicans over the past week have argued for a repeal of the financial bill, arguing that it represents government overreach and threatens the growth of the U.S. economy. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) was the first to call for a repeal of the regulatory changes. Republican senators, including Richard Shelby (Ala.) and John Thune (S.D.), have also called for a repeal of part or all of the law. “The reason why this bill became law was because...

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke “is a math teacher, he’s not a central banker,” former White House Budget Director David Stockman scoffs. “He is so caught up in his equations that I think he’s extremely dangerous—the worst Fed chairman we’ve ever had.” In the flat, dry accents of the Michigan farm boy he once was, Stockman tells me: “How can he believe that stimulating more credit creation and more borrowing can possibly solve the problem of a housing sector that’s drowning in debt and a federal government that’s on the edge of insolvency?… “He is the greatest enabler of Wall...

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner offered a glimmer of hope to investors who are facing huge tax increases on capital gains and dividends next January. In a CNBC interview late Wednesday, Geithner said the Obama administration still hopes to hold the top tax rate on both capital gains and dividends to 20% next year – the level the White House has been proposing since taking office. Of course, a 20% rate would represent a big increase over the current 15%. But it’s a lot better than the 39.6% top rate for dividends that congressional Democrats have signaled they were planning next...

Big changes are in store for the banking system should Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac be revamped or eliminated—both of which are being discussed by housing experts and government officials to deal with the distressed real estate market. As the system works now with the two entities, Fannie and Freddie , banks write the mortgages, but they rarely hold them. The mortgages are sold off into pools, known as mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Fannie and Freddie guarantee the mortgage payments, so that the MBS buyer, be it the Chinese government or an American pension plan, has the security of the US...