Free Republic

Smart economists never predict the stock market. Our theory tells us that it's impossible. Leaving aside inside information, everyone already knows what we know and has traded on this old news and moved stock prices accordingly. Princeton economist Burton Malkiel popularized this point in his famous book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. The fact that only "new news," things that people don't yet know or expect, should change stock prices means that stock movements are supposed to be random — that is, unpredictable.

Renowned economist Laurence Kotlikoff recently testified at the U.S. Senate about the runaway U.S. budget. How bad is it? Kotlikoff says, “I told them the real (2014) deficit was $5 trillion, not the $500 billion or $300 billion or whatever it was announced to be this year. Almost all the liabilities of the government are being kept off the books by bogus accounting. The government is 58% underfinanced. Social Security is 33% underfinanced. So, the entire government enterprise is in worse fiscal shape than Social Security is, but they are both in terrible shape.” So, how much is America on...

Debt figures tell part of the story. When the Great Recession hit, the federal debt was equal to about 40 percent of GDP. But to fight the recession, Congress enacted an $800 billion dollar stimulus bill. Stimulus spending, combined with already enacted spending and tax policy, resulted in four years of trillion dollar deficits. As a result, the debt ballooned to 78 percent of GDP in 2013, almost twice the pre-recession level. --snip-- What's the word for our fiscal situation? Stunning? Shocking? Desperate? In recent testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, Boston University Economics Professor Laurence Kotlikoff, in effect, told...

(CNSNews.com) -- The U.S. has a $210 trillion “fiscal gap” and “may well be in worse fiscal shape than any developed country, including Greece,” Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff told members of the Senate Budget Committee in written and oral testimony on Feb. 25. “The first point I want to get across is that our nation is broke,” Kotlikoff testified. “Our nation’s broke, and it’s not broke in 75 years or 50 years or 25 years or 10 years. It’s broke today. "Indeed, it may well be in worse fiscal shape than any developed country, including Greece," he said. (See...

The United States is heading for bankruptcy, according to an extraordinary paper published by one of the key members of the country's central bank. A ballooning budget deficit and a pensions and welfare timebomb could send the economic superpower into insolvency, according to research by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, a leading constituent of the US Federal Reserve. Prof Kotlikoff said that, by some measures, the US is already bankrupt. "To paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary, is the United States at the end of its resources, exhausted, stripped bare, destitute, bereft, wanting in property,...

Our tax code is a mess for a reason. Special interests pay for special favors. And with 17,000 pages and counting, there's plenty of places for our politicians to hide the kickbacks. Meanwhile, all the exemptions, deductions, exceptions and special provisions reduce the tax base, which means higher tax rates and smaller incentives for individuals and companies to produce income. And whether the tax breaks are set in fine print or spelled out in bold type, they generally favor the rich, making our tax system less progressive than is generally believed. No tax system is perfect, but ours is so...