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Stefan Halper's story of Flynn trip with Russian woman deemed 'not plausible … not accurate.' Five days before the FBI formally opened the Michael Flynn probe in summer 2016, a confidential informant alleged to agents that Donald Trump's national security adviser had left a 2014 foreign meeting alone with a Russian woman. Agents ultimately deemed the account "not plausible" and "not accurate" but proceeded to investigate Flynn anyway, newly declassified documents show. FBI confidential human source (CHS) reports show Stefan Halper, an academic who long worked for the bureau as a trusted informant, was the original source of a story...

Bernake: If declines in the dollar and increases in commodity prices were creating upward pressures on consumer prices and causing expectations of future inflation to rise, those developments would be taken extremely seriously by the Committee and would have to be balanced against the high rate of unemployment that you posit in your hypothetical. Luskin: This is no hypothetical -- it's happening right now. We have a 10% unemployment rate, the dollar is falling, gold is a week or two off all-time highs, and oil prices have more than doubled this year. So why is the Fed running the easiest...

I've written several columns over the last couple months about the attempts by Obama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress to impose nationalized health-care insurance -- so-called "Obamacare." I've said it's bad for corporate profits, bad for the stock market, bad for the economy -- and even bad for people seeking quality health care. I've never had such a huge volume of reader response to anything I've written here, and never so polarized. To half of you, I'm a messiah. To the other half, I'm a pariah. So I was glad to find support in this perilous position from one of...

So let me do the preachers of Armageddon one better. Today's stock market isn't just the “worst since the Great Depression,” like they're so fond of saying. No, it's even worse than the Great Depression. Take a look at the chart, below. It shows the daily progress of the S&P 500 in terms of percentage change from the very top. The brown line is the change from the recent all-time highs on October 9, 2007. The blue line is the change from the all-time highs just before the Great Depression, September 6, 1929. As of yesterday's close (Thursday, March 5),...

Yesterday's Politico story puts it this way: Generally, financial analysts say the stock market likes Republicans more than Democrats. And while predicting market movements is as difficult as predicting the winner of the World Series in August, some experts say the market is already anticipating an Obama win on Nov. 4 and has at least partially accounted for it. “Potentially, you could see a one or two-day rally on a McCain victory, and not much of a reaction if Obama wins, because that’s what’s expected at this point,” said Justin Fishkin, a partner at The Cypress Group, a financial services...

Thank God. A crash landing on the way from New York to Charlotte, N.C., and, miraculously, no one is killed. I'm not talking about US Airways flight 1549, forced to ditch in the Hudson River Thursday, after its engines were apparently knocked out by a flock of geese. I'm talking about the purchase of New York's Merrill Lynch by Charlotte's Bank of America (BAC: 7.18, -1.14, -13.70%). The giant bank has been dangerously destabilized by billions of dollars of unexpected losses from the troubled investment firm. In both cases, a crash. In both cases, an improvised rescue. In both cases,...

Fiscal Policy: President-elect Obama says he's modeling his recovery plan on Clintonomics because it pulled the economy out of a ditch last decade. But that's an old myth — and a dangerous one at that."I've got an economic plan similar to Bill Clinton's," Obama has said, including tax hikes on the rich and Keynesian pump-priming, among other new government spending. He rationalizes that Clinton raised taxes during a recession, and look what happened — average wages went up, along with economic growth and the stock market. And eventually the Treasury reported surpluses after decades of deficits. Obama is even recycling...

How botched bailouts doomed companies that didn't need to fail The road to hell is paved with bad interventions. This year’s emergency sallies into the banking system by the Fed, the Treasury, the FDIC, and the SEC have backfired. They were intended to ameliorate a credit crisis and to keep it from spreading. Instead they’ve inflamed the crisis into an outright panic that now has spread around the world and triggered a recession. Conservatives may rightly object to all this government meddling in private markets on general principle. But the more salient objection is that government has botched it. The...

<p>Last week, Barack Obama revealed his plan to shore up Social Security's shaky finances by raising the income level on which the payroll tax is applied. Currently, incomes above $102,000 are exempt, with that threshold rising every year indexed to wage inflation. Mr. Obama would keep that limit in place, but then assess payroll taxes on incomes above $250,000, which his campaign claims would apply to only the richest 3% of Americans.</p>

IT SEEMS THAT the world is beginning to come around to my point of view, that the credit crisis has been averted and the economy is not going to weaken enough to deserve to be called a "recession." Several speeches this week by Federal Reserve officials have talked about the credit crisis very much in the past tense. The Fed finally came up with new liquidity facilities that were effective at easing the crisis — after nine months of flailing, doing everything wrong and nothing right. This after years of keeping interest rates too low, and triggering the cycle of...

GOLD $1,000! By the time you read this, that prediction — which I've made many times in this column — may have come true. It traded as high as $975 Thursday, a new record. A move up to $1,000 is actually a modest gain from there. If it doesn't happen today, it will happen next week. If not next week, then next month. It's destiny. The forces that have propelled gold from its bottom around $250 in 2001 are still in play, perhaps more than ever. When any investment hits a big, round, long-awaited, highly visible price target like gold...

I'LL NEVER CEASE to be amazed by Warren Buffett. No, not by his wealth. Not by his investment acumen. And not by his folksy wisdom. I'm amazed at the shameless greed of the man, and the fact that despite it, the media continues to treat him like a saint. Don't get me wrong. I firmly believe that as Gordon Gekko said, "greed, for lack of a better word, is good." But as I recall the villain of Oliver Stone's movie "Wall Street," Gekko didn't expect people to love him for his predatory ways. I have no idea what Buffett expects,...

Donald Luskin informed us today that he is stepping down as an economic advisor to Ron Paul and signing on to the John McCain campaign.

Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul sounds radical when he advocates the elimination of the individual income tax, a return to a gold standard, the wholesale downsizing of the federal government, and the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve. The media and the other presidential candidates treat him as a nut. Indeed, Paul often enough opens himself up to that treatment in the flamboyant way he expresses himself. Sometimes he even seems to relish his image as a gadfly on the political fringe. But it’s time to start taking the ten-term Texas congressman seriously. He came in...

FOR YEARS, AS the economy has boomed, the permabears have said recession is just around the corner. They've been wrong. Now there's a little bit of evidence of an economic slowdown, and those same bears are declaring victory — they're saying the recession is right here, right now. We shouldn't be too surprised at a bit of a slowdown here. After all, despite the housing downturn, 2007 was a high-growth year by and large. It wouldn't be out of pattern to have to give back a little for a couple quarters just in the normal cycle of things. And with...

If I were a writer of articles, I would never make "Spur" part of the headline - but that's just me...

THE VULTURES ARE circling. And that's a good thing. On Wall Street, vultures don't go after dead things. They go after things that are alive and very cheap. And right now, they're going after troubled financial stocks in a big way, which means it's time to move in. I was way too early when I said in this column on Oct. 26 that it was time for bottom-fishing in the financial sector. Those stocks are off about 6% since I said that. But now it's time. The vultures have arrived. Investing billions of dollars, they're taking large equity stakes in...

THE BOTTOM IS IN. Yes, I know I've been too early in saying to buy stocks during the correction from the October highs. But all the classic signals of a durable bottom are in place now. Let me count the ways. One. The sell-off last Monday was a classic panic. It was the kind of emotional climax you need to see before you can be sure that everyone who is going to sell has sold. Two. Despite the panic, stocks didn't make new lows against the August bottom. Yet the news background has substantively gotten worse, with evidence of large...

SHOULD WE BE worried about the U.S. dollar falling to all-time lows vs. foreign currencies? Does it matter to investors? Yes it matters, and yes you should be worried — but not for the reasons that you may think. First, let's get all the wrong reasons out of the way. One reason you hear all the time is that the U.S. is growing slower than the rest of the world, so global investors want to move out of dollars and into the currencies of countries that are growing faster. Fine — China and some other emerging markets are growing faster....

QUESTION: IN ALL history, on how many days was the price of gold higher than it was just yesterday? The answer is four. To be sure, on one of those four incredible days — which all occurred in January 1980 — gold closed at $850 an ounce, a substantial 13% higher than yesterday's price of $747.40. So I suppose we could say that gold is still a long way from its all-time high. But be patient. Gold is already up almost $47 an ounce from when I said in a September column that is was headed for $2,000. And back...