Free Republic

With the election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York, much conversation has been made of his appeal to “affordability.” As I’ve written previously, this is a noble conversation, but one that has been dishonestly framed (by Democrats and media) to date. I will use Mamdani’s comment in his acceptance speech to re-frame the debate. We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.Mamdani and the Democrat party have effectively defined a binary choice: Should government or “the market” control affordability? The Democrats are...

Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted last August that a drop in the importance of the U.S. dollar was "irreversible"—but there appears to be no sign that the global economy is turning its back on the greenback. "The U.S. Dollar was used in 48% of international payment transactions last year, the highest level in more than a decade. But Brics...," it said next to the graph, which showed the euro making 23.2 percent of transactions and the Chinese yuan way behind at 3.47 percent. "BRICS countries would like their currencies to be used in world trade, but each has a major...

On Friday’s edition of NBC’s “Now Tonight,” White House Council of Economic Advisers member Jared Bernstein argued that America’s government debt doesn’t weaken the country. Host Jake Ward asked, “For those of us at home, the idea of having debt sounds like a very, very bad thing. … What I want to ask you here is, is [Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)] right, does our debt as a nation make us weak?”

Fed Admits Failure of ‘Plan A’ to Control Money Market Rates, Shifts Back to Repos (which was ‘Plan A’ till 2008) The hullabaloo in the repo market torpedoed the function of Interest on Excess Reserves and forced the Fed to go back to the future. With its announcement this morning, the New York Fed confirmed that the Fed’s Plan A of manipulating the federal funds rate into its target range – now between 1.75% and 2.0% — has miserably failed, and that it will switch to Plan B to control short-term interest rates. But this Plan B used to...