Free Republic

Recessions and stock market crashes are inevitable in a market-based economy, but few Americans realize that their investments face risks far greater than falling stock prices. Because of largely unknown legal changes, millions of Americans could temporarily or even permanently lose their retirement and other investment savings in the next major financial crash, all while too-big-to-fail Wall Street firms and banks are protected. That might sound like a wild conspiracy theory, but the danger is real and well documented. How Wall Street centralized ownership of your investments Beginning in the 1970s, at the request of powerful Wall Street and banking...

Why the artificial-intelligence advertising spree could be the last hurrah - like the dot-coms in 2000 OpenAI and Anthropic are losing enormous amounts of money, yet are given valuations as if they were real companies making real profits. During Super Bowl XXXIV on Jan. 30, 2000, 14 of the 61 television advertisements were for internet startups. Perhaps they should have heeded the advice offered by E-Trade's "Waste of Money" ad that year, which featured a dancing monkey and ended with the on-screen punchline: "Well, we just wasted $2,000,000. What are you doing with your money?" That Super Bowl was played...

Historians never tire of analyzing the fall of Rome. There were many causes, but an oft-neglected one is the corruption of the Roman family and the related population collapse that occurred in the centuries before the empire’s fall. Rome’s original greatness depended in part on its commitment to family. A classic Roman virtue extolled in the quintessential Roman poem the “Aeneid,”—was “pietas” or “piety.” This term referred to deep devotedness to one’s family, particularly one’s parents, as well as gods and country. Early Romans valued marriage, fidelity, honor, and looked down on self-indulgence. Their successes must be attributed, at least...

On June 8, 1967, the Israeli military machine-gunned, bombed and torpedoed the U.S.S. Liberty, an American vessel floating off the Sinai Peninsula, killing 34 service members. Those facts are not in dispute. But almost everything else about the attack is driving a wedge through the MAGA movement. On one side are prominent voices like the podcaster Ben Shapiro, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Rich Lowry, editor in chief of The National Review. They insist the attack on the Liberty was a tragic case of mistaken identity amid the chaos of the Six-Day War, a conclusion shared by a U.S....

Peter Schiff: ‘The dollar is going to collapse, the dollar is going to be replaced by Gold. We are headed for an economic crisis that will make the 2008 financial crisis seem like a Sunday school picnic.’

The sudden collapse last fall of a string of American companies backed by private credit has thrust a fast-growing and opaque corner of Wall Street lending into the spotlight. Private credit, also known as direct lending, is a catch-all term for lending done by nonbank institutions. The practice has been around for decades but surged in popularity after post-2008 financial crisis regulations discouraged banks from serving riskier borrowers. That growth — from $3.4 trillion in 2025 to an estimated $4.9 trillion by 2029 — and the September bankruptcies of auto-industry firms Tricolor and First Brands have emboldened some prominent Wall...

RAY DALIO SAYS THE MONETARY ORDER IS BREAKING DOWN AND FIAT IS NO LONGER A CENTRAL BANK ASSET. GOLD AND SILVER BECOME THE ANCHOR WHEN PAPER CONFIDENCE CRACKS.

President Trump has complained to aides repeatedly in recent weeks about Attorney General Pam Bondi, describing her as weak and an ineffective enforcer of his agenda, administration officials and other people familiar with his complaints said. The criticisms appear to be part of an intense campaign by Trump to pressure the Justice Department to more aggressively pursue his priorities, some of the officials said. Trump has previously criticized Bondi at times but his vocal concerns about his attorney general have grown more frequent in recent months, officials said. This month, Trump has talked with allies about how he could appoint...

Never-before-seen high-definition footage of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe has surfaced in a recent interview between an American conservationist and podcaster Lex Fridman. Author Paul Rosolie has spent two decades working in the Amazon and says the moment was one of the most profound experiences he’s ever had. “In order for any of this to make sense, I had to show you this footage … This has not been shown ever before. This is a world first,” he told Fridman.

The gold price is racing from one all-time high to the next. That’s good news for friends of the precious metal and bad news for anyone still hoping for a stabilization of global debt dynamics. Assuming the markets close out the year without major volatility, gold holders can look forward to an approximate 70 percent increase in value within a single year. This is remarkable -- not least because 2024 already ended with a 26 percent gain for the otherwise conservative asset class of precious metals. That amounts to a doubling of value in just two years -- a surge...

Geopolitics, diversification, and Fed easing contribute to the U.S. dollar’s downward pressures.While the so-called Santa Claus rally delivered year-end gains for stocks and precious metals, the U.S. dollar received a lump of coal to finish a not particularly strong 2025. The U.S. dollar index, a measure of the greenback against a weighted basket of currencies, is on track for its largest annual decline since 2003. This year, the index has dropped 10 percent, with nearly all of the damage occurring in the first half of 2025, when it tanked almost 11 percent. The alternative trade-weighted dollar index—a measure created by...

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign on Monday, accusing him of engaging in the cover-up of the Qatargate affair, which Bennett called “the most serious act of treason in Israeli history.” The statement from Bennett, who is running against Netanyahu in next year’s election, follows new revelations about the scandal. The affair involves allegations that top aides to the prime minister were acting as paid lobbyists for Qatar, where Hamas’s leadership is based, while simultaneously working for Netanyahu. On Sunday, i24 News reported that communication between the suspects showed they had fabricated information,...

Epstein Island was just a sideshow, what this really was about was financing Covert Ops during the 1980's and 90's This is it. The key to Epstein: Bear Stearns put him on BCCI trades in 1979, when it made millions helping the CIA, Brits, Saudis & Israelis disguise covert cash by clearing $13 billion with BCCI, a CIA money laundering bank. Epstein simply developed that clientele & career niche. The rest is history.

John Stossel interviews James Lindsay, famous for fighting wokeness on the left. Lindsay is vigorously investigating wokeness on the right, mostly but not limited to those following the ideas of Nick Fuentes. ---- A new section of the right is foolishly bashing liberty … and even embracing Marxist ideas. That's why some call them the "woke right."

When the U.S. dollar loses its monopoly on pricing the world’s critical resources, Americans’ purchasing power weakens The dollar losing monopoly power is a slow leak, not a blowout. But slow leaks still leave you flat. If the 21st century runs on anything besides oil, it runs on African rocks.

A team of Italian scientists took the world by storm last March when they announced the discovery of a colossal underground complex plunging nearly 3,500 feet beneath Egypt's Giza Plateau and linking chambers the size of city blocks. Now Filippo Biondi, the radar engineer who developed the imaging method, has gone public with evidence that he said leaves little room for doubt.In a new interview on Jesse Michels' American Alchemy podcast, Biondi revealed that four independent satellite operators, Umbra, Capella Space, ICEYE and Italy's Cosmo-SkyMed, all returned identical raw tomography data showing the same structures.>>>Each shaft has a central column...

S.3218 - A bill to provide for the first credible audit of gold owned by the United States in decades, to upgrade the purity of gold to meet global market standards, and to conduct subsequent audits every 5 years. Summary: S.3218 — 119th Congress (2025-2026)

Ukraine will be forced to cut the size of its army under a peace deal agreed between Donald Trump and Russia.The US president has been working with Moscow on a secret 28-point proposal inspired by the ceasefire agreement in Gaza.The White House has told Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, that he must accept the terms of the plan, which will require his country to cede territory, give up some weapons and trim its armed forces, sources have said.The terms of the deal represent a major concession to Russia and have raised fears that Ukraine is being frozen out of talks...

They Designed a System You Can Never EscapeWatch here Every country on earth is in debt. The US owes $38 trillion. The planet owes $315 trillion. But if everyone owes money, who is owed? The answer will change how you see the entire financial system. WHY WATCH THIS VIDEO: (15 Mins) This video reveals the documented history of how four bankers across three centuries engineered a system where debt can never be repaid. You'll discover: ✓ How William Paterson's 1694 Bank of England charter made government debt permanent for the first time in history ✓ Why Nathan Rothschild's bond market...

No one uses “Malthusian” as a compliment. Since 1798, when the economist and cleric Thomas Malthus first published “An Essay on the Principles of Population,” the “Malthusian” position – the idea that humans are subject to natural limits – has been vilified and scorned. Today, the term is lobbed at anyone who dares question the optimism of infinite progress. Unfortunately, almost everything most people think they know about Malthus is wrong. The story goes like this: Once upon a time, an English country parson came up with the idea that population increases at a “geometrical” rate, while food production increases...