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California lawmakers and union leaders have reached a tentative deal to raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next several years, the Los Angeles Times reports. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) is expected to make the formal announcement as early as Monday. According to the L.A. Times, the minimum wage will jump from $10 to $10.50 an hour in 2017 and will increase by $1 every year after that until reaching $15 an hour in 2022. Business with fewer than 25 employees will have an extra year to comply. "The governor and stakeholders have all been negotiating...

I have always known in my gut that the 2008 recession was deliberately caused by the democRATS as an election year strategy. They learned in 1992 that a bad economy was enough to get a democRAT elected to replace a republican incumbent. In 2006, the democRATS took control of Congress and began to put this strategy into action. However, a quick look into the history of the 2 bills I had previously suspected to be the root cause (Sarbanes/Oxley and Frank/Dodd) shows that one was passed in 2002 and the other in 2010, so neither one of those directly precipitated...

Inequality has risen. Jobs are going overseas. The more the stock market rises, the more the working class feels crushed by globalization. And all of this has occurred exactly as Democrats have engineered it. Stuff happens, they say. The truth hurts. Take it from Larry Summers, once one of President Obama's leading economic advisers: "One of the challenges in our society is that the truth is kind of an equalizer," Summers reportedly said in a candid moment in 2009. "One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to...

Warren Buffett bemoaned the “negative drumbeat” on the U.S. economy from presidential candidates in his annual Berkshire Hathaway Inc shareholder letter on Saturday, saying they are misleading Americans into believing their children will be worse off than they are. “It’s an election year, and candidates can’t stop speaking about our country’s problems (which, of course, only they can solve),” Buffett wrote, italicizing “they” for emphasis. As a result of their dour outlook on the U.S. economy, many Americans now believe that their children will not live as prosperously as they themselves do, the 85-year-old Buffett said. “That view is dead...

After a series of stunning declines through the month of January and the first half of February, global financial markets seem to have found a patch of relative stability at least for the moment. But that does not mean that the crisis is over. On the contrary, all of the hard economic numbers that are coming in from around the world tell us that the global economy is coming apart at the seams. This is especially true when you look at global trade numbers. The amount of stuff that is being bought, sold and shipped around the planet is falling...

So the S&P 500 is out of correction for now and the coast is clear. NOT! This is exactly what we've been predicting would happen – after reaching new lows, stocks would have to bounce before they inevitably resume their longer-term trend, which is down. But stocks haven't been the only victims of late. Just a couple weeks ago the January nonfarm payroll report came in at 151,000 jobs. So much for the expected 190,000! And of the ones reported, they were mostly low-wage jobs. Pile that on top of the disappointing Christmas and retail sales in December. Not to...

Remember Obama phones? Now it's Obama loans. The Obama administration is trying to muscle in on the small-dollar loan market, in part by muscling out the online lending industry. It is ordering banks to go against the advice of their regulators and step up small-dollar lending to economically disadvantaged customers. It's toying with the idea of offering banking services, including consumer loans, through the Postal Service. And this week we learned the Treasury Department is asking for $10 million to provide small loans to people with questionable credit through community development organizations. It's ACORN going into the payday loan business....

A heated argument erupted Thursday at a hearing on the IRS, with Democrats and Republicans trading charges about the work of the Oversight Committee. Two Democrats on the panel accused their GOP colleagues of repeatedly holding hearings on the IRS for political reasons. In his opening statement, Oversight Committee ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) complained that the hearing was the 23rd held about the IRS in recent years. "Unfortunately, Republicans have become obsessed with investigating any and every allegation relating to the IRS, no matter how small," he said. He said Republicans are frustrated that they have never found...

The headline you'll read is that the Rubio plan cuts taxes by $6.8 trillion over a decade. This needs to be put in the context of the $42 trillion of revenue the federal government is projected to collect over the next ten years. So it's a big score, but it's not so big when compared to the larger tax revenue picture. Rarely are these two numbers associated, as they always should be. Needless to say, they are not in the TPC report. TPC themselves admit that they lack the capacity to do a macroeconomic analysis of the plan. In other...

U.S. stocks tumbled Monday morning to their lowest level in 22 months as a fresh drop in oil prices amid continuing fears of economic slowdown pushed investors to the perceived safety of government bonds and gold. "Is the market throwing out the baby with the bath water?"said James Meyer, chief investment officer at Tower Bridge Advisors, referring to the "rapid fall in prices for the high flying tech and biotech names that have been leading the market for the past 12 months." "The former leaders of the previous bull cycle are the ones that get taken to the woodshed in...

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., charged the Obama administration with quietly signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement in New Zealand, and said the White House tried to minimize it because it knows the public isn't pleased with the deal.

President Obama on Friday compared his work to keep the U.S. economy churning to the extra effort he has to put into his physical workouts as he ages. We should feel good about the progress we've made, understanding that we have still got more work to do, Obama said Friday while speaking about news that unemployment in January dropped below 5 percent for the first time in eight years. It's sort of like … Im 54 now, so I have to work out harder to stay in shape, and, you know, if I'm feeling good in the gym, I want...

Wall Street stocks ended sharply lower Tuesday as investors unloaded energy and financial stocks amid a selloff in crude-oil futures, which settled below $30 a barrel. The downdraft in energy shares and banks offset strong gains in Google parent Alphabet Inc.-which officially surpassed Apple Inc. to become the most valuable company in the world-toy maker Mattel, and fashion retailer Michael Kors. A fresh 5.5% slump in oil prices following a 6% slide Monday, weighed on energy companies' stocks. The energy sector had the worst performance of the S&P 500's 10 sectors, down 3.3%, followed by financials, declining 2.6%.

Major retailers in the United States are shutting down hundreds of stores, and shoppers are reporting alarmingly bare shelves in many retail locations that are still open all over the country. It appears that the retail apocalypse that made so many headlines in 2015 has gone to an entirely new level as we enter 2016. As economic activity slows down and Internet retailers capture more of the market, brick and mortar retailers are cutting their losses. This is especially true in areas that are on the lower portion of the income scale. In impoverished urban centers all over the nation,...

A minimum wage of $12.55 an hour in Oakland, Calif., may be the culprit for a Wal-Mart store's closure. Wal-Mart announced Jan. 15 it will close 269 stores globally, including 154 locations in the United States-affecting about 10,000 associates across the nation... snip Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, a Democrat, has been leading statewide efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15. "This higher city minimum wage eliminated the jobs of the very workers advocates wanted to help," said James Sherk, a research fellow in labor economics at The Heritage Foundation... snip The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that most...

U.S. stocks moved back into the red Wednesday after the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged and said "economic growth slowed" since its last meeting in December. "Inflation is expected to remain low in the near term," the Fed said in new, more cautious language, that suggests the central bank won't be quick to raise interest rates again. "Lower oil prices and weak global economic growth would make the Fed more cautious about its tightening policy. The second interest rate increase in March has become unlikely," said Jia Liu, research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research in emailed...

Oil prices have broken below $35 per barrel. Job losses in the industry are already over 100,000 and still climbing. Yet, no word from the Obama administration about a potential bailout of this important sector of the American economy. Why were Chrysler and GM bailed out while the oil industry is left to suffer a financial reset at least as sharp as what the automakers went through in 2008-2010? The answer lies not in economics, but politics, specifically union politics. Economically, of course, there are benefits to the fall in oil prices. Because the U.S. is a net importer of...

Reflections on the last State of the Union Address from Barack Hussein Obama… The modern Democratic Party has made no secret of the fact that they detest the free market. No, not dislike, not disrespect, not even misunderstand... they detest the free market. From Secretary Hillary Clinton haughtily declaring to Senator Bernie Sanders famously declaring that 23 brands of deodorant are … the leading lights of the modern Democratic Party are dim bulbs indeed, when it comes to economics. They proudly refuse to understand the subject, and they set themselves up as superior to its realities. It has long been...

There's a pall over the financial markets this holiday season, and it has little to do with the shortage of daylight this time of year. The lifeblood of the street -- bonuses -- will be cut, and if you survive, there's no guarantee of a better 2016. That's because Wall Street is bracing for merciless job losses that could total 100,000 in the US alone by June. By this estimate, Wall Street head count in New York City -- some 170,000 today -- could shrink by as much as 17,000, with the downsizing hitting everyone from million-dollar backers to middle-class...

The stock market currently is even more overvalued than it was at the bull market peaks of both March 2000 and October 2007 -- according to not just one, but two, valuation measures. That at least is the message of an analysis released earlier this week by Ned Davis Research, the quantitative research firm. What caught my eye in the firm's analysis was that, unlike virtually all others that conclude that stocks are overvalued, this one was not based on the so-called Shiller P/E -- the cyclically-adjusted P/E ratio championed by Nobel laureate Robert Shiller of Yale University. That's noteworthy,...