Free Republic

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that the U.S. is facing a catastrophic debt crisis if lawmakers fail to raise the borrowing limit, saying the country would face a spiraling recession. “It would be devastating,” Yellen said to Axios in an interview from Johannesburg, South Africa. “It’s a catastrophe.” “Of course, it makes me nervous,” she added The U.S. reached its technical borrowing limit of around $31.4 trillion earlier this month, but Yellen has been able to enact accounting moves that will allow the federal government to pay its bills until sometime in June. Before then, lawmakers must agree to lift...

Newly-minted US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy faces a daunting task: trying to avoid a US debt default. As I have discussed many times before, nothing has been the same since the US housing bubble and near-collapse of the banking system that produced an expensive bailout of seemingly all financial institutions. After 2008, Federal spending has gone out of control. The budgetary hawks (or pigeons) in the US House of Representatives (with Pelosi, Boehner, Ryan then Pelosi again) went on Federal spending sprees of epic proportions. The Manhattan Institute has a nice chart showing the explosion in the Federal budget since...

The Federal Reserve is widely expected to raise its benchmark interest rate by 0.75 percentage point at its meeting that concludes Wednesday. Other items markets will be watching include quarterly economic and rate projections and Chairman Jerome Powell’s post-meeting news conference. Judging by recent market action and commentary, the expectation is for a hawkish hard line. There’s not a lot of mystery surrounding Wednesday’s Federal Reserve meeting, with markets widely expecting the central bank to approve its third consecutive three-quarter point interest rate hike. That doesn’t mean there isn’t considerable intrigue, though. While the Fed almost certainly will deliver what...

Representative Tim Ryan (D-OH), running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that the “exhausted majority” needed to “kill and confront” the extremist Republican movement. Co-host Willie Geist said, “What is your message to Ohio Republicans in this general election who may look at J.D. Vance and say I don’t like the way he’s running the campaign, maybe I don’t like the guy, and they’re giving you a look?”

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell delivered a stern commitment Friday to halting inflation, warning that he expects the central bank to continue raising interest rates in a way that will cause “some pain” to the U.S. economy. In his much-anticipated annual policy speech at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Powell affirmed that the Fed will “use our tools forcefully” to attack inflation that is still running near its highest level in more than 40 years. Even with a series of four consecutive interest rate increases totaling 2.25 percentage points, Powell said this is “no place to stop or pause” even though benchmark...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - With the recent slowdown in inflation, the Federal Reserve is faced with a conundrum ahead of a plan next month to double the rate at which it is shrinking its massive $8.9 trillion balance sheet. The move to accelerate quantitative tightening (QT), as it’s referred to, is meant to further drain pandemic-era stimulus from the financial system and increase borrowing rates for long-dated assets to weaken inflation. But that is taking place as the U.S. central bank pushes ahead with interest rate hikes to tame stubbornly high inflation, which is currently running at more than three...

Trump, who’s repeatedly flirted with making another presidential run in 2024 to try and return to the White House, captured 70% of ballots cast in the anonymous straw poll, according to results announced by CPAC on Sunday afternoon. That's a boost from the 55% support he won in the hypothetical 2024 Republican primary matchup straw poll at CPAC Orlando in late February.

"the number one humble/brag is...those darn posts about beauty and vanity"

Michael Savage is one of the greatest American radio commentators, and he is one of the top people in the country who got Trump elected. And yet, Savage is also one of the few with the courage to criticize Trump when ( in Savage's eyes ) Trump is backing off of his promises or taking us down a questionable or wrong road. As you probably know, for 8 years Savage has been banned by the UK government from traveling to the UK. Savage is grouped with other people being banned such murderers, rapists, and Islamic terrorists -- and high insult...