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House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff announced Wednesday a broad investigation his committee would undertake "beyond Russia" into whether President Donald Trump's financial interests are driving his actions. Schiff said the investigation would "allow us to investigate any credible allegation that financial interests or other interests are driving decision-making of the President or anyone in the administration." "That pertains to any credible allegations of leverage by the Russians or the Saudis or anyone else," Schiff told reporters after the House Intelligence Committee's first meeting in the new Congress. In a statement, Schiff said the investigation would include a continued probe...

On Monday’s edition of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-CA) stated Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should not resign and it seems as though there is “a slow-moving Saturday Night Massacre.” Schiff said, “Rod Rosenstein should, under no circumstances, resign. If the president intends to obstruct justice, Rosenstein should require him to be fired. He shouldn’t take a step affirmatively and essentially let the president off the hook. This looks to me like a slow-moving Saturday Night Massacre. It seems like the only question is whether these steps take place now or they take...

Last week, responding to President Obama's latest populist assault on the wealthy, I issued a commentary in which I explained why his ideas about American economic history were fundamentally flawed. As dangerous and erroneous as those views are, at least I can cut the President some slack for commenting on a subject in which he really has no basis for expertise. Hailing from academia and local community organizing, Barack Obama likely did not spend huge amounts of time boning up on economic history. However, there are other subjects where he should find firmer footing. Constitutional law certainly comes to mind....

For most of his time as a national political figure, Barack Obama has been careful to cloak his core socialist leanings behind a veil of pro-capitalist rhetoric. This makes strategic sense, as Americans still largely identify as pro-capitalist. However, based on his recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the President appears to have reassessed the political landscape in advance of the 2012 elections. Based on the growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the recent defeat of Republicans in special elections, he has perhaps sensed a surge of left-leaning sentiment; and, as a result, he finally dropped the pretense. According...

Last week, I spent the afternoon visiting the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in lower Manhattan. I brought a film crew and a sign that said "I Am The 1%, Let's Talk." The purpose was to understand what was motivating these protesters and try to educate them about what caused the financial crisis. I went down there with the feeling that much of their anger was justified, but broadly misdirected. Indeed, there were plenty of heated discussions. I did little more than ask how much of my earnings I should be allowed to keep. In return, I was called an idiot,...

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ranking member, and all distinguished members of this panel. Thank you for inviting me here today to offer my opinions as to how the government can help the American economy recover from the worst crisis in living memory. Despite the understandable human tendency to help others, government spending cannot be a net creator of jobs. Indeed many efforts currently under consideration by the Administration and Congress will actively destroy jobs. These initiatives must stop. While it is easy to see how a deficit-financed government program can lead to the creation of a specific job, it is much...

A recent article by the best-known Keynesian economist at Yale, Robert Schiller, begins this way: [A] … fact … about our current economic situation … can no longer be denied: our economy is in desperate need of government stimulus. Does the rest of the article provide a defense of stimulus? No. Since the need for stimulus is undeniable, there is no need to defend it. No reasonable person would disagree. Right? Wrong. There is a problem here. Reasonable people do disagree, strongly disagree. Robert Barro, the distinguished Harvard economist, wrote an article about the same time as Schiller's explaining why...

This morning many on Wall Street were stunned by the big fat zero put up by the August jobs report, the worst showing in 11 months. The data convinced many previously optimistic economists that the United States will slip back into recession. I believe that we have been in one giant recession all along that was only temporarily interrupted by trillions of useless and destructive deficit and stimulus spending. Unfortunately, the August numbers will increase the talk of government efforts to stimulate the economy. But while President Obama prepares to unveil a new plan for the Federal Government to create...

The New York Times recently ran an "analysis" article entitled, "Debt Problem's Sure Cure: Economic Growth." This is something that falls into the category of "Gee, why didn't I think of that?" All you need is growth, so let's go get us some growth! That will take care of everything! Journalist Catherine Rampell asserts, There is, in theory, a happy solution to our debt troubles. It's called economic growth. No need to raise taxes or cut programs. Just get the economy growing the way it used to. Rampell admits that this is a dicey proposition. She holds to the belief...

This week's wild actions on Wall Street should serve as a stark reminder that few investors have any clue as to what is really going on beneath the surface of America's troubled economy. But this week did bring startling clarity on at least one front. In its August policy statement the Federal Reserve took the highly unusual step of putting a specific time frame for the continuation of its near zero interest rate policy. Moving past the previously uncertain pronouncements that they would "keep interest rates low for an extended period," the Fed now tells us that rates will not...

By supposedly compromising to raise the debt ceiling, Congress and the President have now paved the way for ever higher levels of federal spending. Although, the nation was spared the trauma of borrowing restrictions, the actual risk of default existed solely in the minds of Washington politicians. But the real crisis is not, nor has it ever been, the debt ceiling. The crisis is the debt itself. Economic Armageddon would not have resulted from failure to raise the ceiling, but it will come because we succeeded in raising it. This outcome falls along the lines that I had forecast (See...

Until recent centuries, the Chinese people were disconnected from places in the world such as Europe and Africa. China was either unknown or considered very distant from Europe and Africa; few ships attempted to explore that far. Most Chinese people were not familiar with Western civilization, just as few in the West were familiar with Chinese civilization. In fact, the word "China" in Chinese is Zhong Guo, meaning "center" (Zhong) and "nation/land" (Guo). Chinese people believed that their land was the center of the world, not out of arrogance, but rather out of unawareness of the rest of the world....

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court unanimously threw out a massive class-action sexual-discrimination lawsuit against Walmart. By overruling a lower court's decision, the Supreme Court raised the barrier to future legal challenges against large corporations. As might be expected, probusiness outlets defended the ruling, while advocates for women and minorities lamented it. In the present article I won't discuss the specific legalities of the case, as I'm not a lawyer. Rather, I will argue that standard libertarian theory says that there should be no such things as laws against "discrimination," because they are illegitimate infringements on property rights. Furthermore, in...

With Friday's dismal jobs report — showing a paltry 54,000 increase in nonfarm payroll employment in May — more and more analysts are realizing that the so-called economic "recovery" is stalling. As Jeffrey Tucker recently pointed out in an important article, Austrians realize that the recession never left. This has all been smoke and mirrors for the last two years. As John Papola and Russ Roberts's latest video underscores, the classic confrontation is still between the Austrians and the Keynesians. These contrasting visions are still the primary choice when the average person tries to understand why the economy seems broken,...

In a recent screed masquerading as the thoughts of a Nobel prize winner in economics, Paul Krugman excoriates those who speak of fear: fear of a debt crisis, of runaway inflation, of a disastrous plunge in the dollar. Scare stories are very much on politicians' minds. As Krugman explains, such worries are irrational and certainly untrue: None of these scare stories reflect anything that is actually happening, or is likely to happen. And while the threats are imaginary, fear of these imaginary threats has real consequences: an absence of any action to deal with the real crisis, the suffering now...

A recent discussion regarding commodity prices on CNBC consisted virtually of sentence-by-sentence errors with respect to macroeconomic theory. Most of the misstatements involve either accidentally or intentionally — I don't know which — attributing economic and financial market events to various incorrect or misleading cause-and-effect scenarios, when the real explanation is simply the government's creation of money and credit. Regrettably, these errors are not restricted to the CNBC commentators and guests in the segment in question, but in fact are characteristic of economic misunderstanding generally. Therefore, I offer the following as a step-by-step clarification of these issues, so that readers...

Parents probably dream of sending their kid to the University of Chicago. Next to the Ivy League or Stanford, the Chicago school is near the top of the heap. Only 27 percent of applicants are admitted. To be among the roughly 15,000 means prestige and an education to build a lifetime on. The cost for tuition and fees: $39,381. Room and board is another $12,000 or so. Add books and other stuff, and the total Chicago-school experience costs $54,290 a year. Students learn from the likes of University of Chicago economics professor Casey B. Mulligan, who believes what the economy...

You can chart the course of human progress in terms of how clean our clothing is. In early times people used animal skins, had no change of clothing, and had no soap. By Adam Smith's day soap had improved in quality, was produced industrially, and was becoming available to the common man. In fact, the Industrial Revolution, which is usually discussed in terms of iron, steam, and factories, was actually all about bringing products like soap and underwear — previously only available to the rich — to the common peasants. Only after WWII did electric automatic clothes washers displace hand-cranked...

As the recession has deepened and the financial debacle has passed from one flare-up to another during the past year and a half, commentary on the economy's troubles has swelled tremendously. Pundits have pontificated; journalists and editors have reported and opined; talk radio jocks have huffed and puffed; public officials have spewed out even more double-talk than usual; awkward academic experts, caught in the camera's glare like deer in the headlights, have blinked and stumbled through their brief stints as talking heads on TV. We have been deluged by an enormous outpouring of diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription, at least 95...

The only thing more ridiculous than S&P's too little too late semi-downgrade of U.S. sovereign debt was the market's severe reaction to the announcement. Has S&P really added anything to the debate that wasn't already widely known? In any event, S&P's statement amounts to a wake up call to anyone who has somehow managed to sleepwalk through the unprecedented debt explosion of the last few years. Given S&P's concerns that Congress will fail to address its long-term fiscal problems, on what basis can it conclude that the U.S. deserves its AAA credit rating? The highest possible rating should be reserved...