Free Republic

For the first time since B.C. Forbes launched his namesake magazine 93 years ago, there will be no members of the founding family involved in the day-day operations of the corporation. The reigning Forbes family scions -- Chairman and CEO Steve Forbes and Chief Operating Officer Tim Forbes -- are exiting management of Forbes Media and turning the firm over to an outsider. Publishing industry veteran Mike Perlis will be president and CEO, a new title at Forbes, as it scrambles to solve the riddle of how to blend its digital and print domains. Steve Forbes, who is also editor-in-chief...

The Energy Crisis is Over! Not because of some humongous breakthrough in alternative energies but because of new ways to access two sources widely used today: oil and natural gas. The recent news story about China's national oil company, Cnooc, purchasing a stake in Chesapeake Energy's Texas shale oil and gas fields and agreeing to pony up most of the capital to develop them underscores what an amazing transformation is taking place in the U.S.' energy picture. The word "revolution" is overused, but it's truly appropriate when applied to these technological breakthroughs: hydraulic fracturing--a.k.a. fracking--and horizontal drilling. With fracking, drillers...

EXCERPTS: It's time to get back to basic economics. Money--both the paper and electronic varieties--is, in and of itself, worth nothing; it has no intrinsic value. It is a means--and a profoundly important one--of enabling people to more easily conduct transactions without having to go through the clumsy and utterly inefficient barter process. For example, when we sell a subscription to Forbes we don't receive in return an endless variety of products (loaves of bread, goat cheese, hot dogs, shoes, blouses and neckties, etc.) or services (two hours of lawn mowing, etc.). We are paid in cash and can then...

Daily Bell: What is your overwhelming political concern these days? Is it financial? Economic? Sociopolitical? What are you most worried about for America? Steve Forbes: Right now my biggest concern is misbegotten ideology and economic thinking from Washington. What we are experiencing now is what you might call a form of soft-core socialism or quasi-Third World socialism where the government doesn't take over industries but, in effect, dominates industries so that you can't do anything without the permission of the federal government. You see it in health care, in finance and in the new so-called financial reform bill. I think...

Here is video of Steve Forbes assessing President Barack Obama and his ideology about as well as I have heard it expressed. Forbes contends Obama is “ideologically-driven,” and that he believes he will be remembered as a “great President” for the things he has already done. He said that in Obama’s “semi-socialist mind,” that’s pretty good work for the first two years. Here is how Forbes summarized Obama’s thinking: “He feels that, in terms of what he’s done, long-term it will make him a great President – put him on Mount Rushmore – change America from a greedy nation to...

It's hard to imagine an economist being provocative, but Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, has managed to do so. In his June 28 New York Times op-ed, Krugman argued that since governments around the world aren't willing to double-down on Keynesian policies meant to stimulate the global economy, the United States and the rest of the world are facing a third depression. But on CNBC's June 28 "The Kudlow Report," host Larry Kudlow asked if Krugman's premise were true, how come none of the measures being applied, which Krugman advocates more of, have failed to have any effect on...

A few days ago, I did a post in which I linked to an article about Sarah Palin. The article was published shortly after Palin was nominated for vice president. My purpose in citing the article was to say something about Palin and Israel. But I noticed something else in the article that I thought I’d bring up here. In the 2000 presidential cycle, Palin was mayor of Wasilla. And she was formally with . . . whose campaign? Steve Forbes’s. I think that most people think of Palin as a “social conservative,” as indeed she is. But she’s also...

A devastating trade war with China has once again been averted, thanks to some last-minute diplomacy. But the destructive idea behind this ongoing crisis is still there, which means the dispute will undoubtedly flare up again. Uncle Sam believes Beijing manipulates its currency, the yuan, to give China an unfair trade advantage. Washington claims that since China's economy has long been strong and growing rapidly the yuan should go up against the greenback as if it were a common stock experiencing a surge in earnings. This theory is preposterous, but it has a stranglehold on Washington policymakers in both the...

The Rally for the Republicans at the Kentucky Fair & Exposition Center isn’t your standard rubber-chicken campaign event. Frank Simon, a Louisville religious-right leader known for his strong opposition to gay marriage, leads the crowd of 800 in the Pledge of Allegiance. The Rev. Jerry Stephenson, a conservative black pastor, delivers the invocation, asking “Father God” to “help us start a revolution.” Then the Grammy-nominated rock and reggae singer Aimee Allen, decked out in tattoos, patterned stockings, and high-top sneakers, performs a three-song set, culminating in an anthem helped along by the candidate’s sons on acoustic guitars: “We don’t want...

With an ice-cold disdain for public opinion and an obsession worthy of Lenin, President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi rammed ObamaCare through the House by unprecedented parliamentary trickery, bribery and deceit. The President has thereby poisoned the national political well. But the health care fight has just begun. Substantive constitutional court challenges are coming. Congressional elections are around the corner, and there's a growing opposition that wants to undo what Obama has just done. The President will discover that, ultimately, the American people's tenacity will overwhelm his--and he will be a failed President. But the cost of his public-be-damned attitude...

Former presidential candidate Steve Forbes blamed the Federal Reserve for sparking the recession and said President Obama has hindered the recovery. In a speech yesterday to the Boston College Chief Executives’ Club, the editor in chief of Forbes magazine said the economic crisis was avoidable. “It was the result of a series of mistakes starting with the Federal Reserve, and not a sudden outburst of greed,” he said. “The Fed ginned up the monetary printing press and kept interest rates artificially low.” The result, he said, caused cataclysmic events including the bursting of the commodities and housing bubbles that sent...

FRANKFORT – Former presidential candidate Steve Forbes is to endorse Rand Paul’s Republican campaign for U.S. Senate, Paul’s campaign manager, David Adams, said Monday. Adams said the campaign will issue a news release Tuesday about Forbes’ endorsement. Forbes was a Republican candidate in the presidential primaries in 1996 and 2000. He primarily ran on a campaign to establish a flat income tax. Forbes also is editor-in-chief of business magazine Forbes.

Even if the Federal Reserve gets around to strengthening the dollar--which would do wonders to get the economy really moving again--we still face a mammoth and growing problem: the government's increasing domination and distortion of the capital markets. It's not only the need to finance Uncle Sam's deficits that crowds out other credit seekers in the marketplace. It's also the proliferation of government entities (think Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), government loan guarantees, tax credits and the government's growing sway over the banking sector. Even if Washington's red ink were back to the levels of a couple of years ago,...

(Washington, D.C., July 6, 2009) -- As I traveled throughout the U.S. on my recent book tour, I kept running into people who would ask me, "Where is Steve Forbes? The economy is melting down. We need his economic expertise right now." I couldn't agree more. Steve's message in the 1990s of free market ways to create hope, growth and opportunity at home and abroad may have seemed too bold to the GOP establishment at the time. But it's desperately needed today. His plan to scrap the corrupting federal tax code - "We need to take the tax code and...

Just in case the SNL skit wasn’t sufficient to send Tim Geithner the message, today’s Early Show has provided another harsh dose of reality for the Secretary of the Treasury. Grading his performance, an economics prof has said that if Geithner were his grad student, he’d tell him to quit and register in pastry chef school . . . Harry Smith had assembled a panel of economic experts to grade the Obama administration on its performance to date on the economy. Of course in these situations, a network can control the outcome through its choice of guests. Interestingly, there were...

Forbes: Obama Will Be Forced to the Center Thursday, November 6, 2008 2:52 PM By: Gene Koprowski Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine, says he expect President-elect Barack Obama to be forced by the economy to "govern from the center," not the far left, as some fear. "When Clinton came into office, the economy was growing at a 4 percent rate at the end of 1992. Now we have negative growth. Last quarter was 0.3 percent decline,” Forbes told Fox Business News. “So, short term, yes. Obama will move to the center. He is a calculating enough man to know...

For decades the prices of gold and oil have closely paralleled one another. In 2003 an ounce of gold would have bought you 12 barrels of oil. Today that ounce will buy you about 11 barrels, even though the nominal price of oil is almost three times what it was in 2003. Thus most of the oil increase is a result of dollar inflation, not traditional supply and demand.

We are experiencing the devastating consequences of a chain of major economic policy errors, which, to use a current cliché, created the perfect storm. These government blunders temporarily paralyzed the global credit system and are now sending the U.S. and Europe into recession, while sharply cutting back Asia's growth rates. Left to its own devices, the credit crisis, which began in August 2007, would have crushed economies as severely as did the Great Depression. Belatedly, but thankfully, governments recognized that the only way to get credit flowing again was for them to make quick and direct massive infusions of new...

MEDIA ADVISORY Rudy Giuliani and Steve Forbes to Campaign in Virginia Saturday For Immediate Release Contact: Press Office Thursday, October 23, 2008 703-297-8900 ARLINGTON, VA -- The McCain-Palin Virginia campaign today announced that Rudy Giuliani and Steve Forbes will campaign in Virginia for John McCain and Sarah Palin on Saturday, October 25th. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Steve Forbes will hold a Small Business Rally in Richmond with Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling and former Attorney General Jerry Kilgore. Mayor Giuliani will also attend a Veterans Victory Rally in Virginia Beach with Attorney General Bob McDonnell and John...

Has the Federal Reserve run out of bullets? that implication could be drawn from the recently released minutes of the Fed's last Open Market Committee meeting, during which the federal funds rate was cut from 2.25% to 2%. The Fed hinted that no more rate cuts are in store and that the economic horizon is becoming cloudier. (The reason our central bank can't reduce interest rates further is that the inflation picture is getting uglier.) Stocks tanked on this news. However, the Fed has yet to use its most effective artillery: strengthening the value of the U.S. dollar.