Free Republic

Always trust your gut. If you feel like they're lying to you, they are.- Tucker Carlson Tucker just finished this 31 minute speech in Las Vegas, Nevada. He posted the speech on X (formerly Twitter). Speech in the link below,https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1727090631850492257

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday that “uncertainty” over whether the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance will offer admission to Ukraine motivates Russia to continue “terror” in its war on Kyiv. “It seems there is no readiness neither to invite Ukraine to NATO nor to make it a member of the Alliance,” Zelensky said. “This means that a window of opportunity is being left to bargain Ukraine’s membership in NATO in negotiations with Russia. And for Russia, this means motivation to continue its terror.”

Throughout the history of man and money, there have always been periods of inflation. It happened in ancient Rome, China during Marco Polo’s visit, Germany after World War I, and countless other examples. Milton Friedman once said, “Inflation is first and foremost a monetary phenomenon.” If he is correct, then clearly broad-based inflation in an economy occurs not due to disasters, shortages or other temporary/transitory events, but rather it is the direct result of monetary policy. Too many currency units are produced thus outrunning the supply of goods and services. Sound familiar? Thank you, Jerome Powell. We’ve listed 11 reasons...

BARCELONA — Last month, as Europe finally lifted COVID-19 restrictions, the mood was jubilant across the continent. Outdoor mask mandates and curfews were dropped, Americans were cleared to resume travel to tourist mainstays, and hopes rose that life would quickly return to normal. The swift spread of the Delta variant, however, has upended all of that wishful thinking and is offering a warning to the U.S. Fast becoming the dominant strain of COVID-19 across Europe, Delta is wreaking havoc in Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Spain alone reported nearly 44,000 cases on Tuesday, doubling the number recorded one week...

This "Time of Great Uncertainty". "These Uncertain Times". Notice how this terminology is ubiquitous now? It's everywhere. Last night there were earthquakes and the local news opened with that story. The anchor says, in this time of Great Uncertainty there have been a series of earthquakes. Then the commercials. Hyundai does a commercial for their car, says "in these uncertain times". Next it's Sprint, again, "in these uncertain times".

<p>Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaks at a campaign event, Thursday, Oct. 24, 2019, in Hanover, N.H. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola) MUSCATINE, Iowa (AP) — Look no further than Pearl City Station, a plain brick building set along the banks of the Mississippi River, to understand the growing sense of uncertainty seeping into the Democratic Party’s 2020 primary contest.</p>

The stock market is having a horrible time so far in 2016, with the S&P 500 down more than 9%. Gold, on the other hand, is up nearly 10% year-to-date and hit a four-month high of just under $1200 per ounce on Monday before dipping 0.7% Tuesday to $1189.30. It's a bit of a cliche to say that people turn to gold in times of uncertainty: Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. Gold did phenomenally well from 2000-2011 but really suffered after hitting nearly $2000 per ounce in 2011. From 2011 to 2015, the yellow metal pretty much fell in...

Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior. Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has never been an experiment able to capture both natures of light at the same time; the closest we have come is seeing either wave or particle, but always at different times. Taking a radically different...

Here's a nice surprise: quantum physics is less complicated than we thought. An international team of researchers has proved that two peculiar features of the quantum world previously considered distinct are different manifestations of the same thing. The result is published 19 December in Nature Communications. Patrick Coles, Jedrzej Kaniewski, and Stephanie Wehner made the breakthrough while at the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. They found that 'wave-particle duality' is simply the quantum 'uncertainty principle' in disguise, reducing two mysteries to one."The connection between uncertainty and wave-particle duality comes out very naturally when you...

Well, who woulda’ thunk it? The Environmental Protection Agency finally decided to acknowledge the incompatibility of the Renewable Fuel Standard with both America’s declining gasoline consumption and the environmental degradation caused by the production of corn ethanol, thereby obliterating the entirely government-imposed “market” for biofuels — and what do you suppose happens? Via The Hill: Almost eight in 10 biodiesel producers in the United States have cut back production this year due to uncertainty over federal policies that encourage making the fuels, the National Biodiesel Board (NBB) said.The report released Wednesday was based on a survey the NBB conducted. In...

Washington – Secretary of State John Kerry vowed Friday that the United States would defend Japan against attack, even in conflicts involving islands claimed by China and Taiwan, as tensions continue to boil between the Asian powers. Kerry, who said he would visit China next week, met in Washington with Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida and reaffirmed the 1960 treaty that commits the United States to protect its ally. “That includes with respect to the South China Sea,” he said, before correcting himself to say the East China Sea, where China and Japan have conflicting claims. Fears of conflict rose in...

WASHINGTON — When the U.S. State Department announced this week that it finally is going to designate the Haqqani network as a foreign terrorist organization, it was a nonevent for most of our countrymen. That's because few Americans know how deadly the organization is. For that we can thank those at Foggy Bottom who are wedded to the naive hope of a near-term "diplomatic breakthrough" in Afghanistan. Couple that misguided belief with the Obama administration's self-deception that the radical Islamic jihad against the West ended with the demise of Osama bin Laden and it's understandable why the Haqqani network...

In Chairman Bernanake's doctoral thesis, he "focused on the role of monetary policy in affecting economic activity, and on the historical analysis of the causes of the Great Depression." His thesis and resulting understanding of the negative impact that uncertainty has on business cycles should provide insight on the actions needed by government to resolve our current economic difficulties. In short, Dr. Bernanake understood that "[i]t is shown that increased uncertainty provides an incentive to defer such investments in order to wait for new information" (page 2 of the dissertation). In the same paper, he wrote, "Uncertainty is seen to...

President Obama would do us all a big favor if he'd ask himself this: "Would I start or expand a business without knowing what regulations or taxes government will impose next year?" If he'd just stop and ask that, he'd have a sense of what's wrong with the economy. He'd understand why a country that must create 120,000 new jobs each month just to absorb newcomers created only 69,000 last month. Past recoveries were quicker. Something is different. What could it be? Let's remember that the economy -- which is to say, us -- is already burdened by byzantine bureaucratic...

Next Wednesday, between 12:30 and 2PM, we will get a ton of new information to digest and analyze. The Federal Reserve will make a series of statements while unveiling its new communication effort. A portion of the new information will be contained in the revised Summary of Economic Projections (SEP). The Fed has worked long and hard on its new communication policy. The question is, “What will people think and how will the markets react?” I believe that there is a very good possibility that the Fed’s plan will add to uncertainties regarding monetary policy. Contrary to its objectives, the...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Investors fled stocks on Thursday, putting the S&P 500 into correction territory, as worries about the U.S. economy and European debt escalated. All three indexes were down 2 percent, having fallen more than 3 percent each at one point. Decliners beat advancers on the New York Stock Exchange by 14 to 1. "People are throwing in the towel because they can't find relief on any front. There are a lot of worries about the economy," said Milton Ezrati, market strategist at Lord Abbett Co. in Jersey City, New Jersey, which manages $110 billion in assets. The...

“Traditionally, we are led out of a recession by small businesses hiring people and creating jobs, and that’s not happening in this recession,” says Dan Danner, President and CEO of the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB). ...The report shows that small business confidence was down for a third straight month in May, and that only 5 percent of small business owners think now is a good time to expand. Economist Martin Baily of the Brookings Institution says the lack of investment, hiring and expansion by small businesses is one of the reasons the nation’s economy isn’t recovering as quickly...

The laundry room of Tamara Huffman’s split-level here in the Shenandoah Valley is filling up with cheese powder and freeze-dried ham, at the ready should her husband, Brian, lose his job anytime in the next 25 years. She carves a little bit out of their already tight budget every month to buy some more. This sort of stockpiling was once the purview of survivalists preparing for Armageddon. But Huffman’s fear isn’t the end of the world so much as the $5 basket of grape tomatoes she bypassed the other day at her local supermarket.

We want what we can’t have, and this reality comes through in a new study that found women are more attracted to men when they can’t tell how much the males like them. Though the study, titled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not … Uncertainty Can Increase Romantic Attraction”, was conducted on female undergraduates, one of the researchers said she believes the findings would also be true for males. But how did this phenomenon come about? Are we just bored by guys who are clearly into us, or do we simply enjoy torturing ourselves by being infatuated with people...

A lot of people in government don't know much about business operations because they have never run a business. Examples: the current president, vice president, probably most members of Congress, economics professors at publicly funded state colleges, and most of the other people in government or government-funded organizations for whom I slave away as an independent businessman on a daily basis to pay their salary and benefits. In the interest of giving these people a sliver of insight into real-world working conditions, I thought I'd present a glimpse into my thought processes on Social Security tax reduction of 2 percent...