Free Republic

There is a rumor swirling on Wall Street that China may be reversing its decades-old policy of buying U.S. Treasury Bills (T-Bills), which is giving bond-traders a case of nerves.  If China does not buy T-Bills, then the Federal Reserve will have to raise the yield on the bonds to make them more attractive to other buyers.  This rumor combined with the possibility that the Chinese economy will eclipse the U.S. economy in twenty years seemingly makes a thirty-year T- Bill less attractive than in the past. What a strange time in which we live, when cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum may be a...

The roots of today's mortgage-based financial crisis can be traced back to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which Jimmy Carter signed in 1977. Seeking to address complaints from anti-poverty activists and housing advocates about banks allegedly discriminating against minority borrowers and "redlining" inner-city neighborhoods, the CRA decreed that banks had "an affirmative obligation" to meet the credit needs of victims of discrimination in borrowing. To add a government stick to the process, the CRA decreed that federal banking regulators would consider how well banks were doing in meeting the goal of more multiculturalism in loaning when considering requests by banks...