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The Taliban may have seized control of Afghanistan — but for now, the group can't access the nearly $10 billion in reserves in the country's central bank, most of which is reportedly held by the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. Last week, Taliban members attempted to inspect Afghanistan's billions of dollars in foreign reserves, only to be told by officials at the country's central bank, Da Afghanistan Bank, that they could not access it because it was being stored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in Manhattan, the Financial Times reported. Regardless, most of the central bank's...

DENVER (AP) — The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment has reported an increase in fraudulent unemployment claims during the coronavirus pandemic as the department attempts to assist people who are struggling. An investigative department for the KUSA-TV has found the state has filed more fraudulent claims filed by scammers than legitimate claims filed by residents, the station reported. The state agency said 1.1 million fraudulent claims and 1,043,760 legit claims have been filed since the pandemic began in March. “We have to walk a tightrope from the demand and mission to get out these benefits quickly as possible to...

President Donald Trump was able to flip six states in the 2016 election that voted for Barack Obama in 2012 — Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio. Oddsmakers see four of the six flipping back to blue in 2020 — enough to flip the Electoral College. Odds to win Florida and its 29 electoral votes have moved from -182 for Democrat Joe Biden to -200. Trump and the Republicans slumped in the state to +140 from +130. Additionally, Biden improved in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, where he is an all-time best -335 now, as well as in Maine, which...

If you have a strong stomach and two months to kill, NASA might pay you $19,000 to stay in bed and spin around a centrifuge for that period. You’d be on bed rest for sixty days while researchers study the effects of weightlessness on the human body. The test will be conducted in Germany so make sure your passport is up-to-date. If you want to participate you’ll need to be able to speak German, be between the ages of 24 and 55 and be healthy. After your 60-day nap you’ll be required to stick around for another month to be...

The Fed Has Failed: Business Investment Efficiency Is "Worst Since The Great Depression" The Summary: 1.Economic policy objectives (monetary and fiscal) are meant to incentivize domestic private business investment, which drives incomes and the money multiplier effect, i.e. the engine of the economy. 2.Economic policy objectives have failed because CEOs, the private capital allocators, simply cannot accommodate business investment when the demand function is as weak as we currently find it, no matter how available and how cheap the capital. 3.The demand function is weak because we misunderstood and ignored the side effects of trade policies and their reliance on...

"............[SNIP]..........."I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist," says Mr. Greenspan. But after the Fed's model failed to predict the financial crisis, he realized that there is more to forecasting than numbers. "It all fell apart, in the sense that not a single major forecaster of note or institution caught it," he says. "The Federal Reserve has got the most elaborate econometric model, which incorporates all the newfangled models of how the world works—and it missed it completely." He says JP Morgan had put out a forecast three days before the crisis saying the economy was on...

Regardless of who the President is after this close election, the equity markets and the U.S. economy are in trouble. Debt has spread throughout the Western world. The fallout is political dissonance, growing economic hardship and, in some places, mob violence.Ground zero for the spreading fear and panic is Greece, which was once the worldÂ’s greatest civilization and the birthplace of democracy, poetry and philosophy.There is violent evidence of the contradiction from what the ancients taught and what is unraveling in Greece. It would all just be another boring story at the end of the news day, except there is...

By Andy Xie 10.14.2011 14:52 Underground Rumblings, then a Financial Quake Private, real economic activities are on shaky ground as high-rate loans, speculation and the state sector surge A real business does not go bankrupt simply because it can't borrow money. But a money-burning speculator does. This fact explains why it's wrong to blame the recent wave of private company bankruptcies in Wenzhou on China's monetary tightening and credit squeeze. The real story is that the companies speculated with borrowed money, and lost. Excessive monetary expansion from 2008-'10 rewarded speculation through asset inflation. The Chinese government's economic stimulus, launched in...

A woman who lied about being gang raped in Somalia to claim more than £250,000 in benefits had moved to Britain after boasting it was the ‘land of easy money’. Ayan Abdulle was jailed this week after investigators discovered that the story she used to win asylum – and later UK citizenship – was a pack of lies. Now the Daily Mail can reveal the full scale of her fraud and how easily she was able to milk the benefits system for years. Abdulle, who also used the fake name Amina Muse and is from Somalia, was living in Gothenburg...

Andy Xie: An Overwhelming "Get Rich Quick" Mentality Dooms China To Endless Bubbles Joe Weisenthal | Jan. 11, 2010, 5:10 AM /snip The overwhelming desire for getting rich quick dominates every nook, fissure and strata of Chinese society. Such desires cannot be fulfilled; the terrible logic of economics is that money must circulate. Creating bubbles can temporarily blind people to this logic, as overvalued assets substitute for money to fill psychological needs. This is why, whenever conditions permit, China seems to have asset bubbles. Bubbles exaggerate reality but are not formed out of thin air. Cheap money and strong growth...

"I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship." — Ralph Waldo Emerson It is in the spirit of delayed gratification that we decline to join the frenzy of decade-in-review commentary, at least until the first decade of the 21st century actually ends on Dec. 31, 2010. But those who share Emerson's disdain for instant gratification need not fret over the vagaries of the calendar. The past year provided ample illustrations of...

Bought a lotto ticket. It's lucky. I just know. No doubt I'm a winner Soon rolling in the dough. I'll spend, now, on credit And buy a fancy car, Take a nice vacation, Hang with the movie stars. They announce the winner. Expect my lucky break. Someone else's numbers -- There must be a mistake. I didn't win no lotto, man. I didn't win no lotto, man. Forget all retirement plans. No, I didn't win no lotto, man.

The current economic crisis so far eclipses anything the American economy has undergone since the Great Depression that "recession" is too tepid a term to describe it. Its gravity is measured not by the unemployment rate but by the dizzying array of programs that the government is deploying and the staggering amounts of money that it is spending or pledging -- almost $13 trillion in loans, other investments and guarantees -- in an effort to avoid a repetition of the 1930s. Much of this sum will not be spent (the guarantees), and probably most will eventually be recovered. But a...

A brute inflationary monetary policy of the kind we are experiencing today can hardly avoid leading to a growth in GDP that, after all, is largely a record of consumer spending. But we cannot judge an economic policy to be "working" simply by detecting such an increase in GDP. Nor may we say policy has "succeeded" just from increases in government jobs or government-subsidized jobs. An economy's success, properly speaking, is one that increases long-term levels of production with robust private sector employment. In short, inflation and public sector growth do not mean a policy has "worked." As the essence...

1. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates to as low as 1% so that after inflation we had negative interest rates.

...Wall Street's argument is that the housing recession and credit crisis threaten a larger downturn. The 30-day T-bill rate (under 2.9%) has sunk far below the fed funds rate of 4.25% after yesterday, so the Fed is said to be "behind the curve." We're told the banks caught up in the mortgage problems also need more "liquidity" if they're going to lend. Thus pesky details like $90 oil and the flagging greenback can be reckoned with later. Life would be grand if central banking were that simple. The Fed's main obligation is to protect the value of the currency, especially...

Greenspan was more a rock star than a feared Fed sage By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Last Updated: 1:08am BST 18/09/2007 We forget now, but Alan Greenspan first rose in Washington as a political aide to Richard Nixon - not as an economist. Greenspan warns of UK house prices drop Comment: More rock star than feared Fed sage In depth: Alan Greenspan As domestic policy boss for Nixon's 1968 campaign, he wrote the speech calling for an end to the Vietnam draft - the mischievous pledge that clinched a tight race. Greenspan slashed rates to mitigate the dotcom debacle His mentor was...

(WCCO) -- When it comes to unwanted credit applications some people shred, some people mix it with the garbage and others just rip them into pieces. Carol Bungert rips and worries. "If someone did find this in the recycling and pulled it out and filled it out, would they, would they get a card?" Bungert wonders. "Could they use my name and start charging stuff all over town?" In a test to see if that could happen some volunteers used a little tape and some puzzle skills to turn ripped up applications into ones that are almost as good as...

<p>The last politician who took advice from the bond market was Bill Clinton. When he pushed for a tax hike back in 1993 to cut the budget deficit, it was under the assumption that bond investors would respond by bringing down interest rates. (The theory here is that deficits are inflationary. Inflation is bad for bonds.) Yet long-term interest rates surged from 6.45 percent when Clinton signed his tax-hike bill on Aug. 10, 1993, to 8.16 percent on Nov. 7, 1994, the day before the midterm congressional election where Republicans won back the House and Senate.</p>

VAN NUYS - As they pass time on the corner of Kester and Oxnard streets looking for work, day laborers tell stories. They talk about a man who drives by in the afternoons, pretending to need someone to mow the lawn, trim some trees or paint the garage. What the man really wants is sex. And he's looking for a man to hire for the day. "I tried to ask him what kind of work he wanted, and at first he said one thing, then another, so I didn't want to go," one worker recently said at the Van Nuys...