Free Republic

Within a year the full weight of the Obama disaster has become apparent. The democratic mantra of "the stimulus saved the economy" is a lie. The "stimulus" is nothing more than years of pent-up pork barrel spending financed on a sea of barrowed Chinese cash. While schools close and unemployment lines swell, does our "new left" savior acknowledge his mistake? No, in true demagogic fashion he blames others for his failure and seeks to expand his disastrous policies with the claim "we haven't gone far enough." The health care plan is going to lower the deficit - like unemployment won't...

A new Fox News poll has 79% of the American people seeing an economic collapse in this country as a possibility. The sample was taken last Tuesday and Wednesday of 900 registered voters.

Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address As the progressive administration of Barack Obama continues to push out private industry, American voters have a little message for the government officials, hands off, they can do it much better than you. The latest Rasmussen poll reports that the majority of American voters have more confidence in the economic decisions of the business community than in those of government. 51% of voters think the decisions business leaders make for their own shops do more to help the economy than decisions made by...

Russia proposed to China that the two nations should sell Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds in 2008 to force the US government to bail out the giant mortgage-finance companies, former US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson has claimed. The allegation is in his memoir On the Brink in which he also suggests that Alistair Darling, the UK chancellor, blocked a rescue takeover of Lehman Brothers by Barclays Bank when he refused to support special treatment by UK regulators. “Russian officials had made a top-level approach to the Chinese, suggesting that together they might sell big chunks of their GSE holdings...

Dear Fellow Arizonan, We face a state fiscal crisis of unparalleled dimension – one that is going to sweep over every single person in this state as well as every business and every family. That is why I held an emergency cabinet meeting yesterday morning where I outlined for our state’s elected leaders and business leaders the ills our state faces. As I told them yesterday, we ARE faced with some of the worst days in our 97-year history. We can debate how we got here, but we CANNOT remain paralyzed in our efforts to address the situation. We must...

In his economic speech yesterday, President Obama made it clear that his administration will take a step forward on job creation. Unfortunately, it's also taking three steps backward -- which all adds up to more unemployment. The good news is that Obama understands why unemployment has risen so sharply. Media coverage strongly implies that joblessness has risen because layoffs are up -- but that's only part of the equation. The number of jobs lost by firms rose 15 percent from the start of the recession to the first quarter of this year. These layoffs are real and painful for the...

Timeline video, + Here is the Drudgereport headline from exactly one year ago: Sept 14th, 2008 (Screenshot)

The Shadow People (too polite a name for who they really are) have been at this intensely for decades. They are serious about enslaving us. Notice two points out of the many in this amazing treasonous letter from Ted Kennedy to Chairman Andropov of the USSR in 1983. (It is completely authentic and surfaced in London in the 1990s after KGB files came to light.) Kennedy was setting things up to undermine President Reagan. Note: (1) Kennedy's secret messenger Tunney (Kennedy's former college roommate, later a Democrat Senator from California) told the Soviets that, quote: "A few well known economists...

The Icelandic government is coming under domestic pressure to renegotiate the £2.3 billion compensation it has committed to paying British savers over the collapse of Icesave and its parent bank Landsbanki. Around 300,000 UK institutions and savers were bailed out by the UK government when Icesave went down amid the collapse of the Icelandic banking system. The Treasury, however, then forced Iceland to commit to paying that money back. Now the agreement to pay the money back over 15 years is coming under question. Leading advisers to the Reykjavik government say members of Icelandic parliament are prepared to challenge the...

"Bon" or "Non" Appétit? “Kill the umpire,” the fan cried to open the 1996 baseball season in Cincinnati, and eight pitches later, the man behind the plate, John McSherry, was dead, all 320 pounds of him screaming for more and more oxygen to feed his spastic heart. He’d been killed by a billion molecules of sink-clogging, Drano-resistant cholesterol that fed on his coronary artery and sucked up his life’s blood like a vampire in the heat of the night. The next day Howard Stern had characteristically railed that the antidote was obvious. It was the same for all fat people:...

"Special coverage: Law Enforcement and the Economy" CHICAGO — SNIPPET: "As hundreds of jobs in Chicago's police department go unfilled, officers who once patrolled the streets with partners are riding alone in what some cops bitterly call "rolling coffins."" SNIPPET: "This is what the nation's economic crisis looks like in law enforcement. As tax revenue shrivels, police agencies that for years were bulletproof when it came to funding are tightening their belts. Some worry that criminals will take advantage of the situation."

If you're driving a clunky old jalopy worth less than $4,500 and you want to buy a new car in the middle of a recession, the government is willing to cut you a $4,500 check. The final "cash for clunkers" program, which was approved yesterday, is an embarassment and will likely be a total failure. Here's how it works. If you own a car worth less than $4,500 dollars, you can trade it in for a more fuel efficient auto and receive a voucher worth $3,500 or $4,500. If the car is worth more than that, it doesn't make sense...

o sooner had President Obama proposed a new regulatory road map for the country’s financial system on Wednesday than senior lawmakers expressed reservations about one of the plan’s central elements — to broadly expand the reach of the Federal Reserve to regulate financial risk across the entire system. Mr. Obama said that the plan would protect consumers, impose new restraints on financial behemoths and guard against the murky practices that caused the market crisis. “A culture of irresponsibility took root from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street,” he said in a speech to industry executives and senior officials in...

U.S. mortgage applications fell for a fourth consecutive week, with overall demand plunging to its lowest level in nearly seven months, data from an industry group showed on Wednesday. The Mortgage Bankers Association said its seasonally adjusted index of mortgage applications, which includes both purchase and refinance loans, for the week ended June 12 decreased 15.8 percent to 514.4, the lowest since the week ended November 21, 2008. A rise in mortgage rates in recent weeks had sapped demand, particularly for home loan refinancing, but the direction of rates reversed course last week. Cameron Findlay, chief economist at LendingTree.com based...

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) is supposed to be the retail winner in a depression or recession as more and more consumers are forced to shop at the world’s largest retailer whether they want to or not. There is no arguing about the notion that consumers can save money if they buy at Wal-Mart. But several key issues have been happening here, and the company is at risk of having one of the worst charts of all current Dow Jones Industrial Average members.

Forget that 2002 column. In quote after quote from that era, Krugman forcefully argued for rate cuts to stimulate housing and drive the recovery. All day Paul Krugman has been involved in a brouhaha over a 2002 column which seemed to be advocating a housing bubble to get us out of the recession. He says he wasn't calling for a bubble, just that he was just explaining Alan Greenspan was trying to do. Mark Thornton has gone through Krugman's entire archives and undermined this defense. Many of Krugman's own quotes from that era suggest that he was an aggressive advocate...

Deflation. Ten-year yields will probably drop to as low as 1.5 percent over the next two years, Mizuho Asset’s Takei said. The only way that happens is if The United States is gripped by a bone-crushing deflationary spiral. It can happen. It probably will happen, despite The Fed's attempts to stop it, because in fact The Fed has done all the wrong things to stop it over the last ten years, and once you try to use bubble economics to get out of another bubble you have sealed your fate. See, debt deflation cannot be avoided once you blow asset...

This time it's different, say John Hussman and Ray Dalio. In a bad way. John Hussman with another provocative idea, which he attributes to Ray Dalio at Bridgewater: In typical recessions, unemployment tends to be a lagging indicator, and the employment figures themselves tend to move up and down roughly in concert with the overall economy. In the current downturn, however, the unusually high debt burden and precariousness of mortgages among households creates a dynamic that we don't usually observe. In the current cycle, as Ray Dalio of Bridgewater has correctly (in my view) pointed out, unemployment is likely to...

After several weeks of conviction on the part of most economists that the current recession is a “single” dip which will end later this year, the advocates of a “double dip” recession are out in force. Most of the champions of two dips see a brief swing up in the GDP of the developed nations followed by another collapse in the first half of next year. Last week, the head of The World Bank said that there are still plenty of risks in the credit system that will keep a tight reign on available capital and that this could smother...

Another thing to be po'd off at Ken Lewis about if you're a Bank of America (BAC) shareholder: You're paying for Angelo Mozilo's legal defense, as fe faces civil fraud charges from the SEC. Granted, The Tanned One had that agreement in place with Countrywide prior to the sale, and Bank of America inherited that when it bought the company. And it's also true that in Q1 Countrywide was a big contributor to Bank of America's earnings. So maybe you should be grateful! A few extra lawyer bills are a small price to pay. Although if the refi boom melts...