Free Republic

LONDON () – Sweeping regulation introduced by the US to prevent future financial crises could create major "market distortions" ex-Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan wrote in Wednesday's Financial Times. The former bank chief slammed the Dodd-Frank act, which imposes wide-ranging and strict new checks on financial institutions, for failing to "capture the degree of global interconnectedness." "The act may create the largest regulatory-induced market distortion since America's ill-fated imposition of wage and price controls in 1971," warned Greenspan, who was Fed boss from 1987 to 2006. The economist has been widely accused of having encouraged the recent US housing bubble...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: BusinessInsider.com: "Former SEIU Official Reveals Secret Plan To Destroy JP Morgan, Crash The Stock Market, And Redistribute Wealth In America -- A former official of one of the country's most-powerful unions, SEIU, has a secret plan to 'destabilize' the country. The plan is designed to destroy JP Morgan, nuke the stock market, and weaken Wall Street's grip on power, thus creating the conditions necessary for a redistribution of wealth and a change in government. The former SEIU official, Stephen Lerner, spoke in a closed session at a Pace University forum last weekend."

Sacramento, California - The Assembly Higher Education Committee approved two bills on Tuesday allowing college students who are in the state illegally to receive financial aid. Dubbed the California Dream Act, AB130 allows illegal immigrants to receive privately funded college scholarships, and AB131 allows them to receive taxpayer-funded financial aid such as Cal Grants. Currently, illegal students who spend at least three years in California high schools pay only the in-state tuition rate — a significant cost savings over legal citizens from other states who are attending California colleges. That benefit was provided by AB540, which passed in 2001.

Financial terrorism suspected in 2008 economic crash "The unclassified 2009 report “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses” by financial analyst Kevin D. Freeman, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, states that “a three-phased attack was planned and is in the process against the United States economy.”… …“There is sufficient justification to question whether outside forces triggered, capitalized upon or magnified the economic difficulties of 2008,” the report says, explaining that those domestic economic factors would have caused a “normal downturn” but not the “near collapse” of the global economic system that took place… …Officials, who spoke on...

Dear FREEpers, Just sit right back and hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip blah, blah blah, Can't you just smell the collegaite atmosphere of a Big Ten school library located in Madison Wisconsin. Here we can gather up top notch scholarship about the history of islam. Now that you have a cold adult beverage and some buttered popcorn, let's hear what the nutcase's of islam have to say about The Supremacy of the Infrastructure of the Islamic State. That's right folks! Read until reduced to laughing fits, or incredulity, enjoy! The Islamic history reflects much of the...

In Sept, 2008, I penned the post, the US Economy: A Perfect Storm of Housing and Lending Events. This overview of how we managed to bring ourselves to the precarious cliff of a failed economy revealed it was not a single issue, but a combination of many events - including political pressure on lenders for homeownership, relaxing of GSE lending criteria, regulation/deregulation, and profit motivation by financial institutions - leading to an out of whack supply vs demand, driving up housing values to unsustainable and dangerous levels. It never crossed my mind that financial terrorism could be another element...

Courtesy of The Daily Beck

We keep hearing that young men are failing to adapt to contemporary life. Their financial prospects are impaired—earnings for 25- to 34-year-old men have fallen by 20 percent since 1971. Their college enrollment numbers trail women's: Only 43 percent of American undergraduates today are men. Last year, women made up the majority of the work force for the first time. And yet there is one area in which men are very much in charge: premarital heterosexual relationships. [snip] What many young men wish for—access to sex without too many complications or commitments—carries the day. If women were more fully in...

Establish smart spending habits. Live like you're poor. How do you do that? Drive your cars into the ground, don't eat out very much, avoid expensive and potentially unhealthy processed foods, buy food in bulk, buy just enough clothes to fit your needs, and use public transportation. ... Use credit cards only as a convenience to avoid carrying cash; limit your credit card spending so that you can easily pay off the balance each month. Make every dollar count with your spending, so you can free up money to invest in the future. Get healthy. One of the best things...

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is doing a great job, according to none other than himself. Geithner essentially patting himself on the back at a Bloomberg Breakfast event in Washington on Wednesday, saying: "The core of the American financial system is in a much stronger position than it was before the crisis." Geithner has a point: U.S. banks made $87.5 billion in last year, the highest since 2007, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Bloomberg reports. Of course, as Henry points out in the clip, if the system is indeed safer, it's solely because Geithner, his predecessor Hank Paulson and...

France, as current head of the Group of 20 countries, will help the transition to a global financial system based on 'several international currencies', French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde said today. Lagarde, speaking ahead of a G20 finance ministers meeting in Paris on Friday and Saturday, said the world had to move on from the 'non-monetary system' it now has to one 'based on several international currencies'. Accordingly, France wants to see less need for countries, especially the emerging economies, to accumulate huge foreign reserves, she said. At the same time, international capital flows should be better regulated and the...

Snips from excerpt only website: Millions of low-income Americans who don't have bank accounts are finding an alternative to check-cashing stores at an unusual place: their local big-box retailer. Kmart has begun testing check cashing, money transfers and prepaid cards in stores in Illinois, California and Puerto Rico, with plans to roll out the services nationally later this year. Best Buy has installed kiosks in its stores for shoppers to pay utility, cable and phone bills. Wal-Mart has opened roughly 1,500 MoneyCenters that process as many as 5 million transactions each week. According to a recent government survey, nearly 30...

Back in October of 2009, when Congress first announced the formation of a commission to investigate the cause of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew immediately that their ultimate conclusions would support the agendas of their respective political parties. (Watch the video blog I recorded that day) Particularly, I knew that the commission's Democrat majority would use the crisis to justify more government involvement in the financial markets. These concerns have now been fully validated. Given that I was one of the few people who had accurately predicted the magnitude of the housing bubble, and had laid out in my...

A bipartisan panel investigating the financial crisis has referred cases of potential wrongdoing by financial industry officials to the Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said on Tuesday. The 2009 law creating the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission instructs the congressionally appointed panel to refer anyone who may have violated the law to the Justice Department and state attorneys general

The 2008 financial crisis was an “avoidable” disaster caused by widespread failures in government regulation, corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking by Wall Street, according to the conclusions of a Congressional inquiry. The government commission that investigated the financial crisis casts a wide net of blame, faulting two administrations, the Federal Reserve and other regulators for permitting a calamitous concoction: shoddy mortgage lending, the excessive packaging and sale of loans to investors, and risky bets on securities backed by the loans. < snip > ..... Many of the findings have been widely described, but its synthesis of interviews, documents and testimony,...

Mayoral challenger Gery Chico charged Tuesday that Rahm Emanuel “sat on his hands, looked the other way and took the cash” when presented with an “Enron-style” scandal as a board member of home mortgage giant Freddie Mac. After leaving the administration of then President Bill Clinton and before running for Congress, Emanuel parlayed his political connections into an investment banking job in which he earned $16 million over three years. He also made at least $320,000 as a Freddie Mac director after he was given what Chico calls a “sweetheart appointment” by Clinton.

Republicans may starve financial reform of cashBy Dave Clarke and Roberta Rampton WASHINGTON | Mon Jan 3, 2011 11:44am EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republicans in the new Congress could put the budget squeeze on two powerful regulatory agencies to slow President Barack Obama's crackdown on Wall Street. A Democratic-controlled Congress pushed through the Dodd-Frank bank reform laws last year and regulators were counting on a big budget boost to police the $600 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market -- blamed for much of the excess behind the 2007-2009 financial crisis. But the last Congress failed to deliver on the funding, and that...

Greece sneezed, and now most of Europe has a cold. The European debt crisis has already spread like a virus from Greece to Ireland, and other countries are now at risk: Portugal, Spain, and Italy are probable candidates for financial problems. Economists call this the “contagion effect.” How does this spread? Some of it has to do with confidence. When investors see one country encounter financial problems, they may doubt the health of other countries that seem to share economic or even political characteristics. Contagion also has much to do with actual economic links among countries. Researchers have identified financial...

BEIJING – The 121-story Shanghai Tower is more than China's next record-setting building: It's an economic lifeline for the elite club of skyscraper builders. Financial gloom has derailed plans for new towers in Chicago, Moscow, Dubai and other cities. But in China, work on the 2,074-foot (632-meter) Shanghai Tower, due to be completed in 2014, and dozens of other tall buildings is rushing ahead, powered by a buoyant economy and providing a steady stream of work to architects and engineers. The U.S. high-rise market is "pretty much dead," said Dan Winey, a managing director for Gensler, the Shanghai Tower's San...