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One of every four retired workers from the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago and the Chicago Public Schools is getting a pension of more than $60,000 a year. That’s 80,365 people in all. For 13,240 of them, those checks provide a yearly income of $100,000 or more, a Chicago Sun-Times/Better Government Association analysis of pension records has found. An additional 20,004 have pension incomes totaling between $80,000 and $100,000 a year. ... the root of the problem is that government officials kept promising lifetime benefits to workers — and, in many cases, to their surviving spouses should they...

Ah: I see that there was a Twitter exchange among Brad DeLong, James Pethokoukis, and others over why Republicans don’t acknowledge that Ben Bernanke helped the economy, and claim credit. Pethokoukis — who presumably gets to talk to quite a few Republicans from his perch at AEI — offers a fairly amazing explanation: B/c many view BB as enabling Obama’s spending and artificially propping up debt-heavy economy in need of Mellon-esque liquidation Yep: that dastardly Bernanke was preventing us from having a financial crisis, curse him. Actually, there’s a lot of evidence that this was an important part of the...

Timeline proving that the mortgage industry crisis is the Democratic socialist experiment. Another socialist experiment failed, this time a massive federal effort, imperiling the whole US banking industry. Facing this economic disaster, can an informed American people put their trust Obama’s socialist ideology to bring remedy? Will they bring in an acetylene torch to put out the fire? http://eyesandearsweekly.blogspot.com/2008/10/narrative-for-change-proven-failure-of.html

Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004 1:09 p.m. EDT Billionaires Secretly Met in Aspen to Defeat Bush In the days following the Democratic National Convention in Boston this past August, several billionaire Democratic activists secretly met at the famed Aspen Institute in Colorado. The purpose of their clandestine meeting was "to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush," The New Yorker magazine reports in its most recent edition. Details of the meeting remain sketchy, but the magazine described the Aspen conference this way: "Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the...

Falling oil, rising dollar and fears over US rate increase present in 1997-98 Mark Twain reputedly stated that history does not repeat but it rhymed. In an eerie parallel to 1997-98, falling commodity — especially oil — prices, a rising US dollar and potential increases in US interest rates may presage a new financial crisis. Weak growth, high debt levels, disinflation or deflation, policy driven destructive competitive devaluations, inflated financial risk taking and mispricing compounds the problems. The impending crisis may develop as follows. First, US equity prices come under pressure from a stronger dollar. Given 40 per cent of...

A former member of a panel created to examine the causes of the financial crisis of 2007 says government policies that were really at the core of the crash are being quietly resurrected by the Obama administration, and that they are creating another housing bubble similar to the one that burst more than eight years ago. Appearing Friday on The Mark Levin Show, Peter Wallison, author of the new book “Hidden in Plain Sight,” and the Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said that the federal government “was the central player” in the...

If you do not believe that we are heading directly toward another major financial crisis, you need to read this article. So many of the exact same patterns that preceded the great financial collapse of 2008 are happening again right before our very eyes. History literally appears to be repeating, but most Americans seem absolutely oblivious to what is going on. The mainstream media and our politicians are promising them that everything is going to be okay somehow, and that seems to be good enough for most people. But the signs that another massive financial crisis is on the horizon...

Republicans are the adults in Congress while the Democrats, liberal to the core, will never admit we are being set up for another financial crisis It is a cliché, but true, that history repeats itself. This is largely due to the failure of each new generation to learn anything from the past as well as the human tendency toward the bad habits of greed and power-seeking. Only the names and faces change. That is why the next financial crisis is entirely predictable. On October 23, The Wall Street Journal had an article, “Relaxed Mortgage-Lending Rules Clear Final Hurdle.” The financial...

The Great Recession has lasted a lot longer for some than for others. A new survey from Rutgers University’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development found that “one in five workers - or nearly 30 million people - say they were laid off from a job in the past five years," dating back to the end of the recession in June 2009. "Nearly 4 in 10 of these laid-off workers say they searched for a job for more than seven months before finding another one; one in five workers laid off during the past five years never found another...

And you thought that last global financial crisis was bad. A report issued on Sunday by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) warns that policymakers have failed to address the root problems that caused the 2007-2008 financial meltdown. Instead of taking a long-term perspective aimed at increasing real economic productivity and output — the kind that actually benefits people by raising living standards — government officials have sought to pump up the numbers through monetary and fiscal stimulus. As a result, we now have an alarming disconnect between the performance of global equity markets, which are booming, and an underlying...

Because when President Barack Obama was blaming every problem under the sun on his predecessor President George W. Bush, he just wasn’t go back far enough. Via RCP:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO WARREN: I grew up in an America that was investing in kids. It was investing in public universities. It had a higher minimum wage. It was an America that said every kid would get a fighting chance. And that’s how we built America’s great middle class. Then starting in about the 1980s, we turned in a different direction.COLBERT: You mean when Reagan came in and it...

The Chinese “received a message from the Russians” back in 2008 suggesting a pact to sell Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities on the market, which would have nudged down the price of the debt of Fannie and Freddie and also maximized the chaos on Wall Street, a former U.S. official told BBC. It confirms a report that TheBlaze TV’s For the Record first aired back in September 2013.

"Marking-to-market worked effectively as long as there was a market for the assets in question, but it was destructive when the market collapsed in 2007. With buyers pulling away, there were only distress-level prices for private mortgage-backed securities." "Accordingly, financial firms were compelled to write down significant portions of their private mortgage-backed securities assets and take losses that substantially reduced their capital positions and created worrisome declines in earnings. When Lehman Brothers, a major investment bank, declared bankruptcy, a full-scale panic ensued in which financial institutions started to hoard cash. They wouldn’t lend to one another, even overnight, for fear...

Finance More: Economy Wall Street Banks Earnings Here's How The Community Reinvestment Act Led To The Housing Bubble's Lax Lending John Carney Jun. 27, 2009, 9:33 AM 103,381 53 Earlier this week I noted that I had changed my mind on the Community Reinvestment Act. Contrary to my initial conclusion, the evidence is overwhelming that the CRA played a significant role in creating lax lending standards that fueled the housing bubble. Once I realized this, I had to abandon my suspicion that the anti-CRA case was a figment of the rhetoric of Republicans attempting to distract attention from their own...

Editor's Note: This column was co-authored by Prof. Richard Vedder, the Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Ohio University. Cincinnati and Detroit are separated by barely more than 250 miles – a five-hour drive at worst, or under an hour by plane. Despite this proximity, many Cincinnatians would prefer to believe that Detroit’s horrendous fiscal situation couldn’t possibly hit their city. Not so fast. As the largest bankrupt city in America, Detroit has seen its population drop by more than half, unemployment soar to well over double the national average, and services decline. This is what happens to a locality...

<p>In a startling admission, the architect of the biggest regulatory hit on Wall Street since the New Deal now agrees with critics that Washington deserves as much blame for the financial crisis as Wall Street.</p> <p>Former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, co-author of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, said in a recent forum on the crisis that the government — through its decades-long national homeownership campaign and affordable housing goals — "propelled" lenders and investors to excesses they would not have otherwise gone to in the absence of such political incentives.</p>

Larry Summers won’t be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. On Sunday, he informed President Barack Obama that he was withdrawing his name from consideration. There were plenty of substantive reasons to oppose Summers’ possible selection, not the least of which was his role in creating our current Keynesian policy-driven economic malaise. Of course, the left complains that if only the 2009 “stimulus” had been much larger, something Summers opposed, we’d now be better off. Sure, guys. More Keynesian “stimulus” would only mean we’d now be reeling from even more than the $5.3 trillion in budget deficits and $6.1...

Everyone knows that a weak yen is good for Japan’s big exporters like Toyota. Plot a chart of the exchange rate and the car-maker’s share price and the lines are barely distinguishable, so great is the correlation between the two. What’s more interesting to me is whether the flip side of this trade, dollar strength, is more than a short-term blip. The dollar has been falling against a basket of other currencies for 10 years now. If that process has run its course and the dollar is stabilising or even set to appreciate again, that could have big implications for...

Which country will serve as the trigger for the next financial crisis? Given the continuing rise in debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratios in many countries, it is apparent that a new financial crisis will occur. Most of the speculation has been about when, rather than where. The most likely candidates are heavily indebted countries with a large growth deficit. The growth deficit is the difference between expected GDP growth and the expected government spending deficit as a percentage of GDP. The way to eliminate the growth deficit is by either increasing economic growth or reducing government spending. Almost all economists...

Cyprus --- officially the Republic of Cyprus --- is an island country in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria, Lebanon, northwest of Israel and north of Egypt.  I had to search Wikipedia for that information as I, like most of you, wasn't quite sure exactly where this island was.   This eurozone country, with population just north of one million, three-quarters of whom are Greek and most of the others Turkish, dominated the weekend financial news for those of us who were paying attention.  In a stunning shift from previous aid packages, EU...