Free Republic

Appalling as the Benghazi, AP, and IRS scandals are, this dwarfs them all. This puts US national survival, and hundreds of millions of lives at stake. The head of Russia’s National Security Council has arrived in the US on a two-day visit for top-level talks on key stumbling blocks in bilateral relations. He will also deliver President Putin’s response to a letter President Obama sent in April. Putin aide Yury Ushakov confirmed on Tuesday that Patrushev is carrying the presidential letter and is scheduled to meet Obama. Among the US officials Nikolay Patrushev will meet during his trip is National...

...Biden on Friday announced that Cathy Russell, the head of the powerful White House personnel office, would leave to assume the role of executive director of UNICEF.... ...A longtime adviser to the Bidens, Russell served in the White House and State Department during the Obama administration. She was U.S. ambassador for global women’s issues under former President Obama, a role that Biden highlighted in Friday’s announcement....

Why Biden thinks the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks” and “not competition for us.” “Biden Gets China,” headlined the January 2, 2012 report in The Atlantic. As author Steve Clemons explained, “Vice President Joe Biden will take the lead on the administrations next phase China policy.” This marked a shift to a “strategy of engagement with Biden at the top,” that allows the US to deal with China’s likely next president from a Vice President to a Vice President/Next President status -- and to continue both the Departments of State’s and Treasury’s ongoing engagement with other designated key Chinese...

For the past several months we have warned about the pernicious effects soaring prices are having on both corporations ("Buckle Up! Inflation Is Here!") and consumers (""This Is Not Transitory": Hyperinflation Fears Are Soaring Across America"), prompting even otherwise boring sellside research to get (hyper) exciting, with Bank of America predicting that "Transitory Hyperinflation Lies Ahead."But none of this has spooked the Fed into conceding - or believing - that inflation is anything more than transitory. And maybe just this once, the Fed has a point because all else equal, by which we mean lack of rising wages, the best...

On Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria” on Oct. 8, President Donald Trump described Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) as a “communist; she’s left of Bernie!” The president went on to cite Sen. Harris’s views, which are indeed even more extreme than Senators Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) or Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.).But there’s much more compelling evidence to indicate that, yes, Kamala Harris may indeed be communist.Communist Parents Harris’s parents, her mother Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian cancer researcher, and Donald Harris, a Jamaican economist, were both hard-core leftists.In the early 1960s, the couple were active in the Berkeley-based Afro-American Association.According...

Since Osama bin Laden made his first appearance in almost three years on Friday, the government and the news media have exhaustively scrutinized his video for clues as to the Saudi terrorist's whereabouts and well-being. ...his message has been dismissed as meaningless psychological warfare and propaganda, put forward in a claim for relevance on the sixth anniversary of September 11. But what bin Laden actually says in his "message from Sheikh Osama bin Laden to the American people" has the potential to be quite revealing. Gone is any mention of Israel, of the Christian and Jewish crusaders, or of the...

If you were president of the United States, would you hire an alleged former spy for Fidel Castro to be ambassador to El Salvador, a country teetering on the brink of hard-core socialism? President Obama just did. On Dec. 9, Obama nominated Mari Del Carmen Aponte to be ambassador to El Salvador, despite the fact that in the late 1990s, the FBI discovered that she was working with Cuban intelligence officers. According to Insight Magazine, "When the FBI eventually questioned her about her involvement with Cuban intelligence, she reportedly refused to cooperate." Why would Aponte escape the Obama administration's scrutiny?...

John W. Courtney's world collapsed at dinnertime on a Friday in July 2001. That's when he learned from a television newscast that much of the $200,000 that he had saved from his construction job over a 30-year period was lost when his Chicago-area bank was shut down after pursuing a failed strategy of subprime loans. Seven years later, the Vietnam War veteran has yet to recoup $85,000 of his uninsured losses from Superior Bank's failure. And he watches in disbelief as one of the bank's former top officials, billionaire hotel heiress Penny Pritzker, leads the record-breaking fundraising machine of Democratic...

Ten years have passed since the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the worst financial panic since the Great Depression.  Now it seems that some of the lessons learned back then are being forgotten.  Growing debt burdens in emerging markets are igniting new fears of a crisis that could shake economies everywhere. This time, the debt is not mortgages or deficit spending.  The new crisis involves corporate debt and bonds. What is setting off alarms is the recent collapse of the Turkish lira, which has lost more than forty percent of its value.  Turkish banks and companies borrowed heavily over the past few years to finance infrastructure...

After this "reclassification" of intent, the State will probably appeal to the California Supreme Court. Gov. Jerry Brown was recently ordered by the state’s 3rd Appellate District Court to repay more than $331 million in funds the state illegally diverted from a national fund intended to help homeowners struggling with foreclosures from the housing crisis. Instead of complying with the court order, Democrats are pushing through a bill to legitimize the theft of funds. The Assembly already passedAssembly Bill 1829, which makes the statutory changes related to the National Mortgage justifying this theft. AB 1829 was passed on a party...

WASHINGTON -- The Securities and Exchange Commission tapped Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive Adam Storch on Friday to serve as the agency's first-ever chief operating officer of the enforcement division. The new hire represents the latest personnel change at the SEC in its effort to improve its operations following its failure to detect Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme. Enforcement Division Director Robert Khuzami created Mr. Storch's position of managing executive as part of the major re-structuring effort he announced earlier this year. Mr. Storch will oversee division operations that include budget, information technology and administrative services. He will also supervise...

[I begin] with the story of a series of Socialist scholars conferences that Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between the years 1983 and 1985. And when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I truly was amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career. It was at this Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-’80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career. [T]hese Socialist...

Trump ends Obama’s “slush fund” policy of illegally diverting settlement money from actual victims to Obama’s favorite left wing groups that had no legal claim to the money While working as a “community organizer,” Barack Obama filed lawsuits which forced banks to give mortgages to people with bad credit and low incomes. As a result, many of these people ended up defaulting on their mortgages. As their attorney, Obama collected $23,000 in legal fees for himself. Then in April 2013, during Obama’s second term as President, the Washington Post reported that President Obama was still pressuring banks “to make home...

November 2, 2008 To: Senator Obama From: Transition Economic Team Subject: Participation in G20 Meeting Under pressure from President Sarkozy and some other European leaders, President Bush has called the leaders of the G20 countries to Washington for a meeting on November 15 to discuss the international financial crisis. There has been speculation that the President-elect will be invited, though the White House official who informed the campaign of Bush’s intention to convene the meeting did not say such an invitation would be extended. Because an invitation, should one be forthcoming, would presumably be made soon after the election, we...

Financial Crisis: The Republican platform put forward in Cleveland is a lively and conservative document, full of great ideas to make America great again. But one thing stands out as a truly bad idea: reviving the partly-repealed Glass-Steagall Act. "We support reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibits commercial banks from engaging in high risk activities," says the platform document. What? It was one of the Democrats' big talking points during the 2007-2008 financial crisis and after that a major cause of the panic was due to Bill Clinton in 1999 foolishly going along with the Republicans to get rid of...

US authorities are targeting Deutsche Bank for a record $14 billion fine, mark(ing) the latest blow to Germany’s biggest lender, which since the 2008 financial crisis has run a gauntlet of setbacks. The weighty demand from the Department of Justice (DoJ) comes after Deutsche has already paid out billions in fines over interest-rate fixing and sanctions violations, and as it battles through some 8,000 ongoing legal cases and a painful restructuring. […] Deutsche Bank is among several major financial institutions accused by US authorities of misleading investors about the values and quality of complex mortgage-backed securities sold before the 2008...

Hedge funds have started to pull some of their business from Deutsche Bank, setting up a potential showdown with German authorities over the future of the country’s largest lender. As its shares fell sharply in New York trading, Deutsche recirculated a statement emphasising its strong financial position. European regulators and government officials have kept a low profile in public over Deutsche’s deepening woes. However, in private they have struck a sanguine tone, stressing that in extremis there is scope under European regulation to inject state funds to support the bank, provided it is done in line with market conditions. Marcel...

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Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) on Monday notched a major legal win when a U.S. appeals court overturned a $1.27 billion penalty handed down in a high-profile fraud case tied to mortgages sold by its Countrywide unit prior to the financial crisis of 2008.

Washington • Sen. Bob Bennett said Thursday he was unaware that anyone on his staff got special home loans through CountryWide Finance Corp. as alleged in a congressional letter delivered to the Senate Ethics Committee. But the Utah Republican said he would cooperate fully with any ethics investigation that takes place. “I do not have a loan with CountryWide and I do not inquire as to where my staffers go to get their mortgages,” Bennett said in an interview with The Tribune. “I have full faith in the integrity of the staff and the matter is going to be in...