Free Republic

China’s debt surpasses 300 percent of GDP, IIF says, raising doubts over Yellen’s crisis remarks Silvia Amaro Wednesday, 28 Jun 2017 Global debt has hit a record level in the first quarter of this year, mainly driven by emerging markets, raising questions of whether there will be another financial crisis in the near future. Data from the Institute of International Finance showed that global debt reached $217 trillion in the first quarter of this year, or 327 percent of gross domestic product. "The debt burden is not distributed evenly. Some countries/sectors have seen deleveraging while others have built up very...

U.S. cities that implemented big minimum-wage hikes to $10 an hour or more in 2015 have seen a strikingly similar aftermath: Job gains have fallen to multiyear lows at restaurants, hotels and other leisure and hospitality venues. The data aren't, for the most part, stark and reliable enough to amount to smoking-gun proof. But Chicago, Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — all on the leading edge of the push for big minimum wage hikes — all show worrisome job trends.

Democrats are pushing race and environmental issues when they should be embracing the lunch-bucket themes that once built party dominance. Meanwhile, voters flee. Once giants walked this earth, and some of them were Democrats. In sharp contrast to the thin gruel that passes for leadership today, the old party of the people, with all its flaws, shaped much of the modern world, and usually for the better. Think of Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman, John Kennedy, or California’s Pat Brown, politicians who believed in American greatness, economic growth, and upward mobility. For more than 40 years, the Democratic Party has...

WASHINGTON — Obama administration officials, alarmed at doctor shortages, are looking for ways to increase the supply of physicians to meet the needs of an aging population and millions of uninsured people who would gain coverage under legislation championed by the president... Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and chairman of the Finance Committee, said Medicare payments were skewed against primary care doctors — the very ones needed to coordinate the care of older people with chronic conditions like congestive heart failure, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease... “Primary care physicians are grossly underpaid compared with many specialists,” said Mr. Baucus, who...

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico · More than 120,000 union workers are set to walk off their jobs today and demonstrate at pharmaceutical companies, banks and commercial centers after leaders failed to resolve a fiscal crisis that has forced almost 100,000 public employees out of their jobs since May 1. Union leaders had warned the Legislature and Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila that they would call the strike as a show of solidarity if lawmakers had not resolved the crisis by Monday. Ricardo Santos, the president of the Electrical and Irrigation Industry Workers Union (UTIER), said his group would be joined by...