Free Republic

Money Mail can today reveal a timebomb looming in the second-hand market for electric vehicles (EVs). Our investigation found that many EVs could become almost impossible to resell because of their limited battery life. Experts said that the average EV battery guarantee lasts just eight years. After this time, the battery may lose power more quickly and so reduce mileage between charges. Many EVs will lose up to 12 per cent of their charge capacity by six years. Some may lose even more. Yet the cost of replacing an EV battery is astonishingly high, our research found. In some cases,...

Remarks last week by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell about a spate of coming bank failures related to the faltering commercial real estate sector have sent shockwaves through the financial world, leading some investors to run for cover and others to look for opportunities. With the typical U.S. commercial lease ranging from three to five years, the clock is ticking for office and retail property owners and their creditors in the financial sector as remote work has taken off and prompted changes in urban land use. Office vacancy rates have climbed sharply in the wake of the pandemic after falling...

As excerpted from “Inflation: The defining macro story of this decade” a must-read report written by Deutsche Bank’s global head of research, David Folkerts-Landau, co-authored by Peter Hooper and Jim Reid.Ronald Reagan (1978): “Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.” Joe Biden (2021): “A job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and say everything will be okay. Too many people today can’t do that – and it’s got...

‘North Korea is a time bomb’: government advisers urge China to prepare for war The risk of conflict on the Korean peninsula is the highest its been in decades and Beijing must mobilise resources for fallout, observers say PUBLISHED : Saturday, 16 December, 2017, 10:03pm UPDATED : Saturday, 16 December, 2017, 11:26pm China must be ready for a war on the Korean peninsula, with the risk of conflict higher than ever before, Chinese government advisers and a retired senior military officer warned on Saturday. Beijing, once seen as Pyongyang’s key ally with sway over its neighbour, was losing control of...

Something has been going on this past month that has as usual been lost in the shuffle of other mainstream media prioritized news. Lost in the hysteria around the Vegas shooting (of which we still have many unanswered questions) and Harvey Weinstein and Mueller indicting Manafort and the wacky World Series is the rapid rate of growth of the U.S. national debt during the early months of the Trump administration. In October alone, America’s debt has soared by almost a quarter of a trillion dollars. This is on top of already well over $20 trillion. A monumental story. Lost again...

An internal government report seen by Die Welt am Sonntag predicts that Germany will have to take on uncontrollable debt if it doesn't start making huge budget cuts now. It's the same old problem: not only Germans are living longer than ever before, they're not producing enough offspring to replace them in the workforce. The result will be levels of debt reaching 220 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2060 - well above the 60 percent limit for EU member states set out by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 - experts from inside Wolfgang Schaeuble's finance ministry have calculated....

So Bernie Sanders is leading in New Hampshire. That cheers me — though not because he's my ideal candidate, and certainly not because I think he could win in the general election. I'm convinced he would almost certainly lose against all but the loopiest or scariest Republican opponent. Then why am I — someone almost certain to vote for a Democrat, and hoping to vote for a woman, in 2016 — so pleased by Sanders' ascent? Because it helps to puncture the aura of inevitability around Hillary Clinton. Yes, she continues to lead in every national poll by a large...

A rapidly aging population and the government's deepening financial struggles make Japan a potential powder keg for international investments. We try to avoid hyperbole as much as possible at Hedgeye, the research firm where I work as analyst. But after researching Japanese demographics and pension obligations, we have to say that in our opinion, they present one of the most dangerous potential risks to global investing over the next 10-20 years. For background, let's explain Japan's demographic headwinds, which often get bandied about without much supporting data. For starters, with 22.7% of its population above the age of 65 (as...

Obviously here must be trillions and trillions of barrels of oil under the oceans! what if they all begin to LEAK! Even worse... OIL might be squirting up all over the place! Mr. President... you must do something!! If the oceans crack open... WHAT A MESS!Mr. President... we all might die!

For years, states all across the country have been starving their retirement plans. Here's a look at how the crisis is playing out in New Jersey, where the bill is coming due, and the state doesn't have the money to pay it. Even as the nation's economy is showing some tentative signs of bottoming out, another calamity looms: the public pension bomb. For years, states nationwide have shortchanged the retirement programs that cover teachers, police, and other public employees; now the stock market plunge has wiped out billions of dollars from already underfunded plans. California, New York and Illinois are...

Thousands of China's dams are 'time bombs' waiting to burst Fri Apr 20, 4:25 AM ET Thousands of reservoirs in China are "time bombs" waiting to burst, an official was quoted as saying Friday, a day after a dam collapse forced the evacuation of 1,700 people. "The problematic reservoirs are like time bombs, seriously threatening the lives and property of people living downstream," said Jiao Yong, deputy minister of water resources, according to the official Xinhua news agency. On Thursday, 1,700 people had to be evacuated from four villages after a dam in northwest China's Gansu province was breached, causing...

We'd like to think that those we elect to public office are motivated solely by the long-term betterment of their constituents' lives, but if we've learned anything about politics, it is that it is, at best, a short-term business. Just as corporate executives live or die by how investors view their annual profit-and-loss statements, politicians are driven by how action plays with interest groups and voters in anticipation of the next election. We have seen any number of corporate scandals -- Enron, for example -- that involved efforts to mislead the investing public about a company's true fiscal condition. Generally,...

California's Legislative Analysts Office recently reported that the state faces an unfunded liability of $40 billion to $70 billion (and growing) for state employees' retiree health costs, which would require $6 billion a year for 30 years to fund. This comes on the heels of the Los Angeles Unified School District's doubling its estimated unfunded liability for such costs to $10 billion. Those reports ratchet up the magnitude of the state's deferred-compensation disaster from a September review that found California's biggest government agencies faced over $100 billion in unfunded liabilities for existing pension, health care and workers' comp commitments (itself...

President Bush vowed for the first time yesterday to turn over most of Iraq to newly trained Iraqi troops by the end of this year, setting a specific benchmark as he kicked off a fresh drive to reassure Americans alarmed by the recent burst of sectarian violence. Bush, who until now has resisted concrete timelines as the Iraq war dragged on longer than he expected, outlined the target in the first of a series of speeches intended to lay out his strategy for victory. While acknowledging grim developments on the ground, Bush declared "real progress" in standing up Iraqi forces...

As an American, I have always been inspired by the fact that my country welcomes those who seek refuge. And as long as our government officials maintain our borders and ensure that those coming from other countries are screened in order to protect those who legally live here, the concept of welcoming immigrants is a noble one. However, something has gone awry. Indeed, illegal immigration into the U.S. has become an immense problem and a clear and present danger. Documented illegal immigration has more than doubled in the last decade. It has grown, by conservative counts, from 3.5 million in...

Declaring rising pension debt a "ticking time bomb," a California legislator proposes converting public employee retirements from a traditional defined-benefit system to the 401(k)-style plans held by most American workers. Employees hired by a public agency after July 1, 2007, would automatically be enrolled in the new contribution plan proposed by Assemblyman Keith Richman (R-Northridge). The plan would make pension payments for public agencies more predictable and potentially lower costs, he said. Although the measure would not affect the 1 million workers now employed by the state, local governments and school districts, Richman expects the bill to meet stiff resistance...

Many 32-bit root servers currently use the FreeBSD 4.7 operating system. As with all Unix and Unix-like operating systems, time and dates in FreeBSD are represented internally as the number of seconds since the UNIX Epoch, which was the 1st of January 1970 GMT. 32-bit systems can only store a maximum of 231 non-negative seconds (2,147,483,648 seconds or about 68 years). Which means that 32-bit UNIX systems won't be able to process time beyond 19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM GMT. One of the common solutions will be to switch to 64-bit architecture systems that can store a maximium of...