Free Republic

Maybe the problem with all of the government can be summarized by what the Federal Reserve is doing. The Federal Reserve lost $114.3 billion in 2023 and doesn’t seem to care. Maybe that is why the federal government has run up $34 trillion in debt, while they pretend government programs are paid for. They don’t care. They can always print more money. So what does the Federal Reserve do on its books when it has this massive loss? It just books a fictitious asset and fictitious equity. It cooks the books. It has no justification to claim it has money...

Thanks to The Federal Reserve, office property values have gone crazy despite rising vacancy rates. US office space vacancies (white line) have soared since 2008 as The Fed’s massive monetary expansion (blue and green line) has not helped. But Fed monetary expansion DID help drive office prices! At least until 2022, when office space values began to fall. Notice that office values are falling as The Fed withdraws monetary stimulus. During the regional bank failures in March, we directed our readership to focus on the next potential crisis: “CRE Nuke Goes Off With Small Banks Accounting For 70% Of Commercial...

Dr. Anthony Fauci - who offshored banned gain-of-function research to make bat coronaviruses more transmissible to humans - has been accused by Congressional investigators of having 'prompted' the fabrication of a paper by a cadre of scientists aimed at disproving the Covid-19 lab-leak theory.On February 1, 2020, Fauci and his boss, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, and at least eleven other scientists participated in a conference call during which several of them warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China - may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.Three days after the call, four participants from the call...

Owners of electric vehicles are finally admitting that recharging away from home is a total "logistical nightmare," between finding charging stations, and the fact that in the best case scenarios it takes 30 to 40 minutes, and up to two hours, to recharge."We're going through the planning process of how easily Maddie can get from Albany to Gettysburg [College] and where she can charge the car," said YouTube personality Steve Hammes, who leased a Hyunday Kona Electric SUV for his 17-year-old daughter, Maddie."It makes me a little nervous. We want fast chargers that take 30 to 40 minutes -- it...

What about the liquid assets? Well, the FT report goes on to notes that until Friday afternoon, Bankman-Fried was looking to sell the $472MM of Robinhood shares, the largest liquid asset listed for FTX Trading, in privately negotiated deals he was arranging on the messaging app Signal, according to an FT source. As a reminder, SBF acquired a 7.6% stake in Robinhood in May, a transaction which delayed (but did not halt) the company's collapse into oblivion. As part of the attempted firesale, Bankman-Fried was entertaining offers at a 20% discount to Robinhood’s VWAP price, or about $9 per share,...

New details on Mar-a-Lago raid come to light As reported earlier today — President Trump declassified a binder on January 19th, 2021 that contains hundreds of pages about the Crossfire Hurricane scandal. It contains damaging information about the corrupt actors involved with our government. Two different DOJ Attorney General’s have defied President Trump’s direct lawful order to publish the binder in the Federal Register. It’s been 19 months as the DOJ defies the order, and every FOIA request to make it public. Can we now raid the homes of acting AG Monty Wilkinson, and Merrick Garland? The DOJ had already...

Just months after Elon Musk had a public spat on Twitter about what the true cost of “solving world hunger would be”, the head of the U.N.’s World Food Program is urging billionaires to “step up” and confront the global threat of food insecurity. The WFP boss had previously said “All we need is $6.6B—just .36% of the top 400 US billionaires’ net worth increase last year” in order to control a humanitarian crisis where in 42 million people in 43 countries face famine. Musk had previously offered $6 billion if the World Food Programme could provide him “open sourced...

People are fed up with the urban utopian socialist experiment in California. One business owner barricaded a public street in Sacramento to prevent a further spillover in crime from other areas. “The game is over. We’re taking back our streets,” business owner Rich Eaton told FOX40. He barricaded part of Railroad Drive to prevent the commercial area from additional car burglaries, rampant building theft, prostitution, and homeless encampments. “The city’s dereliction of duty has just come to a boiling point and I’m really just begging for help,” Eaton said, adding he has complained about the out-of-control crime to the mayor....

Make no doubt about it, there’s something seriously disturbing about the state of the recent Covid lockdowns taking place in Shanghai. Even for China. Here is what the outbreak looks like, if we are to believe the numbers coming out of China. You’ll have to excuse me for being frank, but I simply don’t believe them. China has lied about nearly everything since the beginning of the pandemic, and they certainly don’t have the rest of the world’s best interest in mind now that they are allying with Russia economically. Source: NY Times Rather, I believe the numbers are likely...

The megadrought in the US West continues to wreak havoc as Federal officials weigh reducing water deliveries downstream on the Colorado River to prevent shuttering of a massive dam that provides power to millions of people, according to AP News. Last month, Lake Powell dropped to 3,525 feet (1,075 meters), the lowest level since the federal government dammed the Colorado River at Glen Canyon (located in northern Arizona) more than five decades ago. This has caused officials at the Interior Department to propose holding back water at the dam to maintain the dam’s ability to generate power. Tanya Trujillo, the...

In a time when various “developed world” intelligence agencies are filling up petabytes of hard disk space with domestic phone recordings and tracking their own citizens who – in the pursuit of a “liberal” agenda – have been escalated to a greater terrorist threat than actual foreign terrorists, some people have had enough and are throwing their smart phones into the trash and replacing them with “dumbphones” instead. One among them is seventeen-year-old Robin West, who according to the BBC is an anomaly among her peers: “she doesn’t have a smartphone.” Instead of scrolling through apps like TikTok and Instagram...

As American workers and businesses struggle with the fallout from the most vicious bout of inflation in 40 years, workers across the US are struggling as wage growth lags behind inflation. For example, federal jobs data released last month showed that wage growth was disappointingly slow, as the YoY growth rate actually declined from January, coming in at just 5.1% (and missing the Wall Street consensus forecast of 5.8%). Since the start of the pandemic, most economists expected near-record numbers of open jobs would force employers to hike wages significantly. And while wages did indeed climb for public-facing workers during...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and President Putin ordering nuclear deterrent forces to be placed on “special” alert has scared the bejesus out of many in the western world who are now panic searching where to buy potassium iodide in case of nuclear war. Potassium iodide can help block radioactive iodine from being absorbed by the thyroid gland, therefore protecting the gland from radiation injury during a nuclear incident.After Putin called for his nuclear forces to be combat-ready last week, U.S. Google search trends of “iodide pills” surged to the highest level since 2011, when the Fukushima nuclear disaster unfolded. Like...

Consumer goods companies are raising prices of ‘essential everyday’ items on Americans as inflation soars to multi-decade highs. The latest to do so is Colgate-Palmolive, an American multinational consumer products company, announced a new expensive line of toothpaste, according to Reuters. Last week, Colgate-Palmolive CEO Noel Wallace told an industry conference that its new Optic White Pro Series toothpaste would be “vital” to its ability to raise prices. The new 3-ounce tube of premium toothpaste will cost a whopping $10.For some context, Statista notes the average price of leading toothpaste brands in the U.S. in 2019 averaged between $4 and...

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday accused a conservative financial news website with a significant American readership of amplifying Kremlin propaganda and alleged five media outlets targeting Ukrainians have taken direction from Russian spies. The officials said Zero Hedge, which has 1.2 million Twitter followers, published articles created by Moscow-controlled media that were then shared by outlets and people unaware of their nexus to Russian intelligence. The officials did not say whether they thought Zero Hedge knew of any links to spy agencies and did not allege direct links between the website and Russia. Zero Hedge denied the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday accused a conservative financial news website with a significant American readership of amplifying Kremlin propaganda and alleged five media outlets targeting Ukrainians have taken direction from Russian spies. The officials said Zero Hedge, which has 1.2 million Twitter followers, published articles created by Moscow-controlled media that were then shared by outlets and people unaware of their nexus to Russian intelligence. The officials did not say whether they thought Zero Hedge knew of any links to spy agencies and did not allege direct links between the website and Russia. Zero Hedge denied the...

The hashtag #EmptyShelvesJoe was one of the hottest trends across Twitter Thursday as people en masse are waking up to the fact that international supply chains are clogged, and shortages have resulted in empty store shelves at their local retailer. The hashtag, number one in the US on Thursday, comes one day after President Biden issued a port directive to operate 24/7 to alleviate snarled supply chains. But the move to have Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a point of entry for 40% of all US containerized goods, work in hyperdrive to alleviate congestion is “too little, too...

The great computer chip shortage of 2021 will likely get worse before it gets better. This conclusion was reached following brief study and anecdotal review. Moreover, while COVID lockdowns may have initially triggered the shortage, several decades of shortsighted decisions and simmering geopolitical tensions make it much more than a matter of fixing a few broken links in the supply chain. Here’s why… The world’s top two leading chip companies are Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics. These two Asian firms, combined, control more than 70 percent of the semiconductor manufacturing market. The U.S., which was once a leader,...

A new study by Douglas Wilbur, a visiting scholar in the UTSA Department of Communication, examines the claims made by the fact-checking website Prop or Not that Russian propaganda targets the American public. He found evidence that popular sites such as Zero Hedge, a Wall Street focused site, echoes Russian propaganda in line with the claims leveraged by Prop of Not. Wilbur analyzed over 600 articles and found a strong, positive correlation between Sputnik, Russia’s state-owned media, and popular alternative media sites that are thought to provide favorable coverage in the U.S. of Russia and its allies. “Covert manipulation of...

This week Dr. Thomas Lifson’s blog, American Thinker, announced that it was closing its comments section.It is news to almost nobody who reads American Thinker that a political witch hunt is underway. Parties in and out of government are looking for excuses to suppress and destroy voices that oppose the left.Because AT lacks the ability to monitor comments in real time, and because our position that comments are a forum, not something we publish, is being called into question, we can no longer publish comments.We take this action with a heavy heart.This was followed up by a statement by Deputy...