Free Republic

The revolving door between the big banks and the Federal Reserve isn't just unseemly — it's a time bomb. Here's how to fix it. Fed Governor Jerome Powell also worked in finance, if not banking. He spent his career in private equity, an industry that uses debt financing to buy, restructure, and then sell firms. Powell worked at Carlyle Group, where he amassed the largest personal fortune of any current Fed official, amounting to tens of millions of dollars. It’s not that bankers and other financiers are not qualified to be central bankers. An understanding of finance is important to...

A former Department of Homeland Security agent says that an investigation he was conducting into a fundamentalist Islamic group operating in the U.S. may have helped stop San Bernardino jihadi Syed Farook had the government not shut down his probe. During an interview with Fox News' Megyn Kelly on Thursday, Philip Haney said that in 2012 as an agent with U.S. Customs and Border Protection's National Targeting Center, he opened an investigation into a Sunni Islamic group called, Tablighi Jamaat, a subset of the fundamentalist Deobandi movement. But Haney said that just a year into the investigation it was shut...

Obama channels his inner Al Gore in climate change messaging shift By Ben Geman - 07/06/13 12:07 PM ET President Obama is channeling his inner Al Gore in his new climate push with a public relations strategy that breaks with his first term. Obama, in short, is now talking loudly and directly about the peril of climate change as he promotes an array of executive-level actions. “There has definitely been a messaging shift,” said Brad Johnson of the advocacy group Forecast the Facts. “The recognition that Americans are already suffering the consequences of climate pollution is long overdue,” adds Johnson,...

Is Harry Reid in Trouble?In the previous post, we noted the basics of the Harry Reid-Harvey Whittemore story. What Whittemore did may or may not have been illegal (a court will decide) and Reid may or may not have known what he was doing.But one thing is for sure: Harry Reid has used his power and influence to help Whittemore. More than once.Check out the headlines below. There are several clear instances of Reid using, and attempting to use, his influence to help ease the skids of Whittemore.First, with the Coyote Springs Project: “Over The Last Four Years, Reid Has Used...

From the best of intentions to bankruptcy and recriminationsThe intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they...