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New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) on Sunday defended his recent decision to lift the mask mandate for schools in his state and predicted that local government will follow suit as warmer weather begins to set in. "Our numbers are improving and I would use the word 'dramatically,'" Murphy said while appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation."

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday she couldn’t predict when the Biden administration would begin to ease COVID-19 restrictions after Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Britain would begin to roll back vaccine and mask rules now that cases have peaked. During an interview on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom,” host Dana Perino pointed out to Psaki that the US is about six weeks behind Europe and Britain when it comes to responding to COVID variants like Delta and Omicron.

The currency war salvos just keep on coming. Moments ago the BOK unexpectedly (the move was predicted by just 2 of 17 economists polled by Bloomberg) cut its policy rate from 2.00% to a record low 1.75%, in what is clearly a full-blown retaliation against the collapse currency of its biggest export competitor, Japan, whose currency has cratered to a level that many in South Korea believe has become a direct subsidy for its competing exports. As such the only question is why the BOK didn't cut earlier. The Korean Won reacted appropriately, if only in the first millisecond: then...

He is spearheading a bill in Congress called The Inform Act. It is an attempt to wake up the nation to our dire financial situation so something can be done to fix this enormous problem. Dr. Kotlikoff explains, “The bill has been endorsed by over 1,000 economists, including 15 Nobel Prize winners in economics . . .Never in the history of this country have this many top economists from all political persuasions endorsed a piece of legislation like this.” Dr. Kotlikoff and his fellow economists all contend, “The country needs to do honest accounting.”

Federal Reserve officials are seriously considering giving the US economy—and especially the housing market—an added jolt with more quantitative easing. Fed officials are likely to discuss such a move at their Jan. 24-25 meeting, when the central bank will issue its first quarterly forecast on interest rates under the new communication policy. Two of the new voting members this year on the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets interest-rate policy, have recently suggested they would support more assets purchases. San Francisco Fed President John Williams said that sustained high levels of unemployment, as forecast by many Fed members, "does make...

Reporting from Washington— Amid increasing political pressure and turbulent global economic conditions, the Federal Reserve is letting its massive bond-buying program expire in days without a new initiative to prop up the American economy –- even as the central bank downgraded its economic assessment to reflect the sputtering recovery. The Fed, upon concluding its two-day monetary policy meeting, said Wednesday it would keep a key short-term interest rate at near zero for the foreseeable future to support the economy. But policymakers agreed to let lapse a $600-billion program to buy U.S. Treasury bonds at the end of this month, as...

NEW YORK, March 25 – With the economy on firmer footing the Federal Reserve Bank is unlikely to extend its bond-buying stimulus program beyond a planned $600 billion, several top Fed officials said on Friday. Members of the more hawkish wing of the Fed went further, with Philadelphia Fed Bank President Charles Plosser saying the U.S. central bank will have to reverse its easy money policy in the "not-too-distant future" to avoid sowing the seeds of inflation. The Fed has kept short-term rates near zero since December 2008 and has bought more than $2 trillion in long-term securities to push...

The Federal Reserve has already injected hundreds of billions of new dollars into the economy since the recession started. Normally, when the government prints up more money, dollars are worth less and that is what we call inflation. But inflation has been surprisingly low. One measure of the money supply, M1, which includes currency as well as checking accounts, soared by 26 percent between August 2008 and September this year. The amount of currency more than doubled. But prices barely changed. As Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke goes forward with plans to print up another $880 billion, someone has to ask...

There's something about quantitative easing that bothers just about everyone - including, believe it or not, Fed chief Ben Bernanke. But in contrast to his many critics, Bernanke's problem lies not with the policy itself, in which the Federal Reserve has pledged to buy $600 billion worth of Treasury bonds over eight months in its latest bid to bring down interest rates and stimulate the economy. What's in a name? No, Bernanke's beef is that what the Fed is doing isn't properly called quantitative easing, as he reminded everyone in his speech Friday. Incidentally, in my view, the use of...

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What is Bernanke really doing when it comes to all his rhetoric about stimulating the economy more? Like a good magician, he is waving one hand (QE2) while the other hand fights deflation. The waving QE2 hand is just an illusion. In the past couple weeks I have been trying to impress upon readers that Bernanke has been repeatedly trying to threaten quantitative easing round two (QE2) and in doing so, has managed to accomplish what he has set out to do without actually having to do any actual easing come November 3rd when the Fed Board meets again.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Reserve should do "much more" monetary easing to spur a sluggish economic recovery, a top Fed official said in an interview published on Tuesday. "In the last several months I've stared at our unemployment forecast and come to the conclusion that it's just not coming down nearly as quickly as it should," Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Evans told the Wall Street Journal. "This is a far grimmer forecast than we ought to have," he said, for which reason he favors "much more accommodation than we've put in place." The U.S. unemployment...

Acknowledging that the recovery has slowed, the Federal Reserve announced Tuesday that it would use the proceeds from its huge mortgage-bond portfolio to buy long-term Treasury securities, The New York Times’s Sewell Chan reports from Washington. By buying government debt, the Fed is taking an unmistakable step to maintain the large amount of money that it pumped into the economy, starting in 2007, to prop up the financial and housing markets.

As recovery starts to stall in the US and Europe with echoes of mid-1931, bond experts are once again dusting off a speech by Ben Bernanke given eight years ago as a freshman governor at the Federal Reserve. Entitled "Deflation: Making Sure It Doesn’t Happen Here", it is a warfare manual for defeating economic slumps by use of extreme monetary stimulus once interest rates have dropped to zero, and implicitly once governments have spent themselves to near bankruptcy. The speech is best known for its irreverent one-liner: "The US government has a technology, called a printing press, that allows it...

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Stocks rose on Monday as investors welcomed signs that credit strains were easing and comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke raised hopes for more spending to help the U.S. economy. With stocks at 5-year lows, thawing credit markets inspired investors to scour for bargains among beaten-down shares. Energy, utilities and materials companies led the way higher. Shares of oil field services companies Halliburton Co and Weatherford International Ltd jumped after they posted better-than-expected quarterly earnings. The energy sector also got a boost as the price of oil rose and analysts at Oppenheimer & Co raised...

BAGHDAD - Shop owners long afraid of Baghdad's bombings and shootings are keeping their stores open later these days on the main street of Jadidah district, saying they feel safer after weeks of a beefed-up U.S. security crackdown. It is one sign that many Iraqis sense violence is easing somewhat in Baghdad as U.S. forces fight to put down militants in the capital and areas on the city's doorstep to the north and south. But Iraqis are not putting much faith in the lull — attacks still hit some districts, fear of kidnapping remains widespread, and everyone remembers past periods...

WASHINGTON - Just in time for the fall elections, government regulators are weighing whether to ease restrictions on when interest groups can run political ads within weeks of the voting. The Federal Election Commission on Thursday began circulating a proposal by Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky that would grant an exemption on airing ads outside a specific timeframe. The commission plans to take up the matter at an Aug. 29 meeting and could vote that day. If the commission approves the change, it could unleash a flood of election ad spending and open a new legal battle over the 2002 campaign...

SEATTLE - A federal judge struck down a move by the Bush administration to ease logging restrictions in the Northwest, saying the government failed to consider the effect on rare plants and animals. U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said in her ruling Monday that under federal law, authorities had an obligation to show why the logging restrictions should be changed. The rule change, which took effect in the spring of 2004, said forest managers no longer had to look for rare species before logging. Instead, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management were to use information provided...

Spain accused of easing up on terror watch Signs emerge of serious intelligence and security failures before bombings Giles Tremlett in Madrid, Owen Bowcott in Casablanca, Ian Black in Brussels and Sophie Arie in Milan Wednesday March 17, 2004 The Guardian (UK) Spain cut the number of police units responsible for watching radical Islamists in the months before last week's Madrid bombings, reducing numbers by up to a half in some cities and sending them back to ordinary police work, it was claimed yesterday. A report in the newspaper El Mundo emerged amid numerous signs of serious police and intelligence...

<p>State anti-tax groups vowed Thursday to fight "with everything we've got" state schools chief Jack O'Connell's effort to set aside California's stringent vote requirement for raising taxes.</p> <p>O'Connell, the superintendent of public instruction, said Thursday that he plans to ask the state Supreme Court to lift the state's separate two-thirds vote requirements for raising taxes and passing budgets.</p>