Free Republic

Media outlets and activists episodically highlight the ethical complexities of mineral supply chains that lie behind producing everything from electric cars to iPhones. The U.S. imports nearly a half-trillion dollars worth of tech products – computers, TVs, integrated circuits, and batteries – and another half-trillion worth of cars and machinery. All of these goods begin with raw materials increasingly sourced from places like the Congo, China, or Argentina. Most economists hold free trade as generally positive. But that doesn’t mean markets necessarily consider the ethical dimensions of trade decisions, especially when consumers are unaware of them. For several years now,...

There has been more concern about the market topping last week than we have in quite some time. We have the 20,000 level in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 2300 in the S&P 500 just overhead, and with the Nasdaq Composite eclipsing the 5000 mark as well, it seems to make everyone looking for the market to top. But just because we are hitting round numbers in a market doesn't suggest that the market is topping. STOCKS TO BUY: TheStreet Quant Ratings has identified a handful of stocks with serious upside potential in the next 12-months. Learn more. As...

Small business owners' optimism soared in December to the highest level since 2004, the National Federation of Independent Business said Tuesday, as President-elect Trump unleashes "animal spirits" on Main Street, even as corporate titans such as General Motors (GM) and Ford (F) tread carefully with the president-elect. NFIB's small business optimism index shot up 7.4 points to 105.8, the best reading since December 2004. It was the biggest monthly gain in decades. A net 50% of smaller firms see business conditions improving vs. 12% in November and -7% in October. "We haven't seen numbers like this in a long time,"...

Big banks shouldn't act like hedge funds by making dangerous bets that can ruin the economy. That's the principle behind the Volcker Rule, a controversial part of the post-crisis Wall Street reform. The rule prohibits banks like Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan from making risky wagers with their own money and bans them owning big stakes in hedge funds or private-equity firms. The banks hate it. Wall Street has bitterly complained about the Volcker Rule for years... ...named after legendary Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, who came up with the idea and fought hard to include it in Dodd-Frank. But recently,...

It has long been rumored that Paul Krugman does not write the New York Times column that appears under his name. I have no reason to believe that that is true, but I hope it is. There are not many situations in which the reputation of a winner of the Nobel prize and the John Bates Clark medal would be improved by an act of intellectual dishonesty, but this is one of them. Like homelessness and military casualties, U.S. government deficits are an issue that bleep into visibility on the progressive radar almost exclusively during Republican presidencies. On October 23,...

European Union: OK, quick: Of the seven major industrial nations, what country grew fastest last year? If you said Great Britain, you were dead right. Funny, because just last June after the Brexit vote, many experts were predicting a British collapse. Here's the reality: "Britain ended last year as the strongest of the world's advanced economies with growth accelerating in the six months after the Brexit vote," says The Times of London. Britain's economics community, not to mention its badly biased, anti-Brexit media, now have egg on their faces... ...dire prognostications of market disaster and a global meltdown never came......

Sears. Macy's. Kohl's. Traditional department store retailers have taken hard hits over the Christmas holidays, with sales lagging the generally robust performance of retailers overall. Now, these mall stalwarts are slashing thousands of jobs and hundreds of stores, trying to right-size themselves. It's no coincidence. Sears on Thursday became the latest retailer to announce that it was restructuring... ...Macy's is letting 10,000 people go. And Kohl's warned about its decline in sales over the holidays. Analysts expect Kohl's to announce cuts. A few years back, it was discounter Wal-Mart, the biggest retailer on earth, announcing it was closing 100 stores....

 The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that the goods and services deficit was $45.2 billion in November, up $2.9 billion from $42.4 billion in October, revised. November exports were $185.8 billion, $0.4 billion less than October exports. November imports were $231.1 billion, $2.4 billion more than October imports. The November increase in the goods and services deficit reflected an increase in the goods deficit of $3.4 billion to $66.6 billion and an increase in the services surplus of $0.5 billion to $21.4 billion. Year-to-date, the goods and services...

Obamanomics: The last jobs report of President Obama's presidency came out on Friday. What it says about his economic performance can be summed up in one word: Lackluster. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the economy created a modest 156,000 new jobs in December, while the unemployment rate remained essentially unchanged at 4.7%. Reuters, however, took this news as evidence that the economy is nearing full employment, and the White House boasted that it marks the 75th consecutive month of job growth — "more than two years longer than the next-longest streak." The current unemployment rate is as...

in Adam Smith, Balance of Payments, Myths and Fallacies, Trade This post follows closely an earlier post from today. (I likely have used in the past a very similar analogy as the one I use here. Nevertheless, it works and is worth repeating.) Suppose that we take all Americans whose last names start with the letter “N” and do an accurate accounting of this group’s spending and saving during some period (say, 2016). Further suppose that our accounting reveals that these “N” Americans earned, collectively, in 2016 a total of $750 billion, and that of this $750 billion, these “N”...

President Obama in February 2009 after a brutal jobs report, the first issued during his administration. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times On a Friday morning in February 2009, the Labor Department issued its standard monthly readout on the state of the United States labor market. It was the first of 96 jobs reports to be issued during the Obama presidency, and it was a catastrophe. “With Grim Job Loss Figures, No Sign That Worst Is Over” was the print headline for The New York Times. “598,000 Jobs Shed in Brutal January,” said The Washington Post. There was considerably less...

INDUSTRIAL policy via Twitter is a new development in economics but we may all have to get used to it over the next four (or eight) years. Donald Trump's tweets on the car industry (and his planned cuts to corporate income tax) may or may not have persuaded Ford to keep a plant in Michigan, creating 700 jobs. But the problem with such headline-grabbing is that there are thousands of companies in America, and jobs are being created or destroyed every day; intervening in all these situations is impossible. Even in cars, for example, GM has recently announced 3,300 lay-offs,...

The employment report out on Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET is expected to show that the economy added 175,000 jobs in December, continuing the solid trend of recent months. But the real focus will be on wage growth and the jobless rate, which both delivered big surprises in last month's report. After the rise in average hourly earnings hit a seven-year high of 2.8% in October, wages backslid in November, slipping 0.1% and bringing the annual rate down to 2.5%. Friday's report could indicate whether that was just a statistical quirk. The consensus view is that December's report will show...

President-elect Donald Trump spent much of his campaign promising to reduce taxes for American businesses and families. His Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin, along with Congress, now bear the weight of seeing that promise fulfilled, namely through comprehensive tax reform. Fortunately, a healthy bipartisan appetite exists for lowering the business tax rate, simplifying the code and applying it in a uniform fashion that does not penalize success. There's good reason that America's antiquated and labyrinthine tax code was a frequent target on the campaign trail. Our statutory corporate rate of nearly 40% (combined federal and state) is the highest in...

Health Reform: Remember when Democrats were promising that ObamaCare would cut the deficit by $1 trillion in its second decade? Turns out they were off by, well, about $1 trillion. A report from the centrist Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says that, left in place, ObamaCare would reduce the deficit by between $350 billion and $150 billion over the next 10 years... ... it assumes (based on official estimates from government agencies) that ObamaCare will reduce Medicare spending a total of $1.1 trillion... ...everyone who knows anything about Medicare knows that cuts of this magnitude aren't even remotely realistic......

What he and his fellow Republicans in Congress do will largely determine the direction of the economy and equities It’s the New Year and time for pundits and gurus of all stripes to roll out our predictions for 2017. No matter how right or wrong we were in the past, we’ll make this year’s predictions with serene self-assurance. Although Republicans swept the White House and the Congress in last year’s election, politics and policy will likely dominate 2017 even more than they defined 2016. Why? Because last year, except for Great Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, which pummeled...

Regulation: As President Obama continues his bizarre last-minute regulatory siege without letup, Donald Trump has made it clear he'll undo most of the unneeded rules once he's in office. And Congress hopes to make it very easy for him to do. As he heads for the exits, Obama is engaged in a frenzy of regulation, intended to hamstring American businesses and reward green groups and unions. But while the pace has picked up recently, it's really nothing new. As Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner has noted, Obama's "lame duck administration poured on thousands more new regulations in 2016 at...

Rules: You have to laugh at the Democrats' current plight. They have almost no leverage to block anyone Donald Trump decides to select for judgeships or cabinet posts. They can't stop Republicans from repealing most of ObamaCare. And they only have themselves to blame. On CNN this week, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer was lamenting the fact that Democrats wouldn't be able to use the filibuster to stop Trump's nominees. There should, he said, be "60 votes because on such important positions there should be some degree of bipartisanship." And who, exactly, is to blame for this? Schumer's predecessor in...

Stock investors have long looked to January to tell them where the market might be headed for the rest of the year. And for good reason: Over the long haul, the-first-month-of-the-year indicator has seemed to work pretty well. Historically, stocks have tended to rise in January. And in general, when stocks were up at the end of January, eleven months later shares logged a positive year; when January was down, shares ended the year in the red. Only 27% of the time since 1929 have the market and January parted ways, according to data from Standard & Poor's. That seems...

Trade: Ford's decision to build a factory in the U.S. instead of Mexico, saving 700 jobs, is a good thing. But is it because Ford fears what Donald Trump might do to it, or because it thinks the corporate environment will be so much better under Trump than under Obama? And, yes, the answer really matters. Ford's move to invest $700 million in Michigan, creating about 700 new jobs here has created quite a political stir. The new plant, slated for Flat Rock, Mich., will make cutting-edge electric and self-driving cars, which Ford has said will likely outsell traditional cars...