Testifying before the House Budget Committee this week, Ben Bernanke said that when the time comes, the Fed will raise interest rates in order to stop inflation from...
Get ready, folks: America is about to buy a car company. As of Monday, we the taxpayers will own more than 70 percent of GM. Whether the company will be formally renamed...
Does anybody really believe that adding 50 million people to the public health-care rolls will not cost the government more money? About $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion...
When I first visited with Jack Kemp in his congressional office in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s, I couldn't help but notice the row of books on his desk. There...
In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan's popularity and policies moved American politics firmly to the right. In only 100 days, Barack Obama's politics and policies have...
How far will the Obama administration move to assert regulatory control over key sectors of the economy? Are we moving away from democratic capitalism, and toward some...
Is bailout nation about to strike again? Sure looks like it. According to a bunch of front-page news stories, life-insurance companies are about to get TARPed. This is...
Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), probably the most knowledgeable man in Congress about the car bailout, and someone who argued months ago in favor of a pre-planned...
Note that the $250,000 cut-off point for the tax is the same line drawn in the sand in Obama's budget for tax hikes on investors and successful earners. The president is...
But as things stand now, there still is no clear roadmap for the dissolution of AIG. There are ideas, but nothing is set in concrete. And as for the $165 million or so...
Out of the blue, bank stocks mounted an impressive rally this week, jumping nearly 40 percent on the S&P financial list. One after another, big-bank CEOs...
You can say a lot of things about President George W. Bush's big-government mistakes. But blaming the Bush tax cuts for the credit-crunched downturn is utter nonsense....
How do you explain it when jobs plunge and stocks surge? That’s what happened Friday as the January employment report revealed a disastrous 598,000 drop in payrolls....
Mustard seeds planted a while back are now pointing to economic recovery. The huge energy tax cut is one such mustard seed. The related inflation collapse is another. By...
Clinton economic adviser Alice Rivlin made the same point in testimony before the House Budget Committee. Her message: Divide up the package and slow down the...
The surprising number of no votes suggests that both parties will keep Geithner on a short leash. And it was President Obama who ran over to the Treasury Department to...
Media commentators regularly compare the current downturn with the Great Depression, which seems like a big stretch. And there's a good chance Reagan was...
Nobody really believes infrastructure spending will end the recession or create permanent new jobs. However, it's interesting just how much the Obama plan has changed...
The Republican leader is drawing a clear line in the sand. Okay, good. But the GOP has got to do more. It must start talking about tax cuts to grow the economy. And it...
The Republican leader is drawing a clear line in the sand. Okay, good. But the GOP has got to do more. It must start talking about tax cuts to grow the economy. And it...
And then in today's meeting Biden talked about the stimulus package with all that new spending. It's going to be an avalanche of government spending.In today's Wall...
However, the really big news is not the fed funds target. It's this sentence: "The focus of the Committee's policy going forward will be to support the functioning of...
If Sen. Corker's plan had prevailed, with UAW support, many believe it would have had 90 votes in the Senate. GM could have gone forward with a clean-as-a-whistle...
It's a tough choice -- especially for Republicans, most of whom want to vote against bailout nation and stop big-government encroachment on our free-market economy....
When asked about tax hikes on Monday, Obama said the debate is between repeal and not-renewal. In other words, repeal the Bush tax cuts in 2009, thereby raising tax...
But all this brings up a whole new problem in American finance: How are we going to transport and deliver trillions of dollars of new government money? It's not an easy...
Well, for almost two years Obama has talked about cutting taxes for 95 percent of the people. McCain has no such record. And even though McCain has launched a strong Joe...
I've never forgotten that advice. Mundell was saying: Choose the best policies as put forth by the great economic philosophers without being too rigid. ...
Behind all this, the credit system is completely frozen. Banks are now loathe to lend even to each other in the overnight markets that are so vital to the...
The investor class is a huge voting bloc. Shareholders in recent national elections represented nearly two out of every three votes cast. And most surveys...
The financial crisis and economic downturn clearly have buried Sen. McCain in recent weeks. Some of McCain's supporters think he can turn the page on the economy Tuesday...
IndyMac was in fact taken over by the FDIC, becoming the IndyMac Federal Bank, while WaMu was acquired by JPMorgan Chase and Wachovia by Citigroup. So far as I know, not...
In the meantime, as the Treasury holds the loans, the government will get monthly cash-flows coming in on the mortgages, or on any other loans that it owns. So it is...
This is similar to the RTC story twenty years ago, when Bill Seidman presided over similar asset sales from bankrupt S&Ls and wound up making money for Uncle Sam and his...
All this was necessary. A collapse of AIG would have been unfathomable -- it is simply too interconnected globally. But it turns out this rescue mission only elevated...