Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the four-term Texas Republican, hopes it is true that, as has been said, Americans invariably do the right thing - after exhausting all the alternatives. 

The United States could easily experience a double-dip recession from repercussions in Europe and China, said Christopher Wood, equity strategist for CLSA Ltd. in Hong Kong.

NEW YORK - A London-based commodities trader claims a major New York bank is conducting serious manipulation of the silver and gold futures markets.

Banks remain cautious about lending in the wake of the financial crisis and are instead using their newly beefed-up capital to buy Treasuries.

About two weeks ago the Obama Administration was blushing as it boasted about the “favorable” numbers its administration received from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The fact that the CBO is appointed by members of the President’s own party (the majority in Congress are Democrats) made some skeptical. However, the experts outside of the CBO and the White House looked at the numbers and said, “wait a minute!” The numbers are scary and the budget is pointing at a direction that will make the US appear to be little more than a typical debtor nation. This is not something “down the road,” but just a few years away.

Not many people noticed amid the Democrats’ struggle to jam their health care bill through the House, but in recent weeks U.S. Treasury bonds have lost their status as the world’s safest investment.

Critics of the President’s health care agenda are always looking for the “right words” to convince others about the danger that will come with Obama’s radical agenda. Maybe the most effective rebuttal is not in words, but in numbers.  It is through reviewing the impact, in numbers, that Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) is tackling this sweeping and far reaching legislation.

"Joe the plumber” became famous when he asked a question of candidate Barack Obama at a town-hall meeting in Ohio. You haven’t heard of Frank the carpenter, but Frank has had even more trouble getting his questions answered than Joe did.

I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan and thought it was a great place to live at the time. We had four seasons, beautiful trees, and it was a wonderful place to be a kid. However, it was also a place in significant economic decline and, by the time we left in the mid 1970s, Detroit was a place on the ropes. Like the many “Michiganders” that flew south to escape the economy of Detroit, we often joked, “would the last person to leave Detroit, please turn off the lights.” With many economists indicating that real unemployment in the Motor City is around 50 percent, the day this city dies seems to be drawing near.

Hyperinflation: Extreme inflation, minimally in excess of four-digit annual percent change, where the involved currency becomes worthless. A fairly crude definition of hyperinflation is a circumstance, where, due to extremely rapid price increases, the largest pre-hyperinflation bank note ($100 bill in the United States) becomes worth more as functional toilet paper/tissue than as currency.(1)

This week it is time to consider unthinkable option number three with regards to the federal budget.  Previously we have discussed unthinkable option number one, do nothing and keep spending more than we bring in, and unthinkable option number two, raise taxes to make up the differences between revenues and expenditures.

When it comes to income taxes there are basically two ways you can cut them. You can either have tax cuts that benefit consumption (geared primarily towards the large middle class in modest amounts and are designed to encourage consumer purchases) and those that are across the board (the same percent for each income group) and encourage production (also known as a “supply-side” tax cut). President Obama favors the former because he considers them more “fair” and they have the ability to help him with the middle class which has become increasingly unhappy with his policies. Rumor has it, he is considering such cuts as we approach the 2010 mid term elections. Someone needs to teach him some history.

Thanks to media that have absolutely no understanding of the economic-related news they are attempting to cover, it is commonly believed that the U.S. is no longer in a recession. The Bureau of Economic Analysis’ advance report for fourth-quarter Gross Domestic Product, usually known as GDP, increased at a rate equivalent to 5.7 percent growth on an annual basis, more than twice the average GDP growth since 1950. This would be astonishing if there were any chance whatsoever that it were real.

One of the worst writers in political punditry, a man with a little deserved reputation as a thinker and analyst, is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Sometimes the things he says are so absurd that it is hard to believe that even ‘he’ believes what he is writing.

Whereas I applaud the president’s speech last week admitting that government intelligence agencies did not adequately “connect the dots” to prevent the attempted Christmas Day airline terrorist attack, the next most significant news (unemployment) was glossed over by the broadcast media.