While most of us were at home waiting for Santa and his reindeer to arrive, a gift arrived for mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as the Obama Administration lifted caps on how much bailout money they can receive from the U.S. Treasury. The old limits for the firms, both of which are under federal conservatorship, had been set at $200 billion each, though all concerned understood these were fictions. The new limits are… well, there are no new limits (which might be scored as a gain for transparency, …
Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” So after a $787 billion stimulus that was supposed to create (not merely save) 3.3 million net jobs but instead saw 3.4 million net jobs lost, House Democrats this week have doubled down by (barely) passing yet another $150 billion stimulus bill. Of course, if deficit-spending created jobs and growth, then the staggering $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009 would have already overheated the economy. The new stimulus bill is offensive on a …
As early as today, the House is set to approve Rep. Barney Frank’s (D-MA) financial regulation bill intended to prevent future Wall Street bailouts by granting regulators sweeping new powers to control firms deemed “too big to fail.” But as Heritage Senior Research Fellow David John explains below, the Frank bill actually encourages future bailouts by signaling to markets that the targeted firms guaranteed against failure, thus enabling risky business decisions. Worse, by empowering the FDIC to seize and close failing financial institutions, while also establishing a fund enabling the …
It has become conventional wisdom that President Obama tries very hard to be all things to all people when he gives a speech these days. While it often makes for excellent oratory, it rarely inspires action or advocacy on his behalf. In fact, after his recent address on Afghanistan, given at West Point, there was widespread criticism from both sides of the aisle over some of the policy, and most of the substance. Simply put, the nation cannot be led through a war or a recession by simply filling in the …
There’s new evidence that General Motors and Chrysler, both owned partly by taxpayers, are still facing interference in the way they are run. The latest example comes not from the Obama Administration, but from Congress. At issue are the closures of over 2,000 dealerships announced by the two firms last summer. Despite much grumbling, the decisions appeared to be a non-political one, potentially saving as much as $2.5 billion annually according to the Washington Post. But politics did come in, in the form of congressional pressure to keep the dealerships …
It’s been used to buy one car company, give another to union allies, punish non-union workers, undermine the bankruptcy code, enrich Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, keep unionized Zombie firms from dying, and generally terrorize the world economy. Now the left in Congress wants to use it again, this time as a slush fund for a third round of stimulus funding. The AP reports: Democrats are looking to tap as much as $70 billion in unused funds from the Wall Street bailout to pay for new spending …
Last month when the White House released its visitor log for the first six months of the Obama presidency, one name appeared far more often than any other: Service Employee International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern. Stern has every right to expect to be welcome in the Obama White House. He has repeatedly bragged about the fact that under his leadership, the SEIU spent $60.7 million to elect Barack Obama president. Stern and Obama collectively support ever expanding federal government programs and state government bailouts which are rapidly bankrupting our country. …
The Washington Examiner‘s Tim Carney points to news from The Hartford Courant that the development project at the center of the Fifth Amendment takings clause case Kelo v. City of New London has just been abandoned by Pfizer. Watch The CATO Institute’s recitation of the case: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N1svadJQ40[/youtube]
Nolan Finley at The Detroit News reports: Workers in Barack Obama’s new economic order fall into two categories — those who are worthy of the president’s energies, and those who aren’t. You may be surprised to learn where you rank. Obama doesn’t weigh the value of workers based on their paychecks, what they do or whether they slip their feet into wingtips or steel-toed boots in the morning. His sole interest is in whether they have a union card in their wallet. If they do, the president is in their …
Sunday, CIT Group, with $71 billion in assets one of the largest small business lenders in the country and the recipient last December of $2.3 billion in taxpayer money filed for bankruptcy. It was the fifth largest bankruptcy in US history. Monday, nothing much happened. Stocks didn’t collapse. There was no panic. In fact, all of the major US stock indices actually went up. Even a tracker of all of the financial stocks in the S&P 500 stock index only lost about 0.14 percent. CIT’s failure was pretty much a …
