Showing posts with label borrowing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label borrowing. Show all posts

Walter E Williams: Trade Deficit Angst

Donald Trump's primary bluster.   Let's look at the political angst over trade deficits. A trade deficit is when people in one country buy more from another country than the other country's people buy from them. There cannot be a trade deficit in a true economic sense. Let's examine this. I buy more from my grocer than he buys from me. That   ... MORE

Debt Collection, At The End Of A Gun (Update)

by Scott Greenfield.     A good friend came to me decades ago with a problem. He received a letter from the Department of Education informing him that he had to repay his student loans that had been incurred decades earlier. He did repay them, he told me. “You have proof?” I asked. Are you kidding? It was 25 years ago. I threw the checks away decades  ... MORE

How And Why Gov't Will ‘Borrow’ Your Retirement Savings

by Simon Black.    The stage is set. According to financial research firm ICI, total retirement assets in the Land of the Free now exceed $23 trillion. $7.3 trillion of that is held in Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs). That’s an appetizing figure, especially for a government that just passed $19 trillion in debt and is in pressing need of new funding sources.  ... MORE

VIDEO: How Big Is The U.S. Debt?

Andrew Napolitano: What If There Is No Difference?

What are the lovers of liberty to do?    What if all the remaining presidential candidates really want the same things? What if they all offer essentially the same ideas couched in different words? What if these primary races have become beauty pageants largely based on personality and advertising? What if our system of governance is so deep   ... MORE

National Debt Spikes $578 Billion In Three Weeks

By Pete Kasperowicz. Spending frenzy after debt ceiling suspension. The national debt has surged more than half a trillion dollars in the last three weeks, as the suspension of the debt ceiling in late October has allowed the government to borrow as much as it wants. Before the debt ceiling was suspended, the national debt stood at $18.15     ... MORE

Why Overregulation Of Payday Lenders Is A Bad Idea

by Veronique de Rugy.  Combating bad ideas would be much easier if they were all backed by ill intent.   More often than not, however, the opposite is true, and the worst government policies are enacted with the intention to help.   Such is apparently the case with the aggressive campaign by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to      ... MORE

Stephen Moore: Winning the Debt-Limit Fight

Putting the brakes on exploding debt.   During his eight years in office, Barack Obama is on pace to have increased the national debt by a horrific $8 trillion — and, ironically, the folks on Wall Street and the mavens of the media still portray congressional Republicans as the fiscal bad boys for trying to slow down the blizzard of borrowing.    ... MORE

Stephen Moore: America's $12 Trillion House of Cards

A precarious situation indeed.       What is the price tag for the audacious Obamanomics experiment? How much has it all cost — the bailouts, the debt, the stimulus plans, the printing of cheap money, Obamacare and all the rest? The answer to that question is just shy of $12 trillion. That's the sum of the $8.3 trillion added to the national   ... MORE

Joshua Krause: Americans Embrace Debt As New Norm

7 in 10 believe that debt is necessary.   America’s debt problem has been widely documented over past few years, and not just the public kind. The average American is swimming in trillions of dollars in medical fees, car payments, mortgage liabilities, as well as credit card statements and college tuitions. However, none of that is shocking        ... MORE

How Student Loans Create Demand For Useless Degrees

by Josh Grossman.   Last week, former Secretary of Education and US Senator Lamar Alexander wrote in the Wall Street Journal that a college degree is both affordable and an excellent investment. He repeated the usual talking point about how a college degree increases lifetime earnings by a million dollars, “on average.” That part about averages is    ... MORE

John Stossel: The Next Bubble

They're doing it again!      When the last housing bubble burst, politicians blamed "greedy banks." They said mortgage companies lent money recklessly, making loans to people with dubious credit, for down payments as low as 3 percent. "It will work out," said the optimistic bankers. Regulators didn't disagree. Everyone said, "Home prices  ... MORE

Look Out, Taxpayers: Student Loans Aren’t Being Repaid

More government folly comes home to roost.     The more than $1 trillion in student loan debt is a looming problem for taxpayers because the borrowers aren't paying it back in great numbers or amounts. "Widespread failure to repay is a problem for the lender, in this case, federal taxpayers," economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of   ... MORE