By Robert Romano — So much for being the left’s new darling. In his continued gambit to make enemies with just about everyone in the Washington, D.C., former Reagan Office of Management and Budget Director (OMB) David Stockman is now taking aim at the Federal Reserve’s zero-interest rate policies that he says are incentivizing reckless spending and borrowing on Capitol Hill. “All the way out to five years, you […]

By Robert Romano — Since Jan. 2009, the labor force participation rate of college graduates has dropped significantly — from 77.6 percent to 75.5 percent today. That may not seem like much, but it represents more than 1.34 million graduates who should have entered the labor force […]

By Robert Romano — Spain looks to be the next on the bailout block. It is seeking a €300 billion rescue package from the European Union on top of the €100 billion bank bailout it already got. Since Aug. 2010, the European Central Bank (ECB) has purchased about €140 billion of Spanish and Italian government bonds on the secondary market . But before a deal can be […]

Video by Frank McCaffrey

By John Vinci As originally published at ObamacareWatcher.org. In 2010, Obamacare limited the expansion of physician-owned hospitals (POHs) and banned the establishment of new ones. By the end of 2010, Obamacare forced up to 84 new POHs in various stages of development to be abandoned.[1]  These hospitals would have provided […]

By Robert Romano — In 1991, before ascending to the Federal Reserve, then-Princeton University professor Ben Bernanke and Princeton colleague Harold James made the case that “nations’ adherence to the gold standard” caused the Great Depression , and those which quickly dropped the standard and engaged in monetary easing recovered quicker than those that waited. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, in a recent piece, “Anstalt’s Shadow Looms Over Excessive Credit Today,” I took the view that, during the […]

By Robert Romano — Today, delegates at the Republican National Convention will be voting to adopt the Republican Party’s platform for 2012. Included is a proposal calling for the establishment of a “gold commission” that would reexamine whether the U.S. dollar should be “set [as] a fixed […]

NRD Editor’s Note: This column originally appeared at RealClearMarkets . By Robert Romano — We’ve seen this movie before. The U.S. housing bubble of the 2000s followed by the world financial crisis of 2008, and the great recession that has followed, complete with persistent, high unemployment, asset prices […]

By Robert Romano — The “new normal” — a Ship of State lost at sea in economically turbulent waters — will not be undone merely with a changing of the guard. So proclaims one of the principal authors of the hypothesis that after the financial crisis the […]

By Robert Romano — Recent research is shedding new light on just how destructive excessive debt — both public and private — can be to economic growth. The study comes not from a right-of-center think-tank like Americans for Limited Government or the Cato Institute, but from the Bank for […]