By Robert Romano What’s a president to do when he wants to implement an ambitious five-year program to provide high-speed Internet access to every single school in America, but lacks congressional support or funding? Apparently, in the case of Barack Obama, it is to just assume the […]

By Robert Romano Rick Perry may be on to something. In a June ad campaign that ran in New York, California, and Illinois , the Texas governor makes the case for businesses to check out Texas as a landing spot to escape the high taxes, regulations, and generally inflated cost of doing business of these blue states. “Why have more […]

By Robert Romano “[W]e estimate that the second LSAP program, known as QE2, added about 0.13 percentage point to real GDP growth in late 2010 and 0.03 percentage point to inflation.” That was the San Francisco Federal Reserve’s take on the impact the central bank’s second round of quantitative easing , totaling $600 billion of U.S. treasuries purchases. At the time $600 billion comprised […]

By Robert Romano Since August 2007 when the financial crisis began, the U.S. Federal Reserve has increased its balance sheet more than 304 percent to $2.7 trillion, an unprecedented monetary expansion dubbed “quantitative easing.” In addition, it has lowered the Federal Funds Rate to near-zero levels to […]

By Robert Romano New legislation proposed by a bipartisan consortium in the U.S. Senate purports to bring an end to Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants at the center of the financial meltdown that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008. The bill will wind down $5 trillion of […]

By Robert Romano “If they’re recreating a trail, that’s wrong and we’re going to have to do something about it.” That was House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers’ (R-Mich.) reaction on the Mike Huckabee radio program to reports that the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) Special Operations Division is feeding intelligence tips to law enforcement , and then instructing them to alter the investigative […]

By Robert Romano 8 million people. That is the number of people 25 years or older with either a college degree or some college who are unemployed or have simply given up looking for work all together in this economy. Collectively, they have hundreds of billions of […]

By Robert Romano More and more, on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal targeting of the tea party and other 501(c)(4) organizations, the question is less who was involved, but now, who was not. First it was supposed to be two rogue employees at the Cincinnati office […]

By Robert Romano Things are getting very, very interesting in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal targeting tea party and other 501(c)(4) organizations, with the House Committee on Oversight leading the investigation issuing a wide-reaching subpoena for executive branch documents. Included in the request made by committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ind.) to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew are all of the communications […]

By Robert Romano “[Y]ou can’t cut overall spending without cutting spending on particular programs.” Actually, yes, you can, but more on that in a moment. That was the New York Times’ Paul Krugman in his Aug. 4 column, “Republicans against reality,” mocking proposed cuts around the edges in the 2014 […]