By Robert Romano “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” That was Hillary Clinton in a paid speech to Brazil-based Banco Itau in 2013 , now released […]

By Robert Romano 9.8 percent. That’s what the unemployment rate would be if 16 to 64 year olds were working at the same rate they were two decades ago in 1997, when labor participation among working age adults was 77.4 percent. Now it’s down to 73.2 percent, […]

By Robert Romano As originally published at https://www.lifezette.com/polizette/voters-in-key-swing-state-agree-faulty-trade-deals-bad-for-jobs/ A whopping 59 percent of Virginians in a new poll agree with the statement: “We can bring jobs back to America by reducing our nation’s participation in trade deals that make it easy for other countries to flood our markets […]

By Robert Romano “That’s your opinion.” That was Hillary Clinton’s Sept. 26 debate response to Donald Trump’s contention that “Your husband signed NAFTA, which was one of the worst things that ever happened to the manufacturing industry.” With Trump now leading in polls in Ohio and rallying from behind in Pennsylvania, Michigan and other rust belt states — states whose […]

By Robert Romano Wall Street investors are betting that when it comes to a Federal Reserve rate hike, it’s likely not going to happen until December . But if the Fed is just planning to hike the federal funds rate anyway — which currently stands at a miniscule 0.4 percent — it should just get it over with. Rip off the Band-Aid. A […]

By Rick Manning Eight years ago, on September 15, Lehman Brothers failed, starting a rapid series of events that resulted in the bank bailouts and the country has not been the same in so many ways. While President George W. Bush famously said that he, “abandoned free […]

  By Robert Romano The global economy took a major hit on Aug. 31 when the seventh-largest shipping company in the world, South Korea-based Hanjin Shipping, filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Hanjin represents about 8 percent of the volume of all trans-Pacific trade , meaning its loss threatens to severely interrupt global supply chains. Billions of dollars […]

By Robert Romano Everybody knows that interest rates are low, and have been in decline for over three decades. For example, in 1981 the 30-year fixed rate mortgage peaked at 16.63 percent. In 2015, it was down to 3.85 percent. On Sept. 9, according to Bankrate.com , the […]

By Rick Manning September of 2008 is the month that marked the freezing of the nation’s capital markets and the politically disastrous bank bailouts that helped sweep Barack Obama into the White House a few short weeks later. The nation’s workforce has changed since the banking system […]

By Robert Romano “[T]he idea is the lower the interest rate the better it is for investors.” That was Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer on Bloomberg TV attempting to put a happy face on negative interest rates, promising based on a very narrow historical dataset — negative interest rates have only been attempted on a large scale […]