By Rick Manning The U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reported on the Friday before Labor Day that consumer spending dropped by 0.1 percent in July, confirming earlier reports that show retail spending’s steep slide since its peak in February. Some analysts doubted the earlier reported Retail Sales […]

By Rick Manning As originally published at Breitbart.com. Burger King is in the news—not because the creepiest looking mascot since Six Flags’ dancing undertaker went off the rails but because they are pursuing a move of their corporate headquarters to the well-known tax haven known as Canada. People with no sense of […]

By Robert Romano $128 billion and counting. That is Investor’s Business Daily’s latest tally of settlements the Obama Justice Department has extracted from the U.S. banking industry in connection with the 2008 financial crisis, as Bank of America agreed to another $17 billion in payouts over losses stemming from its 2009 acquisition of Countrywide. Included is $5 billion as a penalty paid to the federal […]

By Rick Manning The Boston Consulting Group just released a study comparing manufacturing costs around the world, and the United States fared surprisingly well.  Writing about the U.S. and Mexico, the authors explain the improved manufacturing environment saying, “Because of low wage growth, sustained productivity gains, stable exchange rates, and […]

By Rick Manning Extortion is an ugly word.  It is even uglier when it is the U.S. government holding the gun, even when the victims are some of the least sympathetic one’s found in history — big banks. The Obama Administration’s Justice Department announced a $16.65 billion […]

By Robert Romano On August 19, this author did a piece, “Yes, bank lending creates money” about a March 2014 bulletin from the Bank of England that suggested “Commercial banks create money, in the form of bank deposits, by making new loans. When a bank makes a loan, for example, to someone taking out a mortgage to buy a house, it […]

By Rick Manning Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will be speaking on August 22 on the nation’s employment situation at a meeting of the Fed in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Yellen’s speech is expected to explain some of the factors that she uses to look beyond the headline […]

By Robert Romano “Fractional reserve banking is a tautology. Banks aren’t in business, nor could they remain in business if they simply warehoused money. Instead, they borrow money from depositors seeking a return on their savings, and who don’t need access to their savings right away, only […]

By Robert Romano Are e-cigarettes a tobacco product? The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seems to think so. In a rule proposed in April , the agency would define e-cigarette cartridges as a tobacco product under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic (FD&C) Act. That, even though e-cigarettes do not even contain any […]

By Robert Romano The old saying, “So goes retail, so goes the economy” is not without its rationale. A primary indicator of consumer confidence, retail spending has been rather predictive of overall economic performance since the Commerce Department began publishing the figures in 1992. When spending is […]