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 […]

By Robert Romano “[T]he current jobless recovery, along with a longer-term trend toward income and wealth inequality, has some thinkers wondering whether the latest wave of automation is different from those that preceded it.” That was Slate.com senior technology editor Will Oremus reporting on a new study from Pew Research and Elon University titled “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs.” The […]

By Robert Romano One thing both advocates of free trade and opponents agree on is that exchange rates matter. Supporters , such as President Barack Obama, said in 2010 to Senate Democrats that “One of the challenges that we’ve got to address internationally is currency rates and how they match up to make sure that our goods are not artificially […]

By Robert Romano There is no question that younger people are working at a lower rate now than they were in 2000. What is not fully understood is why. Why, since July 2000, has the population of those aged 20-34 increased by almost 7.4 million, yet only […]

By Robert Romano Find out why young people can’t find work! Since March 2007, right before the Great Recession began, the population of those aged 20-34 — so-called millennials — has increased by almost 4.3 million to 64 million according to data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics . Only 44,000 of the 4.3 million — a little more than 1 percent — have […]