By Rick Manning The United States Department of Labor has stumbled upon a secret.  Construction jobs are good.  And in their never ending quest to create equality in the workplace, a senior civil rights advisor with the Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) has penned […]

By David Bozeman While political activism and writing have always been my passions, I always held a day job to pay the bills.  At least till October of last year, when my job of 19 years closed up shop.  Suddenly, unemployment became not a mere […]

By Marta H. Mossburg Detroit’s bankruptcy is about numbers: a 26 percent drop in population since 2000, 78,000 abandoned properties, $10 billion in underfunded pension and health care obligations for public employees and billions more in bond and other debt that make it impossible to […]

By Rick Manning Apparently sloganeering, Joe Biden’s bluster and Super Bowl car ad buys could not pull the Motor City back from the brink. The once proud city of Detroit buried under $18 billion of debt, a taxpayer exodus, collapsed infrastructure and public employee pension promises that cannot be kept has filed for bankruptcy, making […]

By Bill Wilson The second quarter is looking particularly grim for the U.S. economy, with forecasts being downgraded across the board by Wall Street. JP Morgan has cut its estimate for the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in half to just 1 percent annualized from its previous 2 percent expectation. Barclays has come down to 0.5 percent from its previous guess of 1 percent .  Other current estimates for a weak second quarter include Goldman Sachs at Macroeconomic Advisors at […]

By Willie Deutsch There is a fierce war in America between the sugar producers and large food manufacturers.  While most U.S. crop policies rely on subsidies, America does not subsidize sugar.  Instead U.S. sugar policy is based on sugar tariffs and domestic quotas.  U.S. Sugar […]

By Robert Romano You could almost see it coming. Predictably, after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced on June 18 a potential 2014 sunset to the central bank’s quantitative easing program if and when unemployment hits 7 percent , 10-year treasuries jumped from 2.2 percent to about 2.56 percent. So it is with the Fed-addicted market. Because of the inverse relationship between interest rates and bond prices, the central bank — being a major purchaser […]

By Robert Romano Republican Sen. John McCain on July 11 joined forces with freshman Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren to propose reinstating Depression-era separation between commercial and investment banking , known as Glass-Steagall, and a 1956 limitation on bank involvement in insurance business. For McCain, this is certainly nothing new. He had worked with Democrat Sen. […]

By Robert Romano Call it the Keynesian fallacy — an absurd hubris of politicians and pundits — who assume that government spending, because it is included in the measure of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is somehow a meaningful indicator of national economic well being. In Jan. […]

By Robert Romano In 2009, when Pimco CEO and co-chief investment officer Mohamed El-Erian crafted the “new normal” hypothesis with colleagues, it anticipated “coming out of the financial crisis, the economy would not recover in a normal cyclical fashion,” and that “some of the recent abrupt changes to markets, households, institutions, […]