By Robert Romano — What is wrong with this picture? In Cyprus, to avert a bank run by citizens furious over a bank bailout financed by confiscating citizen deposits, with banks reopening for the first time in two weeks, withdrawals from banks are being limited to €300 ($383) a day per person . And yet, domestic, electronic credit and debit card transactions will be welcome . Again, Cypriots will […]

By Bill Wilson — When the original terms of taxing bank deposits in Cyprus was announced on March 18 — wherein deposits less than €100,000 ($128,570) would have faced a 6.75 percent levy and those with more a 9.9 percent tax — it was quite clear the […]

By Robert Romano — How can deposits in Cyprus be unavailable for withdrawal, and yet somehow available for taxation? This has been a burning question for me as I have observed the banking crisis in the Mediterranean island nation — where banks have faced heavy losses on […]

By Bill Wilson — “We do not have an immediate debt crisis.” That was House Speaker John Boehner’s take on the rapidly growing $16.75 trillion national debt, speaking on ABC’s This Week . He went on to suggest that “we all know that we have one looming. And we have one looming […]

By Robert Romano — When the European sovereign debt crisis began at the end of 2009, when it was revealed that Greece had hidden about €30 billion ($38.7 billion) of liabilities from the accounting of its national debt , all the smartest people in the room assured us that there was no risk. Greece was tiny, with a Gross Domestic Product just 2.5 percent of the whole Eurozone. Besides, […]

By Rick Manning — Thursday’s headlines from Washington, D.C. will likely read that the House of Representatives passed a ten year path to a balanced budget proposed by Representative Paul Ryan. While the Ryan budget is a gigantic step in the right direction, a proposal by the House […]

Update: The Cyprus parliament has rejected the savings tax unanimously . For now. The rejection came in spite of modifications to the proposal that would have exempted the first €20,000  ($25,894) deposited from the tax. By Bill Wilson — The Politeuro strikes again. A recent €10 billion ($13 billion) European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout package to prop up Cyprus’ banking system that lost billions on Greek debt comes with a very curious string […]

NRD Editor’s Note: This column originally appeared at TheHill.com . By Rick Manning — News flash. Senate Democrats pass a budget out of committee that includes massive tax increases, dramatically increases spending, never is projected to come close to balancing the budget, and in a tip of the […]

By Robert Romano The past 3 years the $16.7 trillion national debt has grown at an average rate of 10.5 percent, while nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has averaged just 3.85 percent. This is one of the primary reasons why the debt has soared to 103.8 percent […]

By Bill Wilson — Barack Obama wants to double the U.S. quota subscription in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to $130 billion from its current $65 billion level. This is the foreign aid organization that has been busy bailing out Greece, Portugal, and Ireland with $86.6 billion. U.S. taxpayers have been responsible for about 20 percent of those bailouts, or approximately […]