By Bill Wilson — On September 12, the German constitutional court will be ruling on whether the €700 billion European Stability Mechanism (ESM) violates German sovereignty. The decision could well prove fateful for the future of the entire eurozone — and will likely have ripple effects throughout […]

By Bill Wilson — The left has been in a huff over the Republican National Convention Platform Committee’s decision to include a proposal calling for a gold commission to examine whether the value of the U.S. dollar should be fixed as a weight of gold. New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman called it a “very bad, […]

By Robert Romano — In 1991, before ascending to the Federal Reserve, then-Princeton University professor Ben Bernanke and Princeton colleague Harold James made the case that “nations’ adherence to the gold standard” caused the Great Depression , and those which quickly dropped the standard and engaged in monetary easing recovered quicker than those that waited. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, in a recent piece, “Anstalt’s Shadow Looms Over Excessive Credit Today,” I took the view that, during the […]

By Rick Manning — $2.6 trillion dollars! In the entire history of our nation, the federal government has never taken in more money than that in revenues in a single year.  2008 was the last year, this revenue amount was achieved. $3.6 trillion dollars! That’s how much […]

By Kevin Mooney — Suddenly, Great Britain’s House of Lords is back in style and that’s good news for the free market. Some of the more forceful critics of anti-energy, global warming policy proposals are finding expression in the elite unelected chamber. There is Lord […]

By Bill Wilson — Today’s Congressional Budget Office report warning of a deep recession should Congress and the president not agree on a solution to the massive tax increases that will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2013, is true to the extent that the tax increases will kill private sector growth and exacerbate the recession […]

NRD Editor’s Note: This column originally appeared at RealClearMarkets . By Robert Romano — We’ve seen this movie before. The U.S. housing bubble of the 2000s followed by the world financial crisis of 2008, and the great recession that has followed, complete with persistent, high unemployment, asset prices […]

By Bill Wilson — A few recent sets of better-than-expected economic data released by government agencies in Aug. have seemingly made an additional round of quantitative easing — i.e. money-printing to purchase U.S. treasuries or mortgage-backed securities — by the Federal Reserve this year significantly less likely. While the veracity of the data has been […]

By Robert Romano — Recent research is shedding new light on just how destructive excessive debt — both public and private — can be to economic growth. The study comes not from a right-of-center think-tank like Americans for Limited Government or the Cato Institute, but from the Bank for […]

I’m surprised it was only this much …: The Treasury Department says in a new report the government expects to lose more than $25 billion on the $85 billion auto bailout. That’s 15 percent higher than its previous forecast. In a monthly report sent to Congress on Friday, the Obama administration boosted […]