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Small Business Isn’t Holding Its Breath For A Good Jobs Report
Tweet Share on Facebook July 5, 2012 CommentRonald Lazof is managing director of Prism Advisers, LLC and a Job Creators Alliance member.
The month of June has not been kind to the U.S. economy. A series of discouraging reports, including this week's troubling manufacturing numbers, could be a harbinger for a disappointing jobs report this Friday, indicating that a full economic recovery is far from over.
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Government Agency Turns Barclays Settlement Into a Power Grab
Tweet Share on Facebook July 3, 2012 CommentHester Peirce is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Last week, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, known as the CFTC, confirmed its regulatory jurisdiction has no bounds and that it is unwilling to play by the rules laid out by Congress. First, the CFTC announced a $200 million settlement with Barclays based on the international megabank's alleged attempts to manipulate two widely used global financial benchmarks, the London Interbank Offered Rate and the Euro Interbank Offered Rate. In the settlement, the CFTC attempts to take over the process that creates those benchmarks. Second, it issued its long-awaited cross-border guidance, which set forth its aggressive plans to regulate derivatives transactions all over the world.
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Debt Forgiveness Would Revive the Economy
Tweet Share on Facebook July 2, 2012 CommentJames Rickards is a hedge fund manager in New York City and the author ofCurrency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis from Portfolio/Penguin. Follow him on Twitter: @JamesGRickards
It's time for a candid dialogue on one of the most fraught subjects in U.S. economics—debt forgiveness. The country is awash in unpayable debt that acts like an anchor on growth. If creditors insist on repayment in full and if policymakers continue to support creditor demands at taxpayer expense, the current liquidity trap will accelerate its downward spiral. Notions such as "the sanctity of contract" and the "moral obligation" to repay debt are all well and good in normal economic times. Yet, the times are far from normal.
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Open Online Courses Are No Substitutes for Classroom Learning
Tweet Share on Facebook June 29, 2012 CommentJoshua Kim is the Director of Learning and Technology for the Master of Health Care Delivery Science program at Dartmouth College.
Excitement about the potential for open online courses to disrupt the higher education status quo is coming from all sides of the ideological spectrum. The successful Stanford open artificial intelligence course, with 150,000 "students," and the subsequent $60 million Harvard/MIT edX announcement (not to mention the for-profit Coursera and Udacity spinoffs) are driving great expectations that higher education will finally mirror other information industries in leveraging the Internet to scale. The latest example of this enthusiasm comes from two distinguished educators affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford: John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe.
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Why Nations Succeed
Tweet Share on Facebook June 29, 2012 CommentMr. Hahn is director of economics at the Smith School, University of Oxford and chief economist at the Legatum Institute. Mr. Passell is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute and the economics editor of the Legatum Institute's Democracy Lab. They are co-founders of Regulation2point0.org, a web portal on regulatory policy.
What does it really take to succeed in economic development? Try unfettered trade and a market environment that stabilizes prices, keeps regulation to a minimum, and encourages free enterprise. That, anyway, is the conventional view that emerged after a half century of botched efforts at top-down planning in Africa and Latin America.
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Economists Agree: Tax Cuts Cost Revenue
Tweet Share on Facebook June 29, 2012 CommentChad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
There's an old joke that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they wouldn't reach a conclusion. Well, not quite. A panel of prominent economists recently came to a decisive conclusion: Despite a widely held notion to the contrary in powerful circles, tax cuts cost revenue.
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Supreme Court Healthcare Ruling Dooms Small Businesses
Tweet Share on Facebook June 29, 2012 CommentJohn Allison is the retired chairman and CEO of BB&T, a Distinguished Professor of Practice at the Wake Forest University School of Business and a Job Creators Alliance member.
Small business owners and working families were not served well by yesterday's Supreme Court decision to uphold President Obama's Affordable Care Act as constitutional. Not only is the need for real reform of America's unwieldy healthcare system more urgent than ever, but also there are now far more concerns about the prospect for economic growth. By upholding the mandate as a tax, the court and this administration have ensured that taxes will go up for middle-class working families and small businesses everywhere—when they can least afford it.
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Carterfone Case Showed How Regulations Promote Competition
Tweet Share on Facebook June 28, 2012 CommentDavid Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbrodwin.
This week marks the 44th anniversary of the Federal Communications Commission's ruling in the Carterfone case. While few remember the device, no one in America is unaffected by the Carterfone decision, which blew the doors off the tightly-controlled telecommunications industry. Without the FCC's courage, we wouldn't enjoy the vibrant, open, ever-changing Internet that we have today.
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Bank Bailouts Are Here to Stay
Tweet Share on Facebook June 26, 2012 CommentGarett Jones is BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. He is the author of Speed Bankruptcy: A Firewall to Future Crises.
As European Union leaders prepare for this week's summit to determine the next steps for easing the continent's financial crisis, Spain formally requested aid for its struggling banks today.
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Why Obama's Deficit Spending Is Making Things Worse
Tweet Share on Facebook June 25, 2012 CommentJames Rickards is a hedge fund manager in New York City and the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis from Portfolio/Penguin. Follow him on Twitter: @JamesGRickards.
J. Wellington Wimpy was one of the most durable cartoon characters ever. Called Wimpy for short, he appeared in the print, animated, and film versions of Popeye for over seven decades. Wimpy was a glutton for hamburgers and was usually portrayed either eating one or preparing his next burger feast. Wimpy was also a con man and devoted enormous efforts to getting others to pay for his hamburger habit. His most famous gambit was the promise, "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."
