George Soros Lost $1 Billion After Trump Won

EPA : With its Overreaching EPA regulations

Wall Street Journal Calls for State Resistance to New EPA Regulations 

The Public Deserves a Better Deal

The Treasury plan to buy illiquid financial assets has been widely criticized as being unfair to taxpayers, who will have to bear losses ahead of shareholders of the institutions that will be bailed out.

Federal Student Lending Swells: The Next Bail Out ?

Josanne Baxter-Engish, at home in California with her son, above, said she stopped repaying $2,900 in student loans because she can't afford it.

The federal government has long sought to make college affordable to many young Americans by offering various grants and loans to help students out. However, student borrowing from the federal government has grown substantially in the last decade and has put millions of college graduates in massive debt, says the Wall Street Journal.

Stafford loans account for more than three-fourths of federal students loans and are capped at a total of $57,500 for undergraduates.

Since the end of 2007, student debt has grown more than 56 percent.

Ninety-three percent of student loans last year were made available directly by the government, which has low approval standards for loans.

U.S. student loan debt rose by $42 billion, or about 4.6 percent in the third quarter.

Furthermore, payments on 11 percent of student loan balances were 90 days or more behind in

September, up from 8.9 percent at the end of June.

The bulk of loans before 2010 were made by private lenders and guaranteed by the federal government. However, under the Obama administration, the federal government started making loans directly to students.

Because the government does not demand collateral, nor does it have any underwriting requirements, students are encouraged to take as much as they need in loans. Considering the job market is bad for many students out of college, it is increasingly difficult for students to pay off their loans.
Moreover, student debt is difficult to discharge in bankruptcy. Because of this, a borrower has a more difficult time trying to take out consumer loans without paying higher interest rates. Parents that take out loans to help their student pay for college are also affected -- some parents owe as much $184,500.

There are some proposals that could help the student loan problem. For example, students can undergo an assessment of credit-worthiness or impose tougher standards. Both of these could weed out potential borrowers, which would result in lower rates of delinquency.
Source: "Federal Student Lending Swells," Wall Street Journal, November 27, 2012.

America Meets Mr. Romney

 

 

 

 

 

 

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his wife Ann in Schaumburg, Ill., in March.

Anticipating the highlights of the GOP's Tampa convention.

It is good that Joe Biden is going to the Republican National Convention to hold high the flag of his party. People make fun of his gaffes, of his embarrassing verbal forays, but he's no fool and he knows how to take it to the other guy. The speech he is working on, to be given in the heart of downtown, just across from the convention site, will be stirring and stentorian: "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Tampa, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, 'Ich bin ein Tampon.'"
I wish that were mine. It came in the mail from a Hollywood screenwriter, one of the gifted conservatives who quietly toil there.  Cont. Reading

Who Benefits From the 'Avalanche of Leaks'?

What is happening with all these breaches of our national security? Why are intelligence professionals talking so much—divulging secret and sensitive information for all the world to see, and for our adversaries to contemplate?

In the past few months we have read that the U.S. penetrated Al Qaeda in Yemen and foiled a terror plot; that the Stuxnet cyberworm, which caused chaos in the Iranian nuclear program, was a joint Israeli-American operation; and that President Obama personally approves every name on an expanding "kill list" of those targeted and removed from life by unmanned drones. According to the New York ... Cont. Reading

The Buying Power of a Dollar

  

The Buying Power of a Dollar, on a Downswing

 

This may not come as a surprise: You are burning ,through cash today more quickly than ever before.

The American Institute for Economic Research released their Cost-of-Living Guide yesterday, which monitors the purchasing power of the dollar over time.
The report isn’t available online, but its authors say that the purchasing power of the dollar has decreased by more than 95% since 1913. History buffs will recall that’s the same year that Congress created the Federal Reserve System and left the gold standard in the dust. Tracking the Consumer Price Index since 1800, the Institute argues that the U.S. government has been “ineffective” when it comes to preserving the value of the dollar over time.