There's Something Missing in St. Paul By Lawrence Kudlow
On CNBC Wednesday night, Jack Welch, GE's CEO from that firm's salad days in the '80s and '90s, pointed out the dangers of a three-house Democratic sweep.
On CNBC Wednesday night, Jack Welch, GE's CEO from that firm's salad days in the '80s and '90s, pointed out the dangers of a three-house Democratic sweep.
The No. 1 economic issue this election is gasoline prices at the pump. The tax-hike effect of surging oil on global markets that has translated to a huge spike at your local gas station has drained the economy of its vitality. It has damaged consumer purchasing power, made it tougher to pay mortgages on time, worsened the credit crunch, raised the inflation rate, undermined corporate profits and thrown stocks into the first bear market in five years.
There's no Obama-Biden bounce, according to the latest tracking polls. In fact, as of Wednesday morning, Scott Rasmussen reports a 47-46 one-point lead for John McCain. Gallup has the race even and indicates that conservative Democrats -- including married women -- are peeling away from Obama-Biden.
As Sen. John McCain and the GOP leadership nationalize the drill, drill, drill message, the Republican Party might conceivably be riding a summer political rally. The question of offshore drilling, along with expanded domestic energy production, has suddenly become the biggest political and economic wedge issue of this election. Is there a Republican tsunami in the making?
There will be no more business as usual for housing lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac if John McCain is elected president. That's McCain's clear message in a recent hard-hitting op-ed in the St. Petersburg Times and in various straight-talk media interviews.
"Too big to fail" was the verdict in the U.S. Treasury decision to backstop mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But is the taxpayer risk of moral hazard still as big as ever?
President Bush was on message Wednesday in a Rose Garden news conference, when he kept up the pressure on his a drill, drill, drill offensive. He said he knows Americans are worried about gasoline prices and wants them "to understand fully that we have got the opportunity to find more crude oil here at home in environmentally friendly ways."
On the day after an unusually important Fed policy meeting, both gold and stocks severely rebuked the central bank's decision to take no action in support of the weak dollar or to curb rapidly growing inflation. Gold spiked $30, a clear message that Bernanke & Co. won't stop inflation. Stocks plunged over 200 points, an equally clear message that the Fed's cheap-dollar inflation is damaging economic growth.
Sen. John McCain moved decisively to the supply side last week in a strong speech to the National Small Business Summit in Washington, D.C.
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke made big news Tuesday by singling out the weak foreign-exchange value of the U.S. dollar as the principal culprit in "the unwelcome rise in import prices and consumer price inflation."
Tuesday's Wall Street Journal strongly editorializes against the Warner-Lieberman cap-and-trade plan that allegedly will solve our alleged problem with global warming -- now called climate change.
President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain went to bat on energy policy this week. And guess what? They both struck out.
President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country.
It's rather amusing watching the liberal media launch a full-scale attack on George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, with Gen. Tom Shales of The Washington Post leading the charge.
Surprise, surprise. Having failed to puncture Gen. David Petraeus' story about great improvements on the ground in Iraq, liberals are now saying the cost of the Iraq war has somehow undermined the economy -- even caused the current slowdown. What complete nonsense.
Recessions are part of capitalism. They happen every so often. We've had two in the last super-prosperous 25 years. And it looks like we're entering a third one after Friday's jobs-loss report.
I have really learned to like Ben Bernanke. He's the man. And his interest-rate cuts are vastly more effective than the so-called economic-stimulus rebate plan coming out of Congress and the White House.
What exactly is wrong with an optimistic president who has confidence in the long-run future of the American economy?
Did Bear Stearns really need to go down in flames? It's a question that needs to be asked, and my answer is no.
If Sen. John McCain wants to run as a candidate of change, and if he's interested in distancing himself from President Bush on some issues, he should reverse the declining fortunes of the Bush wartime dollar.