The U.S. Treasury is in a bind. Everyone seems to agree that Fannie and Freddie, wards of the government, should be downsized. But how to do it without damaging the housing recovery? Extreme conservatives even want to abolish them, along with the Federal Reserve, Departments of Commerce, Education, etc., etc....

Now the fat's in the fire. Both stocks and bond prices have been falling of late, due to the fear that the Fed will end its $85 billion per month QE purchases of Treasury and mortgage securities too soon. Fed Chairman Bernanke had said that if employment continued to improve,...

Social Security isn't dead, or even dying in spite of the prediction by the Social Security Trustees that it will no longer be able to pay full benefits by 2033. That's because it uses what are called 'intermediate' assumptions of income and tax growth that have prevailed since the huge...

The stock and bond markets are sinking because of Fed Chairman Bernanke's seemingly offhand remark that the Fed could slow down its QE purchases of securities as early as its June FOMC meeting. Now Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) economists are saying that could hurt worldwide growth! Of...

We know how fragile is the U.S. economic recovery just from the past 48 hours, because both U.S. and Japanese stock prices plummeted and interest rates jumped, on a seemingly offhand remark made by Fed Chairman Bernanke in congressional testimony that a reduction in the Fed's QE bond...

The Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA) that supervises the so-called Government Supervised Enterprises (GSE), now including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, just announced restrictions that not only weaken Fannie and Freddie's mandate, but the mortgage and housing markets in general. The FHFA just announced that it will no...

The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee said it in the press release from its latest committee meeting, "Household spending and business fixed investment advanced, and the housing sector has strengthened further, but fiscal policy is restraining economic growth."

Austerinomics, or the policy of starving the beast of government by cutting...

We know who will be the real victims of the cuts in government spending brought on by the sequester agreement, and wealth holders' insistence on lower taxes. It's the next generation; our children. For who suffers most from the precipitous decline in household wealth of the Great Recession -- from...

Fannie Mae (FNMA), or Federal National Mortgage Association, reported a record profit for 2012, a good reason to save the mortgage giant from dissolution, as the banking industry in particular has lobbied for. The government-sponsored enterprise had net income of $17.2 billion for 2012, outpacing profits at S&P...

Paul Krugman is being too gentle with David Stockman, whose recent New York Times 'rant' glorifies the gold standard and denigrates government for standing in the way of putting "free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism."

Like so many in his camp, Mr....

Republican Paul Ryan's 2011 austerity plan is being trotted out by House Republicans once again. In spite of the sequester cuts and a declining budget deficit, Ryan wants to create even more economic austerity. Representative Ryan and House Republicans have to still be living in rural America of...

It's well-known that American job formation isn't keeping up with economic growth, but not why. It's mostly because corporations have been retaining more of their profits and sharing less with their employees, so that household incomes have fallen to historic lows as a share of national income. That has to...

The sequester advocates have gotten their way. The March 1 has passed to reach an agreement to alter the across the board spending cuts, and so government will begin the draconian job cuts that will certainly slow economic growth this year -- up to 750,000 jobs lost and as much...

Come March 1, we will begin to see how much damage the sequester agreement causes. A recent CNBC column by Larry Kudlow illustrates both the misconceptions and reason for the gridlock on avoiding across-the-board spending cuts of some $85 Billion to the federal budget.

Kudlow says

"Looking at...

President Obama's State of the Union speech was all about jobs. So why have so few been created since the Great Recession?

Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen gave a recent speech entitled: A Painfully Slow Recovery for America's Workers: Causes, Implications, and the Federal Reserve's Response. It...

Fourth Quarter GDP growth was a bust. And so cries are rising for the Fed to do more to promote growth (since Congress and the White House can't or won't). Actually the Fed has done more in the past to promote growth -- mainly by ignoring its own inflation goals....

It shouldn't be a secret by now: Consumers are unhappy. And it's not because we are too busy paying down our debts. It's really because no one in Washington has been focusing on job creation -- at least since 2010, when $830 billion of ARRA stimulus spending petered out that...

With tax rates returning to more normal levels from the rollback of Bush era tax cuts, and Republicans giving up on denying debt ceiling increases until April in order to force government spending cuts, there seem to be very few domestic factors to hold back more robust growth...

The subject of juicing is in the air with Lance Armstrong's confession that he and his cycling teammates injected various stimulants to win races. Yet he told Oprah on her show he didn't think he was cheating. "Scary, huh?"

But when it comes to 'juicing' the U.S. economy after a...

Does Congress know that our federal budget deficit has been shrinking steadily since 2009, the end of the 18-month Great Recession? Yes, a combination of cuts in government spending and very low interest rates on the public debt have been bringing down what is really an apples and oranges problem....