WASHINGTON (AP) — Foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury securities fell for the second straight month in May.
The Treasury Department says total foreign holdings dropped 0.5 percent to $6.21 trillion after slipping 0.8 percent to $6.24 trillion in April.
Japan, the second-biggest foreign owner of Treasury securities, reduced its holdings by 0.8 percent to $1.13 trillion. China, the biggest foreign investor in Treasurys, increased its holdings slightly to $1.24 trillion.
The national debt is nearly $19.4 trillion and is expected to grow, which means the United States will need foreigners to keep buying Treasury securities.
Since the President saw fit to issue “guidelines” in an Executive Order, to force schools, businesses, etc, to allow men to use girls’ locker rooms and toilets, I’ve been following the fallout. Shortly after the decree, some schools and stores began welcoming trans-sexuals, and other gender-confused people, to use whatever bathroom or changing facility they identified most with. One reason given was that such persons should not be made to feel uncomfortable if, for example, they are males who believe they are really females trapped in mens’ bodies, and would prefer to use the ladies room rather than the men’s room.I don’t want to go into the usual arguments, like male predators wanting to see females in various stages of undress, but I wonder – if a male wants to use the female bathroom or locker room because he feels uncomfortable using the male facilities, did the President think how uncomfortable the girls might be with men coming in gawking at them? Transgendered people make up well under one percent of the population; why are we trying to accommodate their feelings at the expense of the, say 50 percent of females in the population, who will now be made to feel uncomfortable? It seems to defy logic, when maybe 80 or 90 females have to be made uncomfortable, so one male/female doesn’t.
Well, about a week after this started, I thought of an answer, but didn’t say anything because I was sure lots of others would also think of it. To date, I haven’t heard or read about anyone proposing my solution. I believe it’s because certain people (in power) on both sides don’t want a simple solution. It really isn’t about inclusiveness for all, it’s about breaking down the traditions that have served us well, like honesty and morality, like traditional marriage and the family, like teaching schoolkids about American History and the Constitution, and making them proud to be Americans. The actions of Progressives and others show just how astute Benjamin Franklin was, when he said the Constitution was only for a moral and religious people, and was totally inadequate for any other.
So here is the solution I propose. Every school, and every large store, has facilities to change, try on things, and go to the toilet; they have multiple places for these accommodations. Schools, for instance have faculty bathrooms, as well as student bathrooms. Since the number of transgenders, cross-dressers, etc at each school, store or business is miniscule, only one toilet will be needed to accommodate them (maybe more on a college campus with thousands of students). One of the faculty bathrooms can be set aside for this purpose. Large facilities, institutions, and stores also have enough bathrooms to set one aside so transgenders, etc can use a toilet or change, without embarrassment.
For showering, I can only suggest that if someone is uncomfortable showering with others who have the same genitalia, they wait until they get home to shower. I do not advocate males being allowed to barge into a female shower room, and shower with them. I also believe that if a man wants to use the female showers, it should only be allowed if he has undergone the full medical change, so he is now a woman, like Bruce Jenner did. Just because a man feels feminine one morning does not give him the right to shower with the girls at school.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal regulatory agency established in response to the 2008 Wall Street meltdown to police banks and other financial institutions, is set to issue new rules Thursday that could reshape payday lending.
Payday loans are small-dollar, high-interest loans used most often by low-income workers to help cover monthly expenses between paychecks. The CFPB contends the $40 billion industry that serves an estimated 12 million customers each year traps workers in a cycle of debt that is difficult to escape.
The new rules will be the culmination of more than three years of work by the CFPB, and the latest step in an even longer crusade by progressives to see payday lending banned entirely.
When a draft version of the new regulations was released in March, the Consumer Financial Services Association of America, the trade group for payday lenders, said a “substantial part of the industry” could be forced out of business. According to a Politico report Wednesday, the CFPB’s own projections show that loan volume could fall by 84 percent under the new rules.
That’s all part of the plan, according to some critics of the CFPB who believe the Obama administration’s goal is to drive payday lenders out of business and clear the way for taxpayer-backed nonprofits — including one with direct ties to federal regulators — to take over the market for short-term lending with an expansion of taxpayer-subsidized loans, called “Obamaloans” by critics.
Iain Murray, a vice president at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., says the groundwork for a federal takeover of the small-dollar lending industry has been laid over the past few years.
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Image courtesy Competitive Enterprise Institute
MURRAY: After new regulations force payday lenders to go out of business, says Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the taxpayer-funded “Obamaloans” will be the only game in town for low income workers who need help making ends meet.
“When all other sources of short term cash are outlawed for people with poor credit, where do they turn? The outcry will become overwhelming for federally backed loans to the underserved market,” Murray said in an email to Watchdog.
Along with the expected new regulations from the CFPB, President Barack Obama’s latest budget proposal contains $10 million for the expansion of the federal small-dollar lending program, administered by nonprofits known as community development financial institutions (CDFI).
What does that mean for low-income Americans who might occasionally need a payday loan to help make ends meet?
The CFPB says the crackdown on payday lending will help them escape the “debt trap,” but evidence from states where payday lending has been restricted offers a different narrative.
North Carolina banned payday loans in 2004 after an intense lobbying effort from progressive groups like the Center for Responsible Lending, which decried the industry as a “debt trap” — the same language now being used by the CFPB as it, at the behest of the CRL, crafts new federal rules.
Three years later, a study from the Federal Reserve of New York found low-income workers in North Carolina were worse off than they had been before the ban. The Fed found higher rates of bankruptcies and bounced checks and found that more borrowers were seeking assistance from CDFIs and other nonprofit lenders.
One of the largest, and certainly the most politically influential, community development financial institution in the country is the Center for Self Help, which is based in North Carolina and was fingered by the Federal Reserve as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the ban on payday lending in the state.
Now, Self Help stands to benefit from both the expansion of federally funded small-dollar loan programs and the coming extinction of their competitors in the payday lending industry.
Some critics see a conflict of interest there, because the Center for Self Help owns the Center for Responsible Lending, which acts as its lobbying arm and has a direct conduit to the CFPB.
READ MORE: Lending Influence – How a progressive group profits from pushing financial regulations
Last year, emails obtained by Politico revealed that the Center for Responsible Lending spent hours consulting with senior Obama administration officials, giving input on how to implement the rule that would restrict the vast majority of short-term loans.
“The group regularly sent over policy papers, traded emails and met multiple times with top officials responsible for drafting the rule,” reported Politico’s Anna Palmer. “At the same time, the group’s financial services business, Self Help Credit Union, was pushing CFPB to support its own small-dollar loan product with a much lower interest rate as an alternative to payday loans.”
With the final rules set to be unveiled this week, critics are pointing to those emails and to a revolving door between the CFPB and the Center for Responsible Lending to claim that the progressive nonprofit had undue influence over policy.
Martin Eakes, who founded the Self Help Credit Union in 1988 and now serves as it’s CEO – as well as the CEO of the Center for Responsible Lending – has been pushing federal regulators for years to crack down on payday lending. In 2007, while serving on an advisory panel for the FDIC, which regulates banks, Eakes suggested allowing banks to extend small-dollar loans to anyone with overdraft protection on their checking account.
According to meeting minutes, Eakes said the most viable outcome of that proposal would be persuading policymakers that there are alternatives to payday loans, “thereby making it more palatable to prohibit payday loans.”
When Eakes pitched that idea in 2007, the CFPB did not even exist yet. Less than a decade later, though, he and other progressives who want to reshape the country’s financial institutions have found the perfect vehicle for doing that.
Created in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB has nearly unchecked regulatory authority over U.S. banks and financial institutions. To the cheers of progressives such as U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, the CFPB has cracked down on auto loans, payday lenders, community banks and mortgage brokers – though it has also helped to entrench the idea that some banks are “too big to fail,” the very thing that the CFPB was, in theory, supposed to fight against.
Payday lenders are the CFPB’s next target, but reshuffling the small-loan industry might not help American workers as much as Eakes and other reformers claim.
Almost four in 10 Americans say they don’t have enough savings to cover the cost of a $500 emergency, so there is no doubt that payday lending fills a vital role in helping people get by from paycheck to paycheck. But do lenders take advantage of their borrowers?
Image via Wiki Commons
ECHO CHAMBER: Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, calls payday loans “debt traps,” mimicking the phrase of progressive groups such as the Center for Responsible Lending, which has significant influence over more than just language at the CFPB.
The CFPB certainly think so. When starting the crusade against payday lending in 2013, the agency issued a report slamming payday loans as too expensive and not suitable for sustained use. A sizable share of consumers end up in cycles of repeated borrowing and incur significant costs over time, the report found.
“For too many consumers, payday and deposit advance loans are debt traps that cause them to be living their lives off money borrowed at huge interest rates,” said Richard Cordray, director of the CFPB.
But that’s not the experience of most borrowers. The CFPB’s own publicly available data shows that just 1.5 percent of all complaints submitted to the federal agency were regarding payday loans.
The Consumer Financial Services Association of America says its research shows 96 percent of customers report payday loans to be useful and 84 percent said it was easy to repay the loans.
Some people do use payday loans irresponsibly and end up trapped in a cycle of debt, but even that minority might be worse off without payday lending as an option. A 2007 paper by Mercatus Center researcher Todd Zywicki suggests that regulators are wrong to look at short-term loans using the same metrics as long-term borrowing like credit cards and mortgages.
In a rather typical payday loan, a borrower might take out $300 with a promise to repay $350 in two weeks. That’s an annual percentage rate of 435 percent – an absurd interest payment, when even the worst credit cards typically carry APRs of around 30 percent.
Zywicki says that’s the wrong way to look at payday loans, since they’re not meant to be paid back over the long term — there is no “annual” to the percentage rate. And for comparisons’ sake, the effective APR on overdrafted checking accounts can be as much as 1,000 percent, according to the FDIC.
“Although expensive, payday loans are less expensive than available alternatives,” wrote Zywicki. “Misguided paternalistic regulation that deprives consumers of access to payday loans would likely force many of them to turn to even more expensive lenders or to do without emergency funds.”
In this case, the regulations will do little to protect consumers’ finances, while driving more people to use the products offered, at taxpayers’ expense, by organizations such as the Self Help Credit Union — just like what happened a decade ago in North Carolina.
“The infrastructure for this — the community development financial institutions — is already in place,” said Murray. “Obamaloans will be the only game in town.”
While President Obama runs around the world trying to make the Guinness Book of World Records for Presidential firsts, his administration continues to work what sure looks like a checklist of petty personal vindictiveness masked by misguided self –righteousness. Donald Scarinci, PolitickerNJ Read more
VENICE (CBSLA.com) — Vandals defaced a memorial to Vietnam war veterans in Venice – an awful sight on this Memorial Day weekend.Stewart Oscars welled up as he looked at the vandalized mural located on Pacific Avenue near Sunset Court. It was covered in graffiti from end to end.
“This knocked me out. So sickening. Just sadness…think of all these people. They’re gone,” Oscars said. “I remember the Vietnam war and how friends went to war, and bodies came back. Somehow, it has to be taught that this is not a good idea. This is actually stupid.”
The memorial was dedicated to service members who were listed as missing in action during the Vietnam War.
George Francisco is the Vice President of the Venice Chamber of Commerce. He also runs a nonprofit called Veterans Foundation Incorporated.
“It’s a desecration. I mean it’s very simple. There’s no sort of other way around it. It isn’t graffiti,” Francisco said.
As the Obama administration prepares to publish a long-delayed accounting of how many militants and noncombatant civilians it has killed since 2009, its statistics may be defined as much by what is left out as by what is included.
Release of the information was first envisioned three years ago this month, as part of strict new guidelines President Obama announced for the United States’ controversial use of drones and other forms of lethal force to battle terrorism abroad. Such operations, Obama said in a 2013 speech at the National Defense University, would also be subject to new transparency and oversight.
U.S. concern grows over possible Venezuela meltdown: officials
WASHINGTON | BY MATT SPETALNICK
The United States is increasingly concerned about the potential for an economic and political meltdown in Venezuela, spurred by fears of a debt default, growing street protests and deterioration of its oil sector, U.S. intelligence officials said on Friday.
In a bleak assessment of Venezuela’s worsening crisis, the senior officials expressed doubt that unpopular leftist President Nicolas Maduro would allow a recall referendum this year, despite opposition-led protests demanding a vote to decide whether he stays in office.
But the two officials, briefing a small group of reporters in Washington, predicted that Maduro, who heads Latin America’s most ardently anti-U.S. government and a major U.S. oil supplier, was not likely to be able to complete his term, which is due to end after elections in late 2018.
They said one “plausible” scenario would be that Maduro’s own party or powerful political figures would force him out and would not rule out the possibility of a military coup. Still, they said there was no evidence of any active plotting or that he had lost support from the country’s generals.
The officials appeared to acknowledge that Washington has little leverage in how the situation unfolds in Venezuela, where any U.S. role draws government accusations of U.S.-aided conspiracies. Instead, the administration of President Barack Obama wants “regional” efforts to help keep the country from sliding into chaos.
“You can hear the ice cracking. You know there’s a crisis coming,” one U.S. official said. “Our pressure on this isn’t going to resolve this issue.”
More than four-fifths of America’s metropolitan areas have seen household incomes decline this century, according to new research that exposes the politically charged reality of middle-class decline at the heart of this year’s presidential election.
The research on urban centres that are home to three-quarters of the US population shows that median household incomes, adjusted for the cost of living in the area, grew in just 39 out of 229 metro areas between 1999 and 2014.
By Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times – Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Immigrants are supposed to be beneficial to the U.S. — so much so that federal law requires them to prove they won’t end up on the public dole if they are legally admitted.
But it’s a stricture honored more in the breach than in compliance, according to statistics obtained by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which found that of the millions of legal immigrants living in the U.S. and collecting welfare or other public benefits, only a single person was kicked out of the country over the last three years for becoming a public burden.
Mark Twain is credited with saying “figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” If he were around today Twain’s quote might go something like this: “Figures do lie, and liars figure out how to make people believe them.”
Granted, not as catchy.
But my quote goes a long way toward explaining something that is bothering many political pundits today. President Obama whined last week that he’s not getting enough credit for the economy.
Democrats are besides themselves wondering why Americans are so angry that they might be willing to elect Donald Trump president when the official unemployment rate is only 5%, oil prices are near their lowest level in a decade and the economy has been expanding for seven straight years.
Why aren’t Americans happier?
One of those pundits made me chuckle Tuesday night when he was talking about Trump’s primaries victories in another five states. He suggested that Americans were somehow being brainwashed by the media into thinking the economy was really bad when in fact it was good.
By Dave Boyer – The Washington Times – Thursday, April 28, 2016
The White House labored Thursday to explain a first-quarter economic report showing the weakest growth in two years, even as President Obama was trumpeting his mastery of the economy in a New York Times Magazine interview.
The Department of Commerce reported that U.S. gross domestic product rose 0.5 percent in the first quarter of 2016, the third straight sluggish start to a year. Consumer spending and business purchases both fell, continuing trends that could have ominous implications for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as she tries to claim the mantle as Mr. Obama’s successor.
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The U.S. economy sputtered in the first quarter, expanding at the slowest pace in two years as business slashed investment by the steepest amount since the Great Recession.
Gross domestic product, the sum of a nation’s economy, slowed to a 0.5% annual growth rate in the first three months of 2016, the government said Thursday. The U.S. had grown 1.4%, 2% and 3.9% in the prior three quarters.
America loves kids, but Uncle Sam has a favorite: children of refugees.
Among recipients of food stamps, welfare cash and Social Security payments, refugee children receive more in taxpayer-funded aid than children of citizens, according to a new report on federal spending from the pro-immigration Migration Policy Institute.
For example, 30 percent of refugee children live in households that received food stamps from 2009-13. Among American children, the number was 27 percent, said the report titled, “Young Children of Refugees in the United States: Integration Successes and Challenges.”
A Billion Dollar Stool to Reach the Bottom Rung of the Job Ladder
Adam Millsap
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
In February, the Obama administration proposed a “First Job” initiative. The main goal of the aptly titled initiative is to help unemployed young people obtain their first job by spending $5.5 billion on grants, training, and direct wages. Unfortunately – but unsurprisingly – the press release failed to acknowledge the most significant factor impeding employment in this age group: the minimum wage.
Everyone knows that a first job is a vital step in a young person’s development. Research has shown that work experience at a young age teaches positive work habits, time management, perseverance, and improves self-confidence. Increases in teenage employment also reduce the rate of violent crime. Yet despite these well-known benefits, the US maintains a minimum wage policy that makes it very difficult for all but the most productive teenagers to find a job.
When the minimum wage was discussed in the late 19th and early 20th century it was in the context of preventing the least skilled, most “undesirable” workers from finding a job, with the goal of eradicating the unemployable people. For the next 80-plus years it was common knowledge that a minimum wage would reduce employment among the least-skilled workers. The only debate was about whether such a reduction was desirable from society’s perspective, as many of the appalling eugenicists of the time contended.
As late as 1987, the New York Times editorial staff recommended a minimum wage of $0 because of its negative effects on employment. The Times argued that the minimum wage was an ineffective anti-poverty tool whose employment costs outweighed any benefits from higher wages.
Consumers have been the missing link in the U.S. economic recovery and are likely to remain so absent a major change in sentiment.
Despite the seemingly endless stream of Wall Street economists who believe the U.S. is about to snap out of its malaise, most Americans think the economy is bad and getting worse, according to several recent surveys.
One of the more glaring examples of how strong pessimism has become is Gallup’s U.S. Economic Confidence Index. The measure gauges the difference between respondents who say the economy is improving or declining. The most recent results are not good.
Fully 59 percent say the economy is “getting worse” against just 37 percent who say it is “getting better.” That gap of 22 percentage points is the worst since August, according to Gallup, which polled 3,542 adults. The index carries a sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
