This bill would give the US government the power to strip Americans of their citizenship without being convicted

Barron’s published its year-end roundtable discussion with 10 money managers and financial market experts on Saturday. The star investors voiced their concerns about three government-related problems that threaten economic growth and prosperity in this country. 1. Cumbersome government regulations are holding businesses back and discouraging investors from investing in American companies. Mark Faber, editor and publisher of the Gloom, Boom, and Doom Report in Hong Kong, warns, “The regulatory environment is bad under the current administration. I don’t see a lot of people wanting to invest in the U.S. Statistics … More

In the midst of the administration’s efforts to drastically reduce the nation’s military personnel and hike pay for government employees comes this gem: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new director of which was unconstitutionally appointed by President Obama on Wednesday, is prepared to pay a salary of more than $100,000 for an employee to assist in planning bureau events. According to a job listing on USAJobs.com, the federal government’s official employment classifieds site, the CFPB is seeking an “invitations coordinator” to “support management of CFPB’s participation in external events … More

By circumventing the lawful confirmation process, President Obama’s attempted “recess appointment” today of Richard Cordray to direct the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) demonstrates the very unaccountability that pervades the agency and requires reform. Although operational now, the CFPB has been largely confined to enforcing existing regulations, without authority to impose new rules until a bureau director is in place. But so eager was the President to unleash the bureau’s regulatory muscle that he chose to test the outer limits of his constitutional powers to make appointments during the supposed … More

Hindsight is supposed to be 20/20, but looking back on the past 12 months, it’s tough to see any sense in many of the Administration’s regulatory missteps. Of course, there are bound to be a few howlers when government churns out more than 3,500 rules in a year, including dozens unleashed by Obamacare, Dodd–Frank, and the perpetually errant Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But by any standard, 2011 brought forth a remarkable number and variety of regulatory blunders. Fair warning: Our Top 10 list may prove fatal to any bit of … More

The Senate is slated to vote this week on the nomination of Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). If confirmed, the former Ohio attorney general would become the envy of regulatory zealots far and wide—wielding unparalleled powers with virtually no accountability. President Obama, of course, thinks such regulatory hegemony will benefit consumers, but those who embrace a balance of powers within government know better. All of which is to say that Cordray ought to occupy himself in some other way until Congress remedies the bureau’s … More

The Fed has shocked us once again, and it’s probably right. There’s a firestorm on the horizon. It starts in Europe, but it threatens the U.S. economy just as surely, and the Fed is getting ready. The most fundamental role of any central bank is to deal with a financial market crisis, to ensure markets operate as normally as circumstances permit. A central bank does this primarily by ensuring an adequate flow of liquidity to market participants, whether banks, other financial institutions, or other central banks. It is in this … More

The fight to enforce the mandates of the Tenth Amendment continues as one local police department looks to line its pockets by “cooperating” with the feds in exchange for a cut of the money derived from seizures of property associated with drug busts.

Bowing to competitive pressures, Bank of America yesterday scrapped plans to impose a monthly debit card fee. The proposed charge antagonized customers and provoked vitriol from politicians all too eager to deflect blame for the dumb regulations that prompted the fee in the first place. But as much as one might wish for an end to this whole sordid affair, this isn’t it. Nor will there be a satisfactory resolution until lawmakers reverse the policy blunder. The debit card fees are a direct consequence of the so-called Durbin Amendment, a … More

Protesters set up camp in New York City more than a month ago and have spread to other cities around the country, prompting many Americans to ask: What exactly do they want? The decentralized nature of the protests makes official demands difficult to come by, but the movement has released a number of positions that are fairly representative of the left-wing, anti-capitalist tenor of the protests. We decided to examine one such list of demands, and to give readers a sense of the conservative approach on the varied goals of … More