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Can moderators ask debate questions that don’t presume a progressive policy agenda?
Numerous policy issues are shaping this year’s first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as well as the entire campaign atmosphere. These include…
Blog
Freddie Mac second mortgage funding could foment financial crisis
The 2008 mortgage meltdown and financial crisis never fails to be invoked whenever there is any pushback to excessive financial regulation. Progressives regularly bring up…
Blog
Biden’s budget: A continued attack on reliable energy and freedom
President Joe Biden’s FY 2025 budget request of $7.3 trillion is exactly what Americans should have expected: increased spending and taxes. A budget…
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ALEC Puts Forth Ideas for State Pension Reform
Public awareness of the scope of the state public pension crisis seems to be growing every day. That's a welcome development, in that it has…
Blog
Federal Income-Based Repayment Plan Encourages Skyrocketing Law School Tuition
A recent item in The Washington Post explains "how Georgetown Law gets Uncle Sam to pay its students’ bills," averaging $158,888 over three years,…
Blog
Not With Banks, Not With Retailers, But With Freedom
In explaining my policy positions, I often find myself pointing out I am neither pro-business nor pro-bank, but pro-market. My Competitive Enterprise Institute colleagues and I…
Blog
Detroit Bankruptcy Focuses Attention on Public Pensions
For people watching it from afar, the bankruptcy of Detroit — the biggest municipal bankruptcy in American history — may have brought a sense of…
Huffington Post
Want to Revive Glass-Steagall? Try This Wall of Separation Instead
A debate is raging on the left, the right, and even in libertarian circles on the best way to escape from the Too-Big-To-Fail quagmire. These…
Blog
On Dodd-Frank’s 3rd Anniversary, “North Star” is Further Out of Reach
Over the weekend, President Obama hailed the third anniversary of the enactment of the Dodd-Frank “financial reform.” In his weekly radio address, the president…
Blog
The Government’s Wasteful Obsession with Subsidized Homeownership
The government has spent vast sums of money promoting homeownership through subsidies, tax exemptions, and bailouts. For example, in prosperous Alexandria, Virginia, certain people who…
Blog
The Economist on “the muddle-headed world of American public pension accounting”
As state governments across the nation struggle to address a public pension underfunding crisis they can no longer deny, The Economist is the latest…
Blog
Historian: Housing Nominee Mel Watt Helped Spawn the Subprime Crisis
In the Daily Caller, historian and presidential biographer Charles C. Johnson writes that “Housing nominee Mel Watt helped create the…
Blog
Obama: A Sweet Pension for Himself, But Not For America’s Savers or Investors
In The Washington Post, Allan Sloan points out that while President Obama wants to cap American citizens' IRAs at $3 million or substantially…
Blog
New York Times: Obama Administration Discrimination Settlement Was “Magnet For Fraud” That Enriched Trial Lawyers
A page 1 New York Times story today describes how the Obama administration, despite opposition from civil servants, radically expanded a legal settlement that…
Blog
Amtrak And The Progressive Sleight Of Hand
Progressives have always assumed that if something is good, it must be provided through coercive force by a central government. This is illustrated in progressive…
Blog
Cyprus Is A Lesson For U.S. Policy Makers: Too Big To Fail Is Not Inevitable
American financial regulators could take a lesson from their European counterparts. The recent EU bail-in/bailout of Cyprus, despite its dangers, shows that reducing moral hazard…
Blog
What Cyprus (Initially) Got Right — Remembering The 2008 WaMu Capital “Run”
There's no shortage of criticism of the Cyprus "bail-in" -- the one-time tax the government had proposed levying on insured and uninsured depositors to rescue…
Blog
Dallas Fed’s Fisher And CPAC’s Fishy Too-Big-To-Fail Event
If the Conservative Political Action Conference’s (CPAC) organizers wanted a speaker or panel on the causes of the financial crisis and what to do about…
Blog
SEC Charges Illinois With Securities Fraud And Lets It Off With A Warning
This week, Illinois became only the second state in U.S. history to by charged with securities fraud by federal regulators (New Jersey was the first,…
Free Beacon
Fannie Motors
“It’s becoming Fannie Motors,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute finance scholar John Berlau, referring to the government-backed housing lender Fannie Mae. “They’re still using our tax…
Blog
Stirrings of Pension Reform in Montana
Pension obligations’ strains on state budgets have made pension reform a priority for state policy makers across the nation. Over the last couple of…
Blog
CalPERS: Model Of Pension Dysfunction
Few state governments are as in as much fiscal trouble as California's, so it's not surprising that few state pension funds have been as mismanaged…
Blog
Payback? Government Targets S&P And Egan-Jones, Not Moody’s Or Fitch
Why not Moody's? Why not Fitch? Of all the questions raised about the U.S. government's strange case against Standard & Poor's—a lawsuit that actually asserts that…
Blog
Thrifty People Punished Yet Again By Obama Administration
When I bought my home, I chose a mortgage that was within my means. That meant buying a little two-bedroom house, and using much of…
Blog
New Jersey State Senate Pushes Union Giveaway in Project Labor Agreement Bill
The extent and huge costs of the damage from Hurricane Sandy to New Jersey should make rebuilding the worst affected areas…
Blog
Qualified Mortgage Rule Is One Of Many Dodd-Frank Boots To Drop
The first thing that should be said about today's "qualified mortgage" rule is that it is just one of many new regulations the Consumer Financial…
Blog
Basel III Cliff May Be Averted, But Dangers Still Loom For Main Street Banks
After numerous criticisms from U.S. community banks and lawmakers of both parties, the international committee in charge of the Basel III bank capital agreement…
Blog
GM Stock Sale Doesn’t End Damage Of Government Motors
Below is my statement released today on the government’s planned 15-month sale of its remaining General Motors stock: On Wednesday, the government announced a plan to sell its…
News Release
Taxpayers Get Terrible Deal on GM Stock
Washington, D.C. – December 20, 2012 – John Berlau, Senior Fellow for Finance and Access to Capital, had the following to say about the…
News Release
TAG Bank Bailout Fails in Senate, Taxpayers Win
Washington, D.C. – December 13, 2012 – On behalf of taxpayers and future generations burdened by the nation’s debt, the Competitive Enterprise Institute rejoices at…
Blog
Obama’s Low-Quality College Bailout Will Fuel Skyrocketing Tuition
We wrote earlier about perverse federal financial aid policies that encourage colleges to jack up tuition. Recently, the Obama administration came up with something even worse.
Letters
Free-Market Coalition Letter Against TAG’s Unlimited Deposit Insurance
As the Senate prepares today to vote on extending unlimited deposit insurance for non-interest bank accounts, 14 leaders and scholars of conservative and free-market groups signed a…
News Release
Coalition Tags TAG Bailout as Regressive and Economically Disastrous
Washington, DC, December 10, 2012 – As the Senate prepares today to vote on extending unlimited deposit insurance for non-interest bank accounts, 14 leaders and scholars…
Blog
The Hostess Bankruptcy And The Threat Of A PBGC Bailout
On Friday, November 16, Hostess Brands announced it was shutting down operations after the Bakers, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM), which rejected…
Blog
The Basel Cliff — Basel III’s Poisonous Recipe For The Economy
As if the "fiscal cliff," with its prospects of looming tax hikes, were not enough, big and small banks—and in turn consumers and businesses who…
Trib Live
Chrysler, Fiat deal backfires
John Berlau is the senior fellow for finance and access to capital in the Center for Economic Freedom at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington,…
Blog
FEMA’s Wasteful “Disaster Socialism”
In the Washington Examiner, Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation notes that FEMA has been as slow after Superstorm Sandy as it was after…
Blog
Auto Industry Expert: “Romney’s Plan Also Would Have ‘Saved’ Detroit”
Earlier, we noted that the auto bailouts temporarily look more successful right now than they likely will be in the long-run since Toyota's bogus safety issues,…
Blog
Chrysler And The Cratering Credit Rating Of Fiat
My piece yesterday in The Daily Caller, "The Real Fiat Scandal," spotlights the real threat to Chrysler's prospects in the immediate and long term: Fiat's cratering…
Blog
Did Bush Save General Motors? Obama Messed Up Chrysler
If you accept the dubious logic the federal government "saved" the auto industry (which requires ignoring other things that rescued General Motors, such as the…
Blog
On Halloween, Euro Politics Fit Right In
All the usual characters are present this Halloween night across the Atlantic. But European leaders doing the trick-or-treating aren’t getting the sweet sugar fix they…
Blog
Southern European Bailouts Must Focus On Reform
As European leaders meet in Brussels this week for a summit on the future of European integration, bailouts for the south will be heavy on…
Blog
Mother Nature And Good Luck, Not Big Government, Saved General Motors… For Now
There are lots of claims that the federal government saved the American auto industry by bailing it out. (Never mind that Ford didn't get…
Blog
Suffocating Athena: Public Sector Unions Kill Greek Salvation — Again
On October 1, the Greek government unveiled an austerity package that aims to reduce public spending by $15 billion (11.5 billion euros) for 2013-2014,…
Blog
The Real Spanish Bank Bailout Cost: 113 Billion Euro
Don’t be fooled by the optimism overflowing from the stress test of Spain’s banking system released on Friday. American Consultancy Oliver Wyman, which performed the…
News Release
Report on Spanish Banks Underestimates Cost of Potential Bailout
WASHINGTON, D.C., October 1, 2012 — A report last week said Spain’s banks could require as much as 53.74 billion euro in bailout funds,…
Blog
State Pension Bailout Threat
The state pension underfunding crisis has grown so severe that it has prompted most U.S. states to cut benefits, according to calculations by The…
Blog
The European Central Bank’s Losing Game Of Chicken
European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi is losing a game of chicken with the Euro Area’s distressed peripheral countries. Earlier this month, Draghi announced…
Blog
California Pension Reform Plan A Step In The Right Direction But Not Enough
California Governor Jerry Brown (D) yesterday announced a pension reform agreement, which if approved by the legislature, likely will help narrow the Golden State’s…
Blog
CEI Podcast for August 23, 2012: Bailouts as Corruption
Senior Fellow Matt Patterson argues that when government is big and powerful enough to dispense favors like bailouts, special interests will flock to Washington to…
Blog
New Moody’s Standards Give Clearer Picture Of Public Pension Crisis
The public pension funding crisis has led to a vigorous debate over how those pension liabilities are valued and how large they are. The debate…
Blog
Is Government Motors Headed For Bankruptcy Again?
The tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money spent on the auto bailouts did not fix the automakers' underlying problems, but rather helped…
Blog
My Fox News Interview On GM’s Losses To Taxpayers And Obama’s Auto Dealer Job Shaft
On Tuesday, I was on Fox News’ “Special Report with Bret Baier” answering Doug McKelway’s questions on the Treasury Department’s upward revision of taxpayers' losses…