Your host Richard Morrison welcomes back guest co-host Jeremy Lott and special guest Greg Conko for Episode 47. We start with the new Obama-Geithner plan for expanding regulation of financial markets, the protests over the disputed presidential election in Iran and the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of telemarketing robocalls. We then move on to the “beer bikes” of Amsterdam and some potentially scandalous investment choices made by Sen. Dick Durban. Finally, we talk health care with CEI Senior Fellow Greg…

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Obama gets a failing grade from economists. “U.S. President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner received failing grades for their efforts to revive the economy from participants in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey.”

Not content with the $8 trillion the Obama Administration has already committed for bailouts, pork, and welfare, Treasury Secretary Geithner, who was confirmed by the Senate despite cheating on his taxes, wants to spend $100 billion on IMF loans to bail out struggling nations in Eastern Europe and elsewhere…

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“Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is basing hundreds of billions in emergency lending on credit ratings from companies that gave AAA grades to toxic securities. The Fed has purchased $308.5 billion in commercial paper and lent $631.8 billion” based on appraisals by the bond rating agencies Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch.  So reports Bloomberg News.

Before the financial crisis, we repeatedly warned in vain that these ratings agencies were failing in their job, and that regulations that prevented independent companies from competing with them should…

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“The dollar yesterday staged one of its biggest one-day drops against the euro and fell to a 13-year low against the Japanese yen as near-zero interest rates and the Federal Reserve’s plan to print vast sums of cash dilute the value of the greenback,” reports the Washington Post today.

“On Monday, the Fed cut . . . the federal funds rate, at which banks lend to each other, from 1 percent to a target range of 0 percent to 0.25 percent, and effectively vowed to print as much…

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Jacob Sullum’s recent column argues that Bush’s auto bailout plan is an unconstitutional violation of separation of powers.  We earlier argued that it was either illegal or unconstitutional. 

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve, with little public awareness, is attempting a financial system bailout far bigger than Congress ever authorized, resulting in one failure after another, as economics professor Jeffrey Rogers Hummel explains in a recent editorial.  “All the emergency initiatives of both the Fed and the Treasury since the subprime problem first…

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The stunning defeat of the Hank Paulson’s socialism-for-Wall Street bailout on Monday has just made planks of a pro-free market alternative much more viable. As Open Market has noted before, The Republican Study Comittee, a caucus of pro-market members of the GOP Congress, has presented such a plan that would be much more effective at stopping the contagion than the Paulson bailout, and many of its provisions would not cost taxpayers a dime.

The RSC plan is chock-full of measures to…

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