Your hosts Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist welcome back special guest co-host Michelle Minton for Episode 35 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We begin with a celebration of human achievement and a peek into the realm of secret government documents. We then investigate how the White House is going to waste another $1 trillion of your money and how the British beer tax has managed to kill off 20,000 jobs. Finally we focus on the history of the scandal-addled Sen. Dodd of…

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In a running theme, I again cover the topic of the U.S. government’s heavy-handed dealings with swiss bank UBS.  A nod to my colleague John Berlau, whose letter in today’s Financial Times gives a nod to former ambassador Faith Whittlesey and her commentary in FT expressing concern over the Obama administration demanding the names of 52,000 Americans who do business with UBS.  As I stated in previous posts on this issue, these actions by federal authorities are setting a bad precedent for the privacy of…

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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 Federal Reserve has just cut the federal funds rate for loans to banks to an unprecedentedly low rate — ranging from 0.0% to 0.25% — well below its prior 1 percent rate.  After taking inflation into account, the Fed is literally giving money away.  The Fed’s low interest rates since 2001 helped spawn the current financial crisis and the mortgage bubble, greatly weakening the value of the U.S. dollar and reducing capital investment in the U.S.

The Fed’s rate cut will also have the effect of reducing already…

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