News
FOX News | US consumer borrowing rose $16.5 billion, reflecting big gains in auto and student loans
Consumers increased their borrowing in February on autos and student loans by the largest amount in a year. But for a second straight month, they cut back on their credit card use.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Fortune | Collateralized loan obligations: Our next financial nightmare
Greed, stupidity, and slack government oversight fueled the mortgage bubble. The same thing seems to be happening today, but this time with leveraged loans and junk bonds.
Mercatus | The Secret Assumptions Behind Federal Budgets
Our national dialogue over federal policy suffers from a huge information gap when it comes to understanding the federal budget. This information gap afflicts not only the general public as well as press, but much of Washington’s policy insider community. From the very start of my eleven years as Senate staff, I quickly learned that if one can master Congress’s arcane budget rules, one will command knowledge that even many legislators lack. To put it bluntly, far too few people understand how the federal budget works, how budget-related legislative procedures work, and how scorekeeping works. This article represents an effort to fill in some of that information gap.
Blogs
Heritage Foundation | The Surprisingly Simple Way That Congress Could Save Billions
That was the takeaway from the fourth annual report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office detailing unnecessary duplication in federal government programs. Yet, Congress has done little to bring budgetary common sense to Washington by either consolidating or eliminating the duplicative and wasteful programs—despite the fact that the federal government is over $17 trillion in debt, and Congress spends hundreds of billions on discretionary programs each year that are often redundant and ineffective.
