Brian Wesbury is Chief Economist at First Trust Advisors L.P. in Wheaton, Illinois.
Assuming Congress confirms President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks, the new Trump Administration will represent arguably the most dramatic shift in leadership the United States has ever seen. As a rule, the Obama administration is staffed by the crème de la crème of academically trained policy and legal scholars. Harvard is the number one school represented. […]
What a weird world we live in. The leading business pundits (in print, television, and the blogosphere) have convinced themselves, along with many investors, that professional doomsayers, Meredith Whitney and Nouriel Roubini, know more about banking than the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JP Morgan — Lloyd Blankfein, Brian Moynihan, Vikram […]
On April 14, 2009, in a speech at Georgetown University, President Obama made reference to the Bible: “There is a parable at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that tells the story of two men. The first built his house on a pile of sand, and it was destroyed as soon as the […]
Many conservatives rightly worry about the economic impact of the liberal policy agenda emanating from Washington, D.C. They warn of a dollar collapse, tout gold as the investment of choice, and forecast that the stock market will not go higher. Many agree that things have gotten better in recent months, but boldly predict a double-dip […]
In mid-April, at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama said he wanted to “rebuild” our (economic) house upon a biblical rock. The president used Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount as a centerpiece of his speech, even though his staff wanted all the religious symbols behind the podium covered up. Obama argued that the current downturn “was […]
There are two types of economists—make that two types of people—in the world: demand-siders and supply-siders. What’s interesting about the two is that they think in vastly different ways about life and human interaction. This is not a bumper-sticker difference in ideology. Supply-siders do not walk around saying, “Cut taxes and watch prosperity trickle down.” […]
The strangest thing happened on Friday. It was reported that the U.S. economy lost 600,000 jobs in January and the unemployment rate jumped to 7.6%, but the stock market rallied anyway. Partly, this was because the stock market is a forward-looking indicator and employment is a backward-looking indicator. If the economy is near a turning […]
This is the third installment of “Providing Relief from the Crisis.” Read editor-in-chief R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s introduction here. The government has pulled out all the stops, and is injecting trillions of dollars into the economy through just about every avenue that anyone can dream up. What’s so frustrating is that no one in control […]
Following the announcement by the National Bureau of Economic Research that a recession in the U.S. began last September, both Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke gave speeches. Mr. Paulson said, “We are actively engaged in developing additional programs to strengthen our financial system so that lending flows into our economy.” Chairman […]
Since 9/11, a pall of pessimism has covered the U.S. Polls show that between 60 and 85 percent of Americans have believed that the U.S. is in a recession or would go into one the following year. But from September 2001 through August 2008, those polls were wrong. Nonetheless, the failure of Lehman Brothers, with […]
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