bankruptcy

During the city of Detroit’s bankruptcy, the state-appointed administrator sought to cut pension payments for thousands of retired city workers in violation of Michigan’s state constitution. 

The Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, a federal board tasked with managing the island commonwealth’s course out of fiscal emergency, declared failure on May 3, filing paperwork to begin court proceedings restructuring the government debt.

President Barack Obama has doubled the national debt – from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. He’s added more debt than all of his forty-three presidential predecessors combined.

Researcher Christine Lakatos and I, together, have produced the single largest body of work on green-energy crony-corruption. Our years of collaboration have revealed that those with special access and influence have cashed in on the various green-energy programs and benefitted from the mandates, rules, and regulations that accompany the huge scheme.

An electric truck manufacturer that was awarded $32 million from President Obama’s stimulus program has informed one of its investors that it is on the verge of bankruptcy, if it did not raise $4.5 million by Friday and $10 million by the end of October.

The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico owes more than $70 billion—about $19,729.43 per resident—in debt to creditors and investors. First to note the territory’s fiscal problems were the credit rating agencies, which downgraded the territory’s bond status to “speculative,” the first of three steps along the junk-bond path to loan default.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Jesse Hathaway, managing editor of Budget & Tax News speaks with William Freeland. Freeland is a research analyst with the American Legislative Exchange Council. Freeland joins Hathaway to discuss Puerto Rico’s growing financial crisis.

Since 2011 NLPC has tracked the stimulus-funded fiascoes that were/are battery-maker A123 Systems and luxury electric automaker Fisker Automotive, who at one point were business partners (or stuck with each other, depending on your perspective). Both eventually went bankrupt, and cost taxpayers millions of dollars from Department of Energy awards that were never paid back. Chinese company Wanxiang Group ended up with both failed enterprises, buying their assets for cheap.

For more than two hundred years, practically all of the leading advocates of individual liberty and free markets have assumed that money and banking were different from other types of goods and markets. From Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, the presumption has been that competitive markets and free consumer choice are far better than government control and planning – except in the realm of money and financial intermediation. They have been wrong on this important issue.

“If you like your health plan, you can keep it,” is the Lie of the Year, according to PolitiFact. But Barack Obama has been operating under an even more momentous lie for his entire presidency.

If this administration was truly “the most transparent in history,” could taxpayers bear the sight of it?

There is a serious problem in America today; the epidemic of poverty prices. Across the country, American business owners are being forced by market conditions to sell goods at prices…

Much of the dust has settled following Detroit’s historic bankruptcy filing on July 18. So what happens now?