by Robert Huebscher, AdvisorPerspectives.com

Niall Ferguson is the champion of anti-Keynesian economists. Last week, he explained why America’s pursuit of Keynesian policies is leading to disastrous consequences.

Ferguson gave four symptoms of U.S. degeneration as evidence that Keynesian policies have created underlying weaknesses.

Ferguson, a professor at Harvard, gave the opening talk at last week’s Strategic Investment Conference in San Diego, hosted by Altegris Investments and John Mauldin. His remarks were based on his newly released book, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die.

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by Rodger Malcolm Mitchell, www.nofica.com

Elizabeth Warren may be the best senator in Congress — or at least the most honest. Expect to see her attacked from both sides of the aisle.

She continues to castigate the Obama adminsitration (and she’s a Democrat!) for not punishing the crooked banks (all the big banks are crooked) for criminally defrauding millions of Americans out of trillions of dollars, while continuing to stuff their own pockets.

Naturally, Obama avoids this subject (as do the Republicans) like it were poop in the punch bowl. For politicians, the banks are too big (i.e. too big as contributors) to jail.

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Written by Hilary Barnes

France has been given by the European Commission an extra two years to get its budget deficit down to 3 % of GDP, but on condition that it implements reforms that will improve its longer term budget outlook.

Top of the list is to get the national pension system under control, currently running a deficit of about 0.7 % of GDP and set to rise to almost 1 % of GDP by 2020 or even earlier, and getting steadily larger thereafter.

This will be a tough nut to crack for the present socialist government under President Francois Hollande. No socialist government in the past 30 years has dared to reform the system, leaving it to conservative governments to patch it up.

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Written by Elliott Morss, Morss Global Finance

Introduction

Like bombs, guns are dangerous: in 2011, 87 people were shot every day - 54 suicides, 30 homicides. In addition, 851 people were shot unintentionally, like what happened a week back - a 5-year old boy who was given a gun as a present by his parents and unintentionally shot his 2-year old sister.

In earlier pieces, I have reflected on how we have handled other known killers: cigarettes, alcohol, motor vehicles, and overeating. I have also documented how many deaths have resulted because certain drugs are illegal. This article explains how lessons learned from our efforts to control these other killers apply to guns.

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by Dirk Ehnts, Econoblog101

Since the world seems to be interested in Alternative für Deutschland I have translated some of their demands into English. It’s all from the programme which they posted on their website. I selected only a few which I thought interesting:

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