The new EU directive: quit smoking or die

New rules from Brussels effectively banning low-risk alternatives to cigarettes, like e-cigs, will cost lives

by Rob Lyons 

In December 2012, the EU’s executive, the European Commission, announced its proposals to revise the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), originally passed in 2001, to take account of ‘significant scientific, market and international developments’ that have taken place since. But far from improving Europeans’ health, the proposals as they stand could well lead to many thousands, perhaps millions, of unnecessary early deaths.

In a press release announcing the revision, the EU’s commissioner in charge of health and consumer policy, Tonio Borg, declared: ‘With 70 per cent of smokers starting before the age of 18, the ambition of today’s proposal is to make tobacco products and smoking less attractive and thus discourage tobacco initiation among young people.’ So, for example, the revised directive would provide for some pretty run-of-the-mill tobacco-control measures like bigger health warnings, something likely to be ineffective in persuading smokers to quit - and quite possibly attractive to young people looking for a way to ‘rebel’.

There would also be bans on the use of ‘characterising flavours’ with tobacco products. That would mean an end to menthol cigarettes, on the untested presumption that flavoured products make it easier for young people to get into smoking. In reality, flavoured cigarettes are not wildly popular. Even accounting for menthol, by far the most popular of these flavours, they make up just five per cent of the cigarette market.

Defending the right to mock JM Keynes

Why on earth is historian Niall Ferguson being dragged over the coals for having a pop at a dead economist?

by Tim Black 

I’ll tell you what is really shocking about Niall Ferguson, Harvard professor of history, author of countless forgettable books, and sometime man-ont’-telly. It’s that so many insist on considering him some sort of towering intellect, be it Time magazine, which put him in its ‘top 100 most influential people in the world today’, or Prospect, which did something similar in terms of global thinkers. If ever there was an indictment of the contemporary world of thought, it’s that: the thoughtless elevation of this spectacularly vain shock-jockademic.

But I’ll also tell you what’s not shocking: Ferguson’s less than admirable view of prominent twentieth-century economist, and famed Bloomsbury Groupie, John Maynard Keynes. Yet that is precisely what twisted quite a few right-thinking knickers over the weekend and even prompted an ‘unqualified apology’ from the not-so-great man himself.

The phoney border war over immigration

The fallout from the Queen’s Speech confirms that today neither right nor left views immigrants as real, breathing human beings

by Brendan O’Neill 

The fuss that followed yesterday’s Queen’s Speech reveals what a weird turn the debate about immigration has taken. In the past, the clash over migrants’ rights tended to pit border-fortifying nationalistic types against left-leaners who believed in the right of foreigners to move around the globe and work and live in various places. Today, if the reaction to PM David Cameron’s proposed new immigration measures is anything to go by, there’s little more than a pseudo-spat over immigration, with hamstrung anti-immigrant politicians on one side and a ‘pro-immigration’ lobby that is increasingly elitist on the other. What’s most striking is how neither side treats immigrants as actual human beings, the anti-immigrant side treating them as spectres of destabilisation and the pro-immigrant lot treating them as the ciphers for a new, post-borders, shallowly cosmopolitan political dawn.

Cameron’s proposals, ironically unveiled by our German-descended queen, led to outraged headlines about how he was pandering to xenophobic attitudes and taking Britain back to the bad old days of immigrant-bashing. In truth, the most remarkable thing about his plans is how chaotic they are, and also how much they concede in terms of the security of Britain’s borders. Cameron is proposing effectively to outsource authority over immigration to various non-state actors. Landlords will be charged with checking the immigration status of their tenants, and will face fines if they let their properties to illegal migrants. Employers will have to check passports and papers or risk getting a severe slap on the wrists for ‘hiring illegal workers’. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency will have to ensure that only legit immigrants get driving licences.

'All Will Profit from New Wave of Immigrants'

World from Berlin

By Daryl Lindsey

This week, Germany announced it received more immigrants in 2012 than it has in almost two decades. Yet rather than sounding the alarm, newspaper commentators are welcoming the trend. Most of the newcomers are well-educated and come from other countries in Europe.

The trend has been building for some time. As the economic downturn in Southern Europe tightens its grip, increasing numbers of people are heading north -- many to Germany -- looking for work. On Tuesday, Germany announced that almost a million foreigners came to Germany in 2012, more than have arrived in any year since 1995. Furthermore, the preliminary figures indicate that last year saw a 15 percent jump in immigration over 2011.

The last time the country saw waves of immigration this large was during the Balkan wars in the late 1990s and at the peak of the guest worker movement during the 1970s, which saw hundreds of thousands of Turks, Greeks, Spaniards and Italians move to Germany.

The majority of the newcomers are leaving behind countries in impoverished southeastern Europe or debt-crisis plagued euro-zone countries in Southern Europe, where joblessness is rampant, particularly among youth.

German Central Bank Head Blasts France

'Can't Call That Savings'

By Spiegel

German central bank head Jens Weidmann has strongly criticized French efforts to reduce its budget deficit, just days after the European Union granted Paris more time to meet EU requirements. He warns that French delays could damage the credibility of euro-zone rules.

France needs more time to get its budget deficit under control. That much was made clear last Friday when the European Commission announced it was granting Paris until 2015 to bring its budget deficit below the maximum 3 percent of gross domestic product allowed by European Union rules ensuring the stability of the euro.

But on Wednesday evening, Jens Weidmann, the president of Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, said he is adamantly opposed to the move. "You can't call that savings, as far as I am concerned," he told the daily Westdeutsche Allegemeine Zeitung in an interview. "To win back trust, we can't just establish rules and then promise to fulfil them at some point in the future. They have to be filled with life," Weidmann said.

France had originally hoped to reduce its budget deficit below the 3 percent limit this year, but with its economy suffering, the deficit is likely to be closer to 4 percent and slightly higher in 2014.

The Number Of US Citizens On Disability Is Now Larger Than The Population Of Greece

There are only 13 Americans working full-time for each worker on disability

By Jim Quinn's 

The number of people on SSDI now exceeds the entire population of Greece. The aging of the population has nothing to do with the increase. In 1968 there were 51 workers for every person on disability. Today there are 13 workers for every person on disablity. Even the most pollyanna would agree that medical advancements since 1968 have been significant. These medical advancements would argue for less people being on disability and unable to work.

Workplace safety measures have been increased exponentially since 1968, so that also argues for less disabled workers. The good old ADA law forced all workplaces to become disabled friendly. That argues for less people on disability. The country has transitioned from a manufacturing society to a service society. Workers don’t work on dangerous assembly lines anymore. Robots do the dangerous stuff. This should have dramatically reduced worker injuries and disabilities.

Cosmetic Surgeries Skyrocket in Greece

Crisis Lifting

By Kerstin Kullmann

The economic crisis has forced thousands in Greece to rely on volunteers for even basic health care services. Meanwhile, wealthier Greeks are having more facelifts and breast implants than anywhere in the world. Why?

In Glyfada, an upper-income suburb of Athens with palm-lined streets and a view of the Mediterranean, cosmetic surgeon Athanasios Athanasiou presents his latest accomplishment. A flawlessly beautiful woman wearing a tight-fitting tracksuit and sporting a bobbing ponytail walks into the room, dangling her car keys from her right hand. Athanasiou says: "A complete mommy makeover." He laughs, and the woman laughs along with him. She sits down and says: "Oh, Athi."

The woman prefers not to mention her name because she is a well-known TV personality in Greece. She says that after having her second child, she had Athanasiou perform many cosmetic enhancement procedures: adding new silicon to her breasts, a tummy tuck, liposuction, a lip enhancement, Botox and hyaluronic acid filler treatments and laser procedures. She adds that she has been going to a cosmetic surgeon for almost 20 years, but that the quality of the work has improved considerably in recent years. "I don't want it to be too extreme," she says. "It should look natural. Athi knows how to do that." And now she is looking forward to her birthday. She turns 45 in a week.

Fed's rise to tyranny has no end in sight

The Fed is not the solution, it is the problem

By Noureddine Krichene 

A country needs a constitution for the sole purpose to protect citizens against totalitarian government. Confiscating wealth of citizens via money inflation is totalitarian power. To protect against this power, the US Constitution entrusted congress with the authority to coin and regulate the value of money. The US Constitution sought to protect citizens against totalitarian power of government. 

The US Federal Reserve, founded in late 1913, acquired the power to create money. Its original purpose was modest; namely to provide an elastic money supply for the economy. Soon after, it monetized the US debt; it extended its powers to subsidize traders in capital markets, abolish the gold standard, and then to assume the mandate of full-employment of labor. 

Now it is the central planner of the economy with unlimited power to create money and manage all segments of the economy. It observes no rules. It bails out banks at the expense savers and workers. It is a tool of politicians seeking votes. Speculators in capital markets earn fortunes on Fed's cheap liquidity and the government relies on it to force near-zero interest rate and monetize monumental fiscal deficits. 

Through its negative real interest rate and money expansion it inflicted severe financial crises in the 1930s, 1970s, 1980s, and recently the 2008 financial crisis. It has impoverished masses of people and pushed food prices to forbidden levels - in 2013, close to 50 million US citizens live on food stamps. It caused trillions of dollars in fiscal deficits to cope with bailouts and welfare spending caused by the crisis. 

At present, its policy of massive money printing and near-zero interest is setting off bubbles in the stock markets, housing markets, and a currency war among leading industrial countries. Its pillar achievements are: debauching money, impoverishing workers and fixed-income recipients, economic disintegration, and financial crises and disorders. 

The mathematical menace

Mathematical models, far from being tools to increase knowledge and understanding, can be tools of obfuscation

By Martin Hutchinson 

Far from being tools to increase knowledge and understanding, mathematical models are tools of obfuscation. 

The brouhaha about the spreadsheet error in Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff's 2010 paper "Growth in a time of debt" brings home an important economic truth. Not that Reinhart and Rogoff were in error; their overall conclusion is clearly true, not to say obvious, and correction of the error in their spreadsheet merely softened the conclusion without invalidating it. However the economic truth is that the invention of computer modeling has for the last 40 years allowed charlatans to peddle spurious models in the service of their political agendas, and policy makers and the general public are all too ready to be fooled by these devices.

The attempt to model mathematically complex scientific and sociological interactions is popularly thought to have begun with the computer model of nuclear interaction used in the 1942-45 Manhattan Project, but the techniques and thought processes involved go back well beyond this. Perhaps the most significant pre-computer use of model theorizing came from Rev Thomas Malthus, who postulated that the increase over time in food supply was arithmetical, that in population geometrical, and therefore population would always outrun the food supply. 

Multiculti U.

The budget-strapped University of California squanders millions on mindless diversity programs

by Heather Mac Donald

In the summer of 2012, as the University of California reeled from one piece of bad budget news to another, a veteran political columnist sounded an alarm. Cuts in state funding were jeopardizing the university’s mission of preserving the “cultural legacy essential to any great society,” Peter Schrag warned in the Sacramento Bee:

Would we know who we are without knowing our common history and culture, without knowing Madison and Jefferson and Melville and Dickinson and Hawthorne; without Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer; without Dante and Cervantes; without Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen; without Goethe and Molière; without Confucius, Buddha, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.; without Mozart, Rembrandt and Michelangelo; without the Old Testament; without the Gospels; without Plato and Aristotle, without Homer and Sophocles and Euripides, without Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; without Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison?

Schrag’s appeal to the value of humanistic study was unimpeachable. It just happened to be laughably ignorant about the condition of such study at the University of California. Stingy state taxpayers aren’t endangering the transmission of great literature, philosophy, and art; the university itself is. No UC administrator would dare to invoke Schrag’s list of mostly white, mostly male thinkers as an essential element of a UC education; no UC campus has sought to ensure that its undergraduates get any exposure to even one of Schrag’s seminal thinkers (with the possible exception of Toni Morrison), much less to America’s founding ideas or history.

Cop out

New York pays more police in retirement than to patrol our streets

By NICOLE GELINAS

Last week, Mayor Bloomberg scolded the NYPD’s critics, from The New York Times to the Democratic mayoral candidates. The mayor said that “the attacks most often come from those who play no constructive role in keeping our city safe.”

The mayor is right — but there’s another threat to the NYPD’s crime-fighting success, too. We now have more retired cops than active police officers, and the multibillion-dollar bill for their pension and health benefits harms our ability to hire new ones.

In December 2001, a month before Bloomberg took office, New York had 39,297 cops. Today, the city has 34,510 to protect us — and by the time the mayor leaves office in eight months, we’ll have 34,483 — a cut of nearly 5,000 pairs of eyes.

Yet spending has increased. During Bloomberg’s final year, city will spend $8.7 billion on the police department, nearly double the 2002 figure and more than three times the rate of inflation.

A common sense solution to immigration

Lets Cut Benefits, Not Immigration

By Diana Furchtgott-Roth

A misleading Heritage Foundation report by economists Robert Rector and Jason Richwine concludes that legalizing undocumented workers will cost America $6.3 trillion over the immigrants' lifetimes.

The report is deceptive because it assumes, contrary to empirical evidence, no increased economic efficiency from immigration and no economic mobility. It doesn't discuss numerous benefits to national security from legalizing and making it easier to track America's11 million undocumented workers.

Yes, as the authors point out, America has a welfare problem. Over 47 million people, the vast majority native-born Americans, are on food stamps almost four years after the beginning of the economic recovery. Means tested benefits, healthcare under the Affordable Care Act, and retiree benefits are increasingly expensive, and these costs need to be brought under control for everyone.

But that's not the same as an immigration problem. If we're concerned that benefits are keeping people in poverty and impeding upward mobility, we should cut benefits, not immigrants.

Guess Who Is A Shocking Fan Of Austrian Economics

One also wonders just how they really feel about gold...

By Tyler Durden

The statement below, coined by Friedrich Hayek in his 1931 "Prices and Production", is well-known by any fans of the Austrian school of economics (and by implication, loathed by all Keynesians):

“There can be no doubt that besides the regular types of the circulating medium, such as coin, notes and bank deposits, which are generally recognised to be money or currency, and the quantity of which is regulated by some central authority or can at least be imagined to be so regulated, there exist still other forms of media of exchange which occasionally or permanently do the service of money. Now while for certain practical purposes we are accustomed to distinguish these forms of media of exchange from money proper as being mere substitutes for money, it is clear that, other things equal, any increase or decrease of these money substitutes will have exactly the same effects as an increase or decrease of the quantity of money proper, and should therefore, for the purposes of theoretical analysis, be counted as money.”

One may usually find it in letters of the few renegade hedge fund managers who dare to call out the Chairsatan for his utter bubble pumping insanity, in the writings of those who have not been indoctrinated into the fallacies of the Keynesian pseudo-religious dogma, and generally discussed by those who actually do understand real credit and thus, monetary creation.

Of Owls and Richard the Third

The law of unintended consequences is one of the hardest for people to learn

by Theodore Dalrymple 
Not long ago at a conference I was asked whether I thought that boredom was an important cause of bad, and worse than bad, behaviour. I said that I thought that it probably was, though I could not positively prove it. At any rate, those who behave badly often claim to do so because they are bored, and no one claims to behave well because he is bored.

But even if it is accepted that boredom causes, or rather explains, bad behaviour, it cannot be the final explanation: for why are people bored? Is not the world interesting enough for them? What would a world be like that they found sufficiently interesting to keep them on the straight and narrow path that leads to good behaviour? It is a terrible fate for a creature endowed with consciousness and self-consciousness to find the world uninteresting.

My problem is the opposite: I find the world too interesting. This means that I am all too easily distracted, like a child confronted with too many good things to eat. I pursue things that interest me until something else distracts me, which means that I master nothing. But at least I am not bored.

They’re all Mr Less- Than-Ten-Per-Cent

No UK party won even 30 % of the votes last week marking a new low of the old order

by Mick Hume 

The most remarkable result in last week’s local elections was not that the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) achieved 23 per cent of the votes cast. It was that, for the first time, none of the major parties managed to claim even 30 per cent of the total vote.

On an estimated overall turnout of about 31 per cent, that means no party persuaded even 10 per cent of those eligible to vote that it was worth ticking their box on the ballot paper.

Britain is not in a new era of multi-party politics so much as no-party politics. The Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats are all suffering a terminal-looking crisis. None of them has a clear set of political principles to stand on or a solid base of support. They are political parties in name alone. The sudden emergence of UKIP is simply a symptom, the rash that expresses the sickness at the heart of the body politic.

Senior Eurozone Official: "As Spain Goes, So Goes Slovenia"

And Slovenia is going the same way Cyprus, Ireland, Greece, and Portugal went

By Mike "Mish" Shedlock

The spotlight is once again on Slovenia. Olli Rehn, the European commission’s economic chief is unhappy with economic progress in Slovenia and is threatening to put the country into an "excessive imbalances procedure" by the end of the month.

The problem is, Spain is in a similar "excessive imbalance" state prompting an unnamed eurozone official to state "As Spain Goes, So Goes Slovenia".

Please consider Brussels trains its sights on Slovenia.

 The European Commission is being pushed to take a tougher line with Slovenia amid mounting concerns that infighting is hampering the country’s ability to overhaul its banking sector and avoid becoming the next rescue target in the eurozone crisis.

According to two senior eurozone officials, concerns have focused on “non-cooperation” between Slovenia’s finance ministry and central bank, which is responsible for supervising the financial sector. One of the officials said the central bank was being “obstructionist” towards the new government’s clean-up efforts.

Single mothers are the have-nots in income and education

Single moms are making us broke

By Joe Soucheray

It was reported the other day on an inside page of the Pioneer Press, and without nearly enough fanfare, that more than six out of 10 women who give birth in their early 20s are unmarried. That is census data, from census demographers, from the very government that then becomes responsible for many, if not most, of those unmarried women and children.

If that isn't an astonishing statistic, it should be. Why, to any logical person's way of thinking, it explains everything in terms of government at all levels bloating out of control.

Supposing that even angels might fear to tread here, it being liberal dogma that I shouldn't be telling women what to do, or men, either, for that matter, I would submit that marriage would solve virtually every economic issue facing this country.

The census demographers said that single motherhood, on the increase since the 1940s, has accelerated mindblowingly. The birth rate for unmarried women in 2007 was up 80 percent in the almost three decades since 1980. Just between 2002 and 2007, it was up 20 percent.

The census people didn't use the word mindblowingly. I have chosen it because these numbers are chilling and so telling of the true nature of the government's insatiable spending. Just think of entitlement spending the next time the hypocrites in Washington want to take a snowplow off the road in Yellowstone or take a few flight controllers out of a tower because of this so-called sequestration. Who do they think they are fooling?

Statistically, you can avoid poverty in America by getting a high-school degree and waiting to get married before having a child. It's really that simple.

Carla del Ponte’s Faux Pas

Good war propaganda is nothing if not flexible

By Justin Raimondo 

Poor Carla del Ponte – as soon as she let the cat out of the bag on the Syria “sarin gas” hoax a flurry of articles appeared in the mainstream media reporting panicked denials by UN officials and reminding us all of her past sins.

John Hudson, writing in Foreign Policy, led off with a piece entitled “UN Investigator on Syria: Out Over Her Skis Yet Again?” Did you know she once said it was her duty to investigate war crimes committed by NATO, as well as by the Serbs, in the course of the Kosovo war? Since everyone knows the Western powers never commit war crimes – they’re inherently incapable of it – her office had to “walk back” her comments.

It happened again with the publication of her book, The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals, in which the famed war crimes investigator gave credence to widespread allegations of organ-farming by the criminal gang that took over Kosovo after the “liberation.” “Appalling!” screeched the critics – not in response to the considerable evidence that the “Kosovo Liberation Army” and allied Albanian Mafia did indeed harvest organs from Serb prisoners, but in reaction to her being so impolitic as to mention it.

Germany Under Pressure To Create Money

The next asset class to experience a bubble could be fiat money itself

By John Browne

Currently, central banks around the world are walking in lock step down a dangerous path of money creation. Led by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan, economic policy is driven by the idea that printed money can be the true basis of growth. The result is an unprecedented global orgy of currency creation. The only holdout to this open ended commitment has been the hard money bias of the German-dominated European Central Bank (ECB). However, growing political pressure from around the world, and growing dissatisfaction among domestic voters have shaken, and perhaps cracked, the German resolve. While German capitulations in the past have been welcome occurrences, in this instance the world would be better served if the Germans could stick to their guns.

Last week the statement issued by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) put to rest any expectations that Quantitative Easing in the United States would be coming to an end anytime soon. With an ambiguous, but decidedly dovish statement, the stage appears to be set for an expansion of the $85 billion per month program.  The statement further obscured the criteria that the Fed is supposed to rely on to begin a winding down of the program, leaving market participants increasingly uncertain.

The Federal Reserve Is A Perpetual Debt Machine

11 Reasons Why The Federal Reserve Should Be Abolished

by Michael Snyder

If the American people truly understood how the Federal Reserve system works and what it has done to us, they would be screaming for it to be abolished immediately.  It is a system that was designed by international bankers for the benefit of international bankers, and it is systematically impoverishing the American people.

The Federal Reserve system is the primary reason why our currency has declined in value by well over 95 percent and our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger over the past 100 years. 

The Fed creates our "booms" and our "busts", and they have done an absolutely miserable job of managing our economy.  But why do we need a bunch of unelected private bankers to manage our economy and print our money for us in the first place?  Wouldn't our economy function much more efficiently if we allowed the free market to set interest rates? 

And according to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress is the one that is supposed to have the authority to "coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures".  So why is the Federal Reserve doing it?  Sadly, this is the way it works all over the globe today.  In fact, all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank.  But the truth is that there are much better alternatives.  We just need to get people educated.

The following are 11 reasons why the Federal Reserve should be abolished...

Would legalizing undocumented workers really cost $6.3 trillion?

Big policy changes don’t exist in a vacuum, isolated from the rest of the economy

By James Pethokoukis 

Even if US budgets were deep in the black, it would be perfectly legitimate to examine the fiscal costs of legalizing millions of currently undocumented workers. But such analysis should provide as full an economic picture as possible for policymakers. A new Heritage foundation study, while providing some useful data points, is frustratingly incomplete.

Certainly pundits and activists with axes to grind will run hard with Heritage’s claim that “former unlawful immigrants together …  would generate a lifetime fiscal deficit (total benefits minus total taxes) of $6.3 trillion.” Quite a talking point — one researchers arrive at via a fairly straightforward calculation. They simply determine the difference between their forecast of futures taxes paid and benefits received. Fair enough and good to know.

The study, however, fails to capture indirect but important economic impacts of immigration such as increasing economic activity or positively affecting American employment. Both of those would lead to higher tax revenues and reduced transfer payments. Surely every effort should be given to factoring in such dynamic impacts of immigration reform. The Heritage study says, for instance, that “taxes and benefits must be viewed holistically.” So, too, immigration overall. Big policy changes don’t exist in a vacuum, isolated from the rest of the economy. (And, of course, the study only focuses on a single part of comprehensive immigration reform.)

What amnesty for illegal immigrants will cost America

US is a nation of immigrants, but ...

By Jim DeMint and Robert Rector

The economist Milton Friedman warned that the United States cannot have open borders and an extensive welfare state. He was right, and his reasoning extends to amnesty for the more than 11 million unlawful immigrants in this country. In addition to being unfair to those who follow the law and encouraging more unlawful immigration in the future, amnesty has a substantial price tag.

An exhaustive study by the Heritage Foundation has found that after amnesty, current unlawful immigrants would receive $9.4 trillion in government benefits and services and pay more than $3 trillion in taxes over their lifetimes. That leaves a net fiscal deficit (benefits minus taxes) of $6.3 trillion. That deficit would have to be financed by increasing the government debt or raising taxes on U.S. citizens.

For centuries immigration has been vital to our nation’s health, and it will be essential to our future success. Yet immigrants should come to our nation lawfully and should not impose additional fiscal costs on our overburdened taxpayers. An efficient and merit-based system would help our economy and lessen the burden on taxpayers, strengthening our nation.

Conservative group warns immigrants could cost US $6.3tn

This assumes that people are just costs and don’t contribute anything

By Anna Fifield

The 11m unauthorised immigrants in the US could cost taxpayers $6.3tn if they were allowed to become American citizens, according to a study from the conservative Heritage Foundation .

The think-tank’s study, which is out of sync with the vast majority of other economic analyses, was immediately criticised for being ideologically driven and selective with the facts.
But Heritage hopes for a repeat of 2007, when it used a similar economic report to motivate opponents of immigration reform during the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency and helped kill a proposed bill.

Berlin demands treaty change for bank reforms

A banking union only makes sense if mechanisms for the restructuring and resolution of banks are in place

By Alex Barker

Germany laid down a big barrier on the fast track to European banking union, insisting a revision of EU treaties is necessary to create a single authority to wind up banks, even if it took several years to accomplish.

Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, strongly voiced his legal concerns at an informal meeting of EU finance ministers Dublin over the weekend. His comments point to the high political stakes involved in forging a common institution to shut down troubled financial groups.

His intervention in Dublin was a shot across the bows of the European Commission as it prepares to publish a blueprint for the resolution reforms in June – as well as a reality-check for reformers pushing for the full banking union framework to be agreed in the coming 12 months.

By throwing his weight behind the need for a treaty revision in the medium term, Mr Schäuble also raised Britain’s hopes of opening a path to an eventual repatriation of powers from the EU.

George Osborne, the UK finance minister, made clear that Britain’s backing for treaty change would come at a price. “That sent a chill around,” said one person in attendance.

Differences put aside as Berlin and Paris seek common ground

Next Step - Banking Union 

By Quentin Peel in Berlin

Sniping between France and Germany has been almost constant in recent months.

In Paris, politicians have accused Berlin of bullying their European partners into excessive austerity at the expense of economic growth. The Germans have retorted, usually off the record, that the pusillanimous French have failed to reform their economy and revive their ailing competitiveness.

But when Wolfgang Schäuble and Pierre Moscovici, the two countries’ finance ministers, met on Tuesday to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Franco-German economic and financial council, they came to praise the partnership, not to bury it.

“We are not here to expand on our differences,” the Francophile Mr Schäuble told a gathering of students from both countries at Berlin’s Free University. “We are here to seek common solutions.”

Can Egypt's Islamist finance minister cut a deal with the IMF?

How should the money supply be organized in Islamic thought ?

By David Kenner

The big news in Cairo is that a long-awaited cabinet reshuffle has finally become a reality. President Mohamed Morsy swore in nine new ministers today in a move that increases the Muslim Brotherhood's representation in the government. The shakeup comes as Egypt is deep in talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) about a $4.8 billion loan intended to help the country jumpstart its stagnant economy.

The IMF talks mean that the replacement of Egypt's finance minister is the most important change to come out of the reshuffle. The new finance minister is Fayyad Abdel Moneim, who previously worked as an economics professor at al-Azhar University, the oldest Sunni Muslim educational institution in the world.

France: End of the affair

France’s share of world trade had fallen by a third since 2002

By Hugh Carnegy 

One year into office, François Hollande’s economic management has sparked fears of a social breakdown

Hanging off lampposts, waving flags, lighting flares and cheering wildly, tens of thousands of supporters of François Hollande crammed into the Place de la Bastille in Paris at midnight to greet France’s first socialist president for almost two decades.

“I will live up to your hopes,” he promised the exuberant crowd.

How things have changed in the space of a year.

Waiting at the Bastille in a milling throng of trade unionists for the start of the traditional May Day workers’ parade, Emmanuelle, a civil servant who declines to give her family name, recalls the victory scenes with a resigned sigh.

“I was here that night,” she says. “There was an atmosphere of great hope. Now we are all very disappointed. All the promises – especially to stop companies laying off workers – have not been met.”

Amadou Diop, a student, echoes the sentiment. “I am very disappointed. His social record is bad. He hasn’t stopped the job losses. There is a feeling that the country is plunging into decline and there is a lack of hope.”

Problems have only mounted for Mr Hollande since he took power last May from Nicolas Sarkozy.