John Stossel looks back at the type of year it has been for Liberty in his piece at Real Clear Politics:

This wasn’t a great year for liberty. A few disasters that government caused:

–Obamacare. It was supposed to “bend the cost curve” downward. The central planners had lots of time to perfect their scheme. For a generation, the brightest left-wing wonks focused on health care policy. The result? Soviet-style consumer service comes to America.

–Government shutdown. The real disaster was the unnecessary panic over it. Zoos would shut down, and baby pandas would starve. The media made it sound like America might not survive even slightly limited government. They were happy to echo the politicians’ claim that there’s no wasteful or stupid spending to cut.

“The cupboard is bare,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “There’s no more cuts to make.”

Nothing to cut? Government spends $3.8 trillion a year!

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The Front National leader is a vibrant force to be reckoned with in Europe.

Read Le Pen’s recent comments from an interview with ANSAmed here:

National Front (FN) leader Marine Le Pen, 47, said Wednesday she is ready to be France’s next president.

Le Pen spoke in an interview with ANSAmed on the same day an IFOP survey for the Nouvel Observateur showed her right-wing party leading in the polls ahead of the 2014 European elections – an absolute first for France.

”Yes, I feel I am ready for the Elysee”, Le Pen assured ANSAmed over the phone. ”I can’t stand those who say we’re not competent enough” to lead the country, she added.

She ”is not surprised”, she says, at the results of the survey.

”Today we are the leading party. The Socialists and the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) can only win if they make a deal and form a pact of national unity”, added Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter, who came in third after current Socialist President Francois Hollande and outgoing UMP president Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential elections.

Le Pen junior took over from her father as party chairman in a congress in Tours in 2011, and has been trying to change the party’s image from one of racism and xenophobia to a more moderate version ever since.

”The French are clear-headed. A lot of people are becoming aware” of France’s true situation, she said. Which explains the support of personalities such as actor Alain Delon, who publicly announced he favors the FN in an interview with Swiss daily Le Matin. Le Pen went on to explain that hers ”is not an extreme right party” but rather a ”patriotic, extremely democratic one”. It stands for more ”popular referendums” with a ”Gaullist vision” of national sovereignty and independence.

”Also, we are not against a market economy”, she continued.

Asked whether she thinks her party resembles Italy’s anti-establishment, anti-euro 5-Star Movement (M5S), Le Pen said that ”there is no movement like ours right now. Ours is a mature party, with 40 years of history behind it. The M5S movement is a recent one, born of citizens’ exasperation at the current crisis”.

Le Pen, who opposes the EU and the single currency, reiterated the need to liberate France from the yoke of the Brussels technocrats – and of others.

”It’s time to put an end to the status quo. We no longer want to be vassals of the United States or the Gulf monarchies”, she warned.

The FN leader rejected the idea that her party lacks a leadership that is competent enough to rule the French republic.

”Bollocks”, she said matter-of-factly. ”Today we can count on a lot of people who are willing to work with us. And they are highly trained, too”

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What I’m about to share with you is something I’d like you to share with or teach to your spouse. In 2008 some of the smartest guys in the room sat and watched as their mutual funds lost close to 50%. Meanwhile boring old Vanguard GNMA made money. That’s all the proof I need to make sure my well balanced portfolio owns Vanguard GNMA. It would be nice to be able to buy just one balanced mutual fund and be done with it. But there are none out there today that fit the bill. Don’t get me wrong, I love the world class Vanguard Wellesley fund. There is no better low cost balanced fund. But without getting into too much detail I do have a couple of concerns.

One is its size. The fund is aircraft carrier big making it difficult to buy smaller stocks without overrunning the company. And two, the bond duration is longer than I’d like. I decided to run a back-of-an-envelope portfolio using Vanguard GNMA, Vanguard Short-Term Investment Grade, and Young Research’s Retirement Compounders stocks using Vanguard Wellesley’s 60/40 bond to stock mix. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this portfolio had a higher income/dividend rate. My two concerns were solved—a lower duration or risk on the bond side and the ability to own dividend paying stocks with Navy SEAL like anonymity. Teach this to your spouse because as the saying goes: to learn read, to know write, to master teach.

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Americas most dangerous mayor Bill de Blasio! Move your business out of New York City now! The new mayor is the most dangerous presence on the New York political scene in memory. Here John Fund,writing at National Review lays bare the grizzly details of the de Blasio delusion.

The cheers were saved for de Blasio, who proclaimed a “new progressive direction” that will “take dead aim at the ‘Tale of Two Cities’” injustices he emphasized in his campaign.

He then recited the key elements of his platform: affordable-housing projects, an end to hospital closures, reform of the “broken” stop-and-frisk policy, and a tax on upper-income earners. After each item, he would say, “We won’t wait, we’ll do it now.”

Not content with promoting his own agenda, he had to take swipes at something called the “far right,” which he zinged for its agenda of “trickle-down economics” and giving “more to the most fortunate.” Luckily, much of de Blasio’s fiscal program will need approval from New York governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators — who, for all their faults, don’t appreciate the “Bill in the China Shop” approach of the new mayor.

Noah Rothman, a writer for Mediaite.com, was taken aback by the tone and tenor of the speeches. He tweeted that “MSNBC [is] really missing a branding opportunity here. . . . We’re swearing in a new prime time host.” Indeed, we can only thank the schedulers for at least sparing us from having MSNBC’s Al Sharpton at the podium.

The speeches finally over, the crowd went into City Hall to celebrate the arrival of the New Progressivism. I noted that Bertha Lewis, the former national head of the scandal-ridden ACORN “community-organizing” group, was an honored guest. Last fall, the New York Post reported that, according to a Democratic insider, ACORN had long sought to put de Blasio into the mayor’s office. “Without exaggeration, ACORN’s long-range plan since 2001 was to elect de Blasio mayor,” the insider said. “De Blasio was a big ACORN project.”

 

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This update hits the nail on the head. Individual buyers of gold coins are buy and hold investors with little need or desire to ever be sellers. I expect this 2013 trend, including increasing interest in silver and platinum, to pick up steam into 2014.

Demand for gold coins shot up 63% to 241.6 metric tons in the first three quarters of 2013, according to the latest figures available from the World Gold Council.

Sales of Gold Maple Leaf coins by the Royal Canadian Mint surged 82.5% to 876,000 ounces in the first three quarters of 2013 from the same period of 2012. The Perth Mint, Australia’s national coin and bar producer, saw sales rise 41% to 754,635 ounces last year, while the U.S. Mint sold 14% more American Eagle gold coins than it did in 2012, along with a record amount of silver coins.

Coin buyers tend to be small investors who view gold as an insurance policy against financial shocks, said Bart Melek, a senior commodity strategist with TD Securities Inc.

Because these investors intend to hold onto their gold for years or decades, many see the recent drop as an opportunity to buy more at a cheaper price, he added.

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