economy ↘↖
If, as reported, the Democrats have dropped the public option, they have abandoned any attempt to improve the health care in the United States in favor of increasing health-care insurance profits. This is good for the economy, as ever more jobs will be created in medical claims processing. Also, delivering 40 million new (taxpayer subsidized) premium-payers to the insurance companies to pretend to cover the currently uninsured will certainly drive up health insurance stocks. But nothing in the bill will actually improve heath care nor lower the cost of what passes for healthcare in the US. The war is over, the people lost.
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“how Goldman Sachs pulled off the amazing trick of making $3 billion in three months time, while the entire financial system collapses, foreclosures are at a record and unemployment skyrckets, and the US dollar collapses”
Does writing a blog constitute work? That appears to be the position of the New York State Department of Labor, which recently declared a laid-off attorney ineligible for unemployment benefits because she was bringing in $1.30 a day from blog ads.
— Lawyer’s Unemployment Benefits Yanked Over $1 A Day From Blog - Forbes.com
‘Boneless’ Wings, the Cheaper Bite
“in restaurants from Sarasota to Seattle, an improbable poultry part is showing up on menus: a little chunk of chicken breast that is fried and sauced and sold, with marketer’s brio, as a “boneless wing.””
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“A farmer sprayed milk on policemen during a protest against falling milk prices outside the E.U.’s headquarters in Brussels.”
State budget balancer - Los Angeles Times
I am not a big fan of politics, but this is a neat tool.
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“The abandoned houses project began innocently enough roughly ten years ago. I actually began photographing abandonment in Detroit in the mid 90’s as a creative outlet, and as a way of satisfying my curiosity with the state of my home town. I had always found it to be amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence.”
Obama is the new Dubya. When it comes to finance at least, the parallels are way (way) too striking to ignore.
— Is Obama the Financial Dubya? - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org
Given the present chaos, should-n’t we be asking if business education is not just a waste of time, but actually damaging to our economic health? If doctors or lawyers wreaked such havoc in their own professions, we would certainly reconsider what is being taught at medical and law schools.
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Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support. Big banks, it seems, have only gained political strength since the crisis began. And this is not surprising. With the financial system so fragile, the damage that a major bank failure could cause—Lehman was small relative to Citigroup or Bank of America—is much greater than it would be during ordinary times. The banks have been exploiting this fear as they wring favorable deals out of Washington. Bank of America obtained its second bailout package (in January) after warning the government that it might not be able to go through with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch, a prospect that Treasury did not want to consider. The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.
