Sacandaga

Drug Makers in the Healthcare Reform Catbird Seat

I don't think that a promise of reduced approval cycles would be sufficient to sway the medical device manufacturers. They are always aware that they are one election and one major device failure, like the knee replacements 10 years ago, from having cycles stretched out again.
I think the concession the are really after is more patent protection, although that's less of an issue in the device market than it is in the drug market. Still, patent extensions, or easier-to-get modification approvals, are much less likely to be overturned once put in place.


On Sep 26 08:32 AM Mikethelad wrote:

> Firstly, maybe Advamed isn't being as effective as the other lobbying
> groups for pharma and services.
> But, the quid pro quo for device companies for a hefty fee like the
> one above could be an acceleration in new product registration cycle
> time from the FDA. Comparing the US with European regulatory time
> to approval, new products come to market in the EU 15-24 months in
> advance of the US.

Vanilla Financial Products Could Help Remedy Clear Market Failures

There is a model for the vanilla system: the cable TV carriers, who are required by the rules granting them franchise territories to offer a regulated, plain-vanilla service that includes local broadcast channels and any local, carrier-produced content, usually for around $15 per month.
The analog-to-digital conversion of broadcast TV has driven many Americans disinterested in cable programming (or at least in the way it is bundled and sold) into this "plain vanilla" cable product that is never advertised and roundly criticized by cable providers. It has also gained subscribers no longer able to afford enhanced programming packages.
While it's true that there is typically only one source of this plain vanilla product in each market, the fact that the "take rate" for regulated basic cable is so high vs. the converter box suggests that consumers are willing to pay for something that they previously got for nothing if they are presented with an option that is simple and understandable.

How Goldman Sachs Games the System

Selective disclosure is only a crime when companies do it, because they presumably know what they're talking about.
But GS's purported decision to provide its investment advice to some clients before others is perhaps a bad business practice, but not a crime, because even GS's advice is opinion, not fact (if the latter, they're really in trouble).
Those who are paying for it but getting it later than others should protest or fire GS.
I'm no defender of GS, and I think the WSJ article has substance. But this rehash is a pile of conjecture piled on other people's real investigation adds nothing to the WSJ article.

TARP Repayments: Media Continues to Trumpet Unjustified Positive Economic Spin

"Lest someone accuse me of whining without solutions..."

No one has to accuse you.
You confessed and convicted yourself in a mere 550 words of drivel.

No one is fooling anyone (except the conspirators leading you astray) on TARP or anything else. We are arguably far ahead of where we were a year ago, with weekly failures and shotgun marriages of major financial institutions. We are a long way from a sound, fully solvent financial system. The TARP repayment coverage claims nothing more.

Washington's Dilemma: This Isn't a Recession, It's a Collapse

What we need is less local government in total.
Let's combine the 50 states into 13 (Alaska, Hawaii, NY and California remain as-is, combine the rest into 9 others: New England, Newsylvania (NJ, PA, MD, DE), Caroginia (VA, NC, TN, KY, WV), Flagiapippi (FL, GA, SC, MS, AL), Texlaoklico (TX, AR, LA, OK), Rustbeltia (OH, IN, IL, MI, WI), Cornland (ND, SD, MN, IA, NE, KS, MO), Northwestia (WA, OR, ID, MT, WY), Rockyland (CO, NV, AZ, UT, NM).
Plus, no state may have more than 20 counties, and no county may have more than 20 other political subdivisions.

What to Buy and Why: Barron's 2009 Roundtable, Part I

"Giving a tax cut to people who spend the money at Wal-Mart on products made in China isn't going to do it. - Scott Black"

So, things will be much better if we give tax cuts to rich people who will spend it on products made in (or travel to) Germany, France or Italy?

60 Minutes on Oil: Did Anyone Verify Anything?

As several people have pointed out indirectly, there is a gap between "production" statistics and actual market supply that is big enough to drive a supertanker through, and Todd and everyone else here knows it.
When the commodities markets dictate it, pipelines strangely shut down. Supertakers somehow slow down. Refineries get "overhauled." And storage tanks fill up.
Strangely enough, those problems seem to all happen when interest rates are low and leverage is cheap, but they seem to disappear when rates start to climb and somehow getting rid of all that oil becomes a priority.
But speculation? Of course not! It's all just "bottlenecks" in the system we somehow managed to solve somewhere around the time the Ted spread went through the roof.

60 Minutes on Oil: Did Anyone Verify Anything?

Answer:
The distinction isn't between equities and commodities. There are speculators in both. The distinction within commodities is between principals -- those who legitimately rely on the markets to hedge their exposure to price changes in commodities they actually produce or consume -- and the rest of you sleazebags, who claim your are creating liquidity, but actually create only turbidity. And lots of pain for lots of ordinary people.


On Jan 12 11:22 AM OldLimey wrote:

> Here's a question pitched for maximum 'thumbs down': Why is it that
> folks who trade in oil and its derivatives are 'speculators' and
> folks who trade in equities are 'investors'?
>
> Does it not occur to anybody that trading shares on a secondary market
> - as opposed to buying an IPO - invests nothing new into the company
> concerned? To rant against somebody who invests in oil is as meaningless
> as ranting against the people who bid stock indices (or Treasuries?)
> up to unsustainable highs and leave the wider economy to pick up
> the pieces from the ensuing crash. Pretty much everybody reading
> SA is a speculator whether or not they like to think of themselves
> as such, insofar as most of us aim to ride a chosen asset class as
> high as it will go and get out before it starts to reverse. If that's
> unacceptable to some readers, best idea would be to elect a government
> that will change the rules we all freely play by. Maybe you have
> just done that - but I rather doubt it. Better still, elect a government
> that won't debase the fiat currency.

Oil Price Economics the 60 Minutes Way

Truly, it doesn't take a Wharton MBA -- or even Steve Kroft's Syracuse BA in journalism -- to understand that prices of all essential consumer goods (food, housing, fuel) commodities were being jacked by speculators during the exact period when interest rates were being kept artifically low by Mr. Greenspan. And, that those same prices all plummeted when a big piece of that speculative pie, housing, turned out to be the first to turn elastic (i.e., turns out people will move in with their parents to escape a bad-deal mortgage faster than they'll stop eating or stop driving to work and the store) when interest rates began climbing again and threatening the leveraged towers they'd built.

Housing also fell fastest and hardest because it was super-jacked with CDS plays and other leverage schemes, but once those deals went south, you knew that a box of Corn Flakes would be down from $7 to $4 not long afterward.
It's equally clear that there's a lot more involved than SUV mileage and demand from China and India when you realize that the number and average size of energy-related hedge funds more than quadrupled between 2001 and 2006, when doesn't include similar plays among sovereign wealth funds and commodity broker-dealers.

The true scandal is the fact that those oil-desk traders will move from Enron to Morgan Stanley and now somewhere else for the signing bonus and the chance to inflate the next commodity bubble.
Some of them undoubtedly must have had relatives for whom $4 gasoline was a true crisis. Did they share their trading profits with those relatives? Not likely.

Passengers, Packages: The Paradox of Air Transport

This is one of the nuttiest ideas I've ever heard.
For one thing, the average passenger that checks luggage (only about 60% of all air passengers) is never going to be willing to 1) pack far enough ahead of time to get it picked up by an express company, or 2) be willing to have it deposited at their destination unprotected, or have some stranger sign for it. Keep in mind that many people don't go immediately to a hotel from the airport, so someone is going to have to take responsibility for securing their luggage when it arrives, which may be many hours before you claim it.

Also, what makes you think that passenger airlines can easily fill their luggage compartments with profitable cargo? Their space-available cargo services are filled mostly with mail, and there is less and less mail in the system these days.

Just because Heathrow had day one problems, it doesn't mean that managing airport luggage sorting is beyond the reach of modern technology. The biggest obstacle to efficiency is the spot checking and scanning that Homeland Security now requires, not the coding and routing itself.

Face it -- people want their luggage to travel with them. They will never believe they are better off having lots of additional people handle and store it over a completely separate system on a separate schedule. And the purported cost savings will quickly turn into cost overrruns worse than anything happening in the current passenger system.

Six Air Courier Stocks to Transport Your Portfolio to New Heights

What about Atlas Air (AAWW)?