biodummy

GE CEO Immelt: Misdirected on Healthcare

Casey: Immelt is the first serious figure who had called for reindustrialization of America. I am ready to take everything he says seriously. Arrogant and self-righteous Jack Welch was (and still is if you read his comments on the last page of BW) ready to ship all the U.S. jobs except the ones at Walmart to China or wherever for an extra penny in cost reduction - I think he should be tarred and feathered together with the bankers who promoted this.

The Imperatives of Healthcare Reform

A lengthy article in the last issue of New Yorker magazine quite succintly explaining what is really behind the unstoppable increase in health care expense - specifically, why the Medicare costs are so different in places

www.newyorker.com/repo...

Plunge Protection Team Attacks BofA: This Ends Now

If one begins with the lie (like the author does here claiming the dilution of the gold standard had been taking place in the late 1920s) it is sort of hard to believe in everything else he says. If anything, major recessions/depressions were happening more frequently and with greater severity before the fractional reserve banking had been put in place - essentially, about half of the time between the Civil War and WW1 the economy had been in recession. Gold standard (while being a dream of goldbugs - if it is instituted, the price of gold should be jacked up to ~$10K/oz to match the existing global gold reserves and the amount of money needed for the economy to run) is quite dead and is not coming back.

Despite Fed, Money Supply Contracting

"The M2 money supply which includes all cash changing hands throughout the economy plus savings deposits, CDs and money market accounts"

Foreclosures or bank sales would not change any of these; could it be that some cash is moving from the money markets into the corporate/muni bonds or stocks? Since early March (the trough in the market) bond yields dropped quite a bit which indicates demand; also, the stock rally (whether bear market or not) needed some cash to kindle it...

Arena's Obesity Drug Not Likely to Make It

On the efficiency side, Lorcaserin had been actually better than fenfluramine hen used alone (~2.4 Kg = 5 Lbs placebo-adjusted weight loss from the meta-analysis); everyone knows that fenfluramine (Pondimine) when used as a combo with phenthermine was very effective - just deadly. FDA guidelines quite dfinitively offer a choice of two primary goals - >35% of pts losing >5% of weight, this the number being >2x of the placebo [Lorcaserin met this requirement], and placebo-adjusted weight loss of >5% [they did not meet it - but according to the PR and CC they pre-specified the first goal]. If you think some more, if you have a drug that works extremely well on say 40% of the population and not at all on the other 60%, you almost never will be able to reach the second type goal. To me, the key issue for the approval is if FDA forces ARNA to run a good size combo trial before the approval can be granted - Lief and Co. simply don't have money to do that.