Monthly Archives: April 2012
EU approves Sony’s acquisition of part of EMI
“BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union’s competition regulator approved on Thursday a deal by Sony/ATV and other investors to buy part of the famous British music company EMI Group Ltd.
Sony/ATV, a joint venture between Sony Corp. and the Michael Jackson estate, and several investment funds including United Arab Emirates-based Mubadala Development Co. jointly offered $2.2 billion in November for EMI Music’s publishing businesses.
EMI’s publishing arm manages the rights to songs of popular artists such as Amy Winehouse, Regina Spektor and Rihanna.
Universal Music Group has a pending deal to buy the rest of EMI, which became famous for recording The Beatles and is also home to Coldplay and Katy Perry. EMI was put up for sale by Citigroup last summer, after the bank foreclosed on private-equity firm Terra Firma, which bought the music company in 2007.
To get approval for the deal from the European Commission, the Sony-led investor group promised to sell the publishing rights to several music catalogues as well as the works of 12 artists, including Ozzy Osbourne, Robbie Williams, and Ben Harper….”
Comments »Market Update
U.S. equities shit the bed…DOW down 121, NASDAQ down 30, S&P down 12
“2:30 pm : Selling has started to accelerate, driving stocks down to new session lows and leaving the major market averages with large losses.
Tech stocks continue to be hit with the brunt of the selling effort; the sector is now down 1.7%. To be fair, though, Industrials aren’t much better off as they grapple with a 1.5% loss. DJ30 -120.34 NASDAQ -32.32 SP500 -13.22 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 900/1.32 bln/1525 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 1145/450 mln/1815
2:00 pm : Stocks continue to trade in weak fashion, leaving the major equity averages to fractionally extend their session lows. The broad-based S&P 500 hasn’t been in positive territory for about two hours.
Telecom, up 0.2%, and Health Care, up 0.1%, make up the only two major sectors that have managed to maintain any kind of a gain. Tech is leading the other eight sectors lower with its drop to a 1.1% loss. DJ30 -69.56 NASDAQ -17.05 SP500 -7.13 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 1000/1.24 bln/1405 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 1255/420 mln/1660
1:30 pm : Tech stocks continue to come under pressure. The sector, which is the largest by market weight, is now down 0.7% for the day. Only Industrials, off by 0.8%, are in worse shape. Qualcomm (QCOM 63.38, -3.60) continues to weigh heavily on the Tech space — the stock has slumped in excess of 5% to a new monthly low because the company’s underwhelming forecast has overshadowed its better-than-expected earnings results.DJ30 -58.62 NASDAQ -11.51 SP500 -5.65 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 1150/1.12 bln/1250 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 1440/375 mln/1460
1:00 pm : Listless trade has left the major equity averages to plod along with modest losses for the second straight session.
Stocks have struggled to establish a clear direction in today’s trade. The mood ahead of the open was mixed because of eurozone concerns tacitly communicated by the euro’s retreat. A disappointing weekly jobless claims count further undermined confidence that had been built initially with help from a big batch of better-than-expected earnings reports from a broad range of industry bellwethers.
Disappointment related to the latest Philly Fed Survey and monthly existing home sales numbers after the open stirred a flurry of selling that dropped the major averages into the red for modest losses. Stocks managed to rebound from there, but the move proved unsustainable amid a lack of leadership. The Nasdaq is now at a session low, while both the S&P 500 and Dow test their depths of the day.
The broad market may be down with a modest loss, but shares of online retailer eBay (EBAY 40.59, +4.72) surged to a new multi-year high in response to its latest quarterly report, which featured an upside earnings surprise. The company also raised its forecast for fiscal 2012.
Dow components American Express (AXP 57.65, -0.39), Travelers (TRV 62.30, +2.83), Verizon (VZ 38.30, +0.64), and DuPont (DD 52.39, -0.88) all posted upside earnings surprises of their own. Fellow blue chip Bank of America (BAC 8.84, -0.08) gapped higher at the open because of a positive response to its report, but shares have since faltered. Morgan Stanley (MS 17.98, +0.32) has maintained some of its gain after pulling back from its opening level. DJ30 -35.73 NASDAQ -6.54 SP500 -3.81 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 1110/1.04 bln/1270 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 1345/355 mln/1550
12:30 pm : The Nasdaq has notched a new session low, although its loss remains relatively modest. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is quickly approaching the depths that it set in the early going, but the Dow has yet to test its daily low.
Shares of Bank of America (BAC 8.86, -0.06) are in the red with a modest loss after a sharply higher open that came in response to its latest quarterly report. A positive response to the latest numbers from Morgan Stanley (MS 17.85, +0.19) also helped shares of the investment bank and brokerage outfit open higher, but the stock has moved down from that mark. Collectively, Financials are down 0.3% today. DJ30 -42.77 NASDAQ -6.44 SP500 -4.61 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 1130/960 mln/1215 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 1360/325 mln/1525
12:00 pm : The major stock averages continue to muddle along in mixed fashion. The lackluster action is largely owed to ongoing listlessness.
Although the broad market has been without much direction today, shares of eBay (EBAY 40.90, +5.03) are up 14% to trade at multi-year highs following the release of the online retailer’s latest quarterly report, which featured better-than-expected results for both the top and bottom line. The company’s second quarter forecast was actually in line with what Wall Street had already projected, but management did raise its outlook for fiscal 2012. Several analysts upgraded shares of the stock following the report’s release.
Despite strength in shares of EBAY, the Consumer Discretionary sector is down 0.5% for the day. In the prior session Consumer Discretionary stocks actually booked the only major gain of any major sector. DJ30 -2.65 NASDAQ +4.35 SP500 -1.02 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 1320/830 mln/1005 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 1585/285 mln/1245
11:30 am : Stocks are on the slide again. The action has taken both the Dow and the S&P 500 back to the flat line after they had worked their way up to a modest gain. The stock market’s inability to sustain a gain comes amid a continued lack of leadership.
With stocks struggling to find direction Treasuries continue to hold on to slight gains. The benchmark 10-year Note is up only a handful of ticks, but the move has been enough keep the Note’s yield near its monthly low of about 1.95%. DJ30 +0.90 NASDAQ +9.39 SP500 +0.07 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 1510/705 mln/770 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 1815/245 mln/990
11:00 am : A dose of disappointing data prompted stocks to retreat earlier, but they have since bounced back into positive territory. Overall gains remain modest, though.
For the second straight session the broad market is without a legitimate source of leadership. Tech and Financials, arguably the two most influential sectors, are both up a rather tepid 0.3%. Energy has a narrow lead over most of the other sectors, but its 0.4% gain is still too modest to inspire broader buying interest. Meanwhile, Telecom’s 0.7% gain has mattered little to many market participants due to the sector’s lack of weight. DJ30 +39.12 NASDAQ +20.61 SP500 +4.00 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 1525/600 mln/715 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 1910/205 mln/870
10:35 am : The CRB Index is now up 0.3%. Earlier this morning it was down narrowly.
Oil continues to contend with moderate selling pressure, which has left contracts priced with a 0.3% loss at $102.35 per barrel.
Meanwhile, natural gas prices were down narrowly at about $1.95 per MMBtu a few minutes ago, but since the release of the latest weekly inventory report they have moved modestly lower to $1.94 per MMBtu for a 0.6% loss. Weekly inventory data showed a build of 25 bcf when a build of 30 bcf had been broadly anticipated.
Precious metals prices were up only fractionally about 90 minutes ago. From there they bounced higher, but a pushback by sellers has forced prices off of session highs. Gold prices now trade at $1647.50 per ounce for a 0.5% gain, while silver sits at $31.86 per ounce with a 1.2% gain. Helping the case for precious metals, the dollar has declined to a fractional loss against a collection of competing currencies after it had been bid higher this morning. DJ30 +2.34 NASDAQ +20.26 SP500 +1.36 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 830/410 mln/1340 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 1040/145 mln/1685
10:05 am : Stocks have faltered following a flurry of data, which was generally disappointing.
The Philadelphia Fed Survey for April fell to 8.5 from 12.5 in the prior month, but had been generally expected to decline to just 10.3.
Existing home sales hit an annualized rate of 4.48 million units during March, but that is down from the pace of 4.60 million units posted in the prior month and also less than the rate of 4.62 million units that had been broadly anticipated.
Leading Indicators for March increased by 0.3%, which is slightly greater than the 0.2% increase that had been forecasted, on average, among economists polled by Briefing.com. DJ30 -50.78 NASDAQ -2.17 SP500 -4.32 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 1415/220 mln/675 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 1750/80 mln/900
09:45 am : The Dow and S&P 500 are currently narrowly above the neutral line, but the Nasdaq has mustered a modest gain with help from eBay(EBAY 39.73, +3.86), which has sprinted out to a 10% gain with help from a pleasing quarterly report. In contrast, Qualcomm (QCOM 64.00, -2.98) has slumped in response to its latest quarterly results.
As a reminder, 10:00 AM ET brings the latest existing home sales numbers, the latest Philadelphia Fed Survey, and monthly Leading Indicators.DJ30 14.01 NASDAQ +1.35 SP500 +10.20 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec NA/NA/NA NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec NA/NA/NA”
Comments »Oracle, Google, and Jobs’ Legacy
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Comments »Larry Ellison, the outspoken and brash chief executive of Oracle Corp., is always full of surprises.
This week, as one of the primary witnesses in Oracle’s (ORCL -0.46%) lawsuit against Google (GOOG +0.22%) , he might even be surprising himself. With Oracle alleging Google’s Android software infringes on its intellectual property, Ellison has become an unwitting avenger for his friend, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Jobs, investors may remember, told author Walter Isaacson many things for his biography, “Steve Jobs” before he died last year. One of his more passionate diatribes was on the topic of Google, and how Android copied many features of Apple’s (AAPL -1.94%) iPhone and its iOS software. Jobs vowed he would “destroy Android, calling it a “stolen product.”
“I will spend my last dying breath, if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs told Isaacson. “I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this,” he said, even if he had to use all of Apple’s cash in the process.
To date, Apple has never sued Google itself, but instead has sued some of its hardware partners, including HTC and Samsung, for infringing on Apple’s patents including those that cover multi-touch gestures, swiping, pinching and expanding and other inventions.
Ford To Sink $760 Million on New Chinese Assembly Plant
Comments »Ford (F) and its joint-venture partner said Thursday they will build a $760 million assembly plant in Hangzhou, bringing Ford’s investment in China since 2006 to $4.9 billion.
The Hangzhou plant, built with Changan Ford Mazda Automobile, will open in 2015 with an initial production capacity of 250,000 units.
Panetta: US Constantly An Inch From War
“Now excuse me, I have a flight home to catch”
Comments »Brussels, Belgium (CNN) — The United States is prepared for “any contingency” when it comes to dealing with North Korea, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told CNN.
“We’re within an inch of war almost every day in that part of the world, and we just have to be very careful about what we say and what we do,” Panetta said Wednesday on “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.”
During a wide-ranging interview at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talked about Syria, the Secret Service and North Korea. The two were in Belgium for meetings to prepare for a NATO summit in Chicago next month.
Panetta’s assessment of North Korea followed last week’s launch by Pyongyang of a long-range rocket. Despite the failure of the launch — with the rocket breaking apart 81 seconds after liftoff, it drew condemnation from the United States and countries in the region.
When asked whether the threat posed by North Korea kept him awake at night, Panetta said: “Unfortunately these days, there’s a hell of a lot that keeps me awake. But that’s one that tops the list.”
You May Not Have Known, But Illinois Has Corrupt Officials
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Comments »The finance chief for a small city in northern Illinois has been arrested and charged with stealing more than $30 million from the city coffers and using the money to sustain a luxurious lifestyle.
MyFoxChicago reports that Rita Crundwell, 58, the comptroller of Dixon, is accused of using city funds to finance her horse farm and buy expensive items ranging from tractor-trailer trucks to a motor home to jewelry.
She held the position as comptroller since the early 1980s, in the boyhood home of former President Ronald Reagan. The federal complaint against her alleges that she embezzled more than $3.2 million just since last fall. That’s on top of a salary of $80,000.
She allegedly bought a $2.1 million motor home, in addition to several trucks that cost as much as $147,000, according to the report.
Dixon Mayor James Burke called the allegations a “traumatic event” for the city.
According to a criminal complaint, the siphoning of city funds went undetected for years until another staffer filling in as vacation relief became suspicious and discovered a secret bank account. How an enormous sum — it dwarfed the city’s current annual budget of roughly $8 million to $9 million — could be stolen and escape the notice of a yearly audit left many puzzled.
A Chicago-based corruption watchdog, the Better Government Association, called it a wakeup call for state and local officials to put in place better safeguards, especially in smaller towns that lack rigorous oversight.
“Tens of billions of our tax dollars flow through 7,000 plus units of government in Illinois every year. And we can only watch a few of them,” said the association’s president, Andy Shaw. “Most of them don’t have inspector generals. Most of them don’t have auditor generals. Most of them don’t have watchdog groups looking closely. … It’s ripe for ripoffs.”
GSA Neely’s Wife Also Likes To Abuse Taxpayer Money
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Comments »The widening investigation into questionable spending by General Services Administration official Jeff Neely and other alleged abuses within the agency suggests Neely’s wife was also living large on taxpayer money — with perks including vacations, catered parties and even a free parking spot.
Some of the most specific details about Deb Neely’s involvement have emerged over the past few days of congressional hearings, following the April 2 inspector general’s report about an $823,000 Las Vegas conference organized by her husband.
GSA inspector general Brian Miller said Wednesday during a Senate hearing on GSA that Neely’s wife had a dedicated parking space at an agency facility in California.
“Even today, we found out that the wife of the regional commissioner (Neely) had a parking space throughout the year of 2012 at the federal building,” he said.
Sources familiar with the investigation later confirmed to Fox News that Deb Neely was afforded the parking spot at the San Francisco office.
Other records indicate that Neely’s wife “personally handled party arrangements, directed the actions of federal employees and ordered thousands of dollars of food at taxpayer expense,” Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said Monday during a House oversight hearing.
He also said Neely’s wife once reportedly impersonated a federal employee so she could join her husband at a private sector conference.
“The impression conveyed by these documents is that Mr. Neely and his wife believed they were some sort of agency royalty who used taxpayer funds to bankroll their lavish lifestyle,” said Cummings, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Investigations also uncovered what appears to be an e-mail from Neely to his wife in which he talks about taking her on an official, 17-day trip to Hawaii and Guam as a possible “birthday present.”
She wrote back: “Its yo birthday … We gonna pawty like iz yo birthday!”
Leon Panetta Has Racked Up $860,000 Flying
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Comments »Since becoming secretary of Defense in July, Leon Panetta has flown home to spend time at his walnut farm in Monterey, Calif. 27 times, according to the Pentagon.
Panetta is required by post-9/11 department rules to travel on a military plane with communications equipment, which Defense officials have estimated costs something on the order of $32,000 for each round trip to Monterey and back. The rules require Panetta to compensate the taxpayers for the cost of a commercial plane ticket: about $630.
Of course, $630 wouldn’t get Panetta a private ride on a jet that leaves and returns at times of his choosing, but the secretary says he has no choice.
It’s harder to make that argument, though, when you are the one calling for deep cuts in Defense spending and also issue the orders that cause a soldier making $20,000 a year to uproot his family to the other side of the country or separate from them entirely. Privates shipped to Ft. Bliss don’t get to spend their weekends at home.
NIH Under Fire For Spending Taxpayer Funds On “Homoerotic” Website
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Comments »The National Institutes of Health has spent millions of dollars over the past decade to fund the construction of an HIV-prevention website that, among other sexually explicit features, includes a graphic image of homosexual sex and a Space Invaders-style interactive game that uses a penis-shaped blaster to shoot down gay epithets.
The grant money went to a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota that created a site called Sexpulse. The goal was to draw in what are termed MISM — or “men who use the Internet to seek sex with men” — in order to educate them and ultimately reduce their risk of contracting HIV.
But the site used unorthodox methods to get subjects’ attention and keep them interested. The site includes pornographic images of homosexual sex as well as naked and scantily clad men. It includes several risqué interactive features, like the Space Invaders-style arcade game.
The conservative Traditional Values Coalition, which flagged the government-backed research and described it as “gay porn,” complains the website and studies are a multimillion-dollar waste.
“We can’t spend money on this. America is broke,” coalition President Andrea Lafferty said. “People are losing their homes, they’re losing their jobs … and what we’re doing is we’re funding year after year these cockamamie grants by people at NIH.”
NIH records show the government started awarding grants to the Minnesota team beginning in 2001, renewing them almost every year since then. The 2012 grant was valued at more than $680,000; in total, NIH has awarded more than $5 million to the team. The researchers started developing the Sexpulse site in 2005 and continue to work on the project — the project leader told FoxNews.com that total funding through 2015 is expected to top $7 million.
The values coalition, which frequently complains about NIH spending, is drawing attention to the Sexpulse grants as Congress renews a heated debate over government waste in the wake of the General Services Administration scandal. In that case, an internal report found the agency spent more than $820,000 on a Las Vegas retreat.
“This is a lot more money,” Lafferty noted of the NIH funding.
40 Richest People Lost $6.2 Billion Yesterday
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Comments »The 40 richest individuals on Earth lost a combined $6.2 billion yesterday as stocks dropped amid disappointing U.S. earnings, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the wealthiest people.
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal joined the index, which doubled the number of billionaires it tracks yesterday. Alwaleed’s fortune has increased 18.2 percent, or $3.2 billion, this year, as shares of his Kingdom Holding Co. (KINGDOM), a diversified investment group that is planning to build the world’s tallest tower, rose 36 percent. The 57-year-old ranks 24th on the index with a net worth of $20.5 billion.
“There is no secret to success,” Alwaleed said in an e-mail sent from Saudi Arabia. “It is based on a sound investment strategy, commitment and long-term vision.”
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index takes measure of the world’s wealthiest people based on market and economic changes and Bloomberg News reporting. Each net worth figure is updated every business day at 5:30 p.m. in New York. The valuations are listed in U.S. dollars.
The expanded list was published with the release of new billionaires profile pages in the Bloomberg Professional service. The profiles feature a transparent analysis of how each billionaire’s fortune was calculated.
Alwaleed’s fortune makes him richer than Google Inc. co- founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Page ranks in 29th place with $18.9 billion, while Brin ranks 32nd on the list compiled by Bloomberg News. He is worth $18.7 billion.
Oil Speculation and Dodd-Frank Regulation, Oh My
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Comments »A day after President Obama called for increased oversight of speculation in energy markets, House Republicans struck back, at least indirectly.
On Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee voted on budget legislation that would, among other things, repeal the Resolution Authority granted the Federal Reserve in the Dodd-Frank legislation and subject the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the annual appropriations process.
The developments speak to the starkly different philosophical approaches the two parties have regarding regulation of financial markets. They are related because the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) was given authority in the Dodd-Frank Act to impose position caps on oil traders, beginning in January 2011.
These limits have not yet been implemented because the CFTC’s budget was slashed ahead of Dodd-Frank’s passage, says Leo Hindery, founder of InterMedia Partners, a private equity firm, and a former economic adviser to President Obama.
“Dodd-Frank was a painful bill to get passed,” Hindery recalls. “It didn’t do everything a lot of us wanted but, that said, it was a pretty good piece of legislation despite untold opposition.”
Unable to stop Dodd-Frank from becoming law, Hindery says its opponents, a.k.a. “Republicans”, are now trying to “gut” the legislation. (To be sure, one man’s “gutting” of legislation is another man’s attempt to cut the budget and let free market capitalism work.)
Hedge Funds See Record Assets Under Management
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Comments »Hedge fund assets jumped to record levels in the first quarter of this year, when funds had their best first quarter in five years, according to the latest HFR Global Hedge Fund Industry Report, released on Thursday by Chicago-based research firm Hedge Fund Research.
Total investor capital allocated to hedge funds in the first quarter exceeded $16 billion, HFR said in a statement.
Combined with strong performance for hedge funds in the first quarter, when stock and credit markets gained strongly, total capital invested in the global hedge fund industry increased to $2.13 trillion, exceeding the previous record of $2.04 trillion set in mid-2011, HFR said.
Among investment strategies, those most favored by investors were fixed income-based Relative Value Arbitrage and Macro, which received “an overwhelming majority of the new investor capital for the quarter,” HFR’s statement said.
It said that in the first quarter, investors allocated $12.4 billion in net new capital to Relative Value Arbitrage and $7.8 billion to Macro and redeemed $2.9 billion from Equity Hedge and $940 million from Event Driven strategies.
Relative Value Arbitrage is an investment strategy which seeks to take advantage of price differentials between related financial instruments by buying and selling different securities simultaneously. Macro is a strategy based on macroeconomic trends. Equity Hedge involves taking long and short positions in separate stocks simultaneously. Event Driven investing is driven by specific events related to companies or countries.
In the first quarter, investors preference for the industry’s most established managers continued to be pronounced, according to HFR. Firms with more than $5 billion in assets under management were allocated $18.3 billion in new capital in the quarter, while funds managing less than $5 billion saw a combined net outflow of nearly $2 billion over the same period.
“The record level of assets and the shifting distribution of these are indicative of powerful trends shaping the hedge fund industry in 2012,” Kenneth J. Heinz, President of HFR, said in a statement.
Claims Surface Suggesting BP Knew What Was Going On and Covered Up Another Blow Out
[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj1I-a3vqI8 450 300]
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Radical Right: A Revisit of the Oklahoma City Bombing in a New Upcoming Book
ANALYSIS: Health insurers try to fool Congress with fuzzy math
“Want to find out what Congress is about to vote on? Take a ride on the Washington subway.
If you’ve been on the Metro in recent days, you might have seen an ad designed to make you feel sorry for our poor health insurance companies. So sorry that you’ll call your congressman and demand he support a bill that would gut an important part of the health care reform law: the provision requiring that insurers spend at least 80 percent of the premiums they collect from us on our actual health care.
Back in the early 1990s, when most insurance firms were still nonprofits, they were spending on average 95 cents of every premium dollar paying medical claims. As they began to convert to for-profit status, though, that percentage dropped because of pressure from Wall Street. Now that the industry is dominated by a handful of investor-owned corporations, the average is around 80 percent. The members of Congress who drafted the Affordable Care Act felt that was as low as it should go. And so they inserted language in the bill requiring insurers to pay rebates to their policyholders if they go below that threshold.
Shareholders hate that provision because the less insurance companies spend on health care, the more is available for profits. And because job number one for any investor-owned company is to “enhance shareholder value,” industry lobbyists have been at work ever since the bill’s passage to get the provision repealed or weakened. One way of doing that is by getting Congress to exempt the commissions insurance firms pay agents who sell their policies from the equation used to determine that threshold. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is set to do that as early as today.
A key component of the industry’s ongoing campaign to convince lawmakers to gut the law is to convince us that they’re barely making ends meet. And for that they’ve enlisted the help of one of Washington’s pre-eminent spin doctors, Rick Berman.
One of Berman’s industry-funded front groups, the Employment Policies Institute, is behind the D.C. subway ads featuring a dollar bill divided into segments that, we are asked to believe, reveals how insurance companies really spend our premiums (35 cents to hospitals, 33 cents to doctors, 14 cents for drugs, etc.). The five words above the dollar: “Where Your Insurance Dollar Goes.” The one word below it: “Surprised?”
We’re told that the sponsor of the ad is rethinkreform.com, meaning that it is the work of a front group within a front group. Berman’s “Institute” created the Committee to Rethink Reform in 2009 to stir up opposition to the health care law.
Because it is a 501(c)4 organization, the Employment Policies Institute does not have to disclose where it gets its funding—and it doesn’t. But knowing just what lobbying and PR group paid a consulting firm to create that divided dollar bill several years ago should give us a pretty good hint.
It was none other than—you guessed it—the lobbying and PR group for the insurance industry, America’s Health Insurance Plans.
Surprised?
AHIP has commissioned the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to develop a number of “studies” over the years to help advance whatever agenda AHIP felt needed advancing. With a tagline, “Your agenda is our agenda,” PwC has a proven track record of being a reliable agenda advancer for AHIP.
So reliable, in fact, that it put out a widely discredited AHIP-commissioned study a few weeks before the Senate voted on reform in 2009 in an attempt to get people to believe that certain provisions of the reform bill would raise premiums. PwC was forced to disavow the study’s conclusions when reporters figured out that AHIP had instructed it to ignore other important provisions of the bill that would help hold premium costs down.
I was still working for the industry when AHIP hired PwC to come up with that dollar bill that now graces Washington’s subway cars. Berman’s subway ad uses the exact numbers, down to the penny, that were featured on the AHIP/PwC dollar.
When we see that dollar and its cost breakdowns, what’s really supposed to surprise us is that just 3 cents go to health insurer profits. What AHIP/PwC and Berman’s groups don’t tell you is that the big for-profit insurers make far more than 3 cents profit off of every premium dollar they collect from us, and that the only way they were able to get the average down to 3 cents was by including several nonprofit insurers—the ones that cannot by law make a profit—in the equation.
AHIP thought up the dollar bill illusion to obscure the reality of just how profitable insurers really are. Over just the past two years, the five biggest insurers have reported more than $20 billion in profits. That’s money that could be used to provide millions of uninsured Americans access to needed care. Instead, a big chunk of our premium dollars are probably going into Rick Berman’s pocket.
Even though the Employment Policies Institute doesn’t have to disclose donors, it does have to tell the IRS how much money it takes in and how it spends it. In 2009, this “think tank” spent just $18,000 of the nearly $11 million it took in paying its staff to think, or do anything else for that matter, and $8.5 million for “advertising and promotion.” Most of the rest went to Richard Berman and Associates.
Surprised? “
Comments »Sanctions Against Iran Have No Effect: Study
“An updated industry report published on Wednesday appeared to show tightening international sanctions were having no impact on Iranian crude exports.
The latest publication of data by the Joint Organizations Data Initiative (JODI) listed Iran as having produced 3.752 million barrels per day (bpd) in February, marking the highest output since December 2008.
The 32,000 bpd increase over January mostly went into exports, which climbed 3.2 percent.
JODI, an initiative coordinated by the International Energy Forum (IEF), depends on participating member states for data collection.
The IEA said in its report on April 12 that sanctions on Iran could see “output could plummet to 2.6-2.8 mb/d by mid-summer, unless alternative buyers can be found”. Total production in Iran was placed at 3.35 million bpd in February, further decreasing to 3.3 million bpd in March.
Norway was among the most prominent gainers in the JODI report, adding 282,000 bpd, an increase of 19.5 percent. Other additions were recorded for Canada, were production increased to 2.375 million bpd.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest exporter, reported a minor decrease for JODI of 18,000 bpd in February versus a month earlier to reach 9.853 million bpd, falling short of the 10 million bpd IEA assessment. After a jump last month, exports eased by 22,000 bpd.
Russia’s production level remained under 10 million bpd for the second month running, although it still edged Saudi Arabia by 90,000 bpd to remain the world’s largest oil producer. No details were available as to how exports fared in February, but added data for January indicated that most of the drawback hit exports.
Production in Iraq was also lower, coming in 107,000 bpd less to reach 2.54 million bpd. Libya and the United Arab Emirates, notable players in the world oil markets, once again did not provide any information in time for publication.
The IEA maintained that higher output from Iraq, Libya and the UAE “more than offset reduced Iranian and Angolan supplies” in March.
Inconsistencies and delays in data submissions from member states have been contentious issue within the IEF. More transparency, the IEF argues, would help reduce price volatility seen as detrimental to long-term industry investment.”
Comments »DOUG KASS: Here Are The 12 Things That Could Crush The Markets
“These are the 12 things that he believes could throw the markets into a tizzy.
1. US Politics
2. Euro Politics
3. Interest rates
4. Economic deterioration
5. Fiscal issues
6. Deflation
7. Strategists excess bullishness
8. Housing
9. Black swans
10. Fund flows
11. The nothing but Apple (AAPL) market.
12. Technical deterioration
