Another Thing I Hate About Wall Street

I’ve always thought the stock market would be more appropriately located in Atlantic City. It’s a casino, after all.

Karen, this would make a good underplayed story of the day:

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President Barack Obama’s economic advisers are increasingly concerned about the U.S. Senate’s delay in confirming the nominations of Austan Goolsbee and Cecilia Rouse to the White House Council of Economic Advisers….Without Senate confirmation, the two economists are barred from advising the president as the administration tackles the worst financial crisis in 70 years and tries to advance the spending plan Obama submitted to Congress last week.

Yes, exile, Nate mentioned that today too:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/hoping-he-fails.html
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“But if someone wanted to make the case that the Republicans were actively trying to promote the Administration’s failure, they’d be hard pressed to find a better example.”

Caught the last two minutes of Tweety last night. I’m sorry you had to endure an “interview” conducted by a man who has learned how to talk indefintely without stopping to breathe. But you were game! Nice job under the circumstances.

@Joe

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Maybe we can Scherer to title it “Republicans’ Petty Confirmation Strategy”.

Is the Spring Break in April considered a “recess”? If so, Obama could fill numerous posts during those 2 weeks…

It sort of makes sense.
After all one of the reasons companies jettison workers at the drop of a hat is so that they can continue to show a profit. The fact that the workers left behind have to bust their a$$ out of fear for their jobs is bonus points.

I tend to agree with Obama’s recent statement, we should be worried about the long term health of the economy, and not the day to day as represented by the short term stock market. After all, it’s our greed in chasing short term stock gains and bonuses that seems to have gotten us into this mess.
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By the way, I recently read your health care article, and feel for you (I glanced to see if swampland would have a blog post, and didn’t see one.) I hope everything turns out for the best.
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-MBirchmeier

The market goes up when layoffs occur or jobs are shipped to lower paid workers overseas. Auto workers with good contracts and health plans are viewed as cheating business out of money. Executives expect bonuses even when corporate profits fall.

The double standard noted above does not get covered by business reporters because the reporters are biased in favor of business. Jon Stewart’s take down of Jim “The Democrats are Bolsheviks” Cramer and CNBC was classic. The true state of companies were not reported. Stocks were supported despite warning signs.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/what-battered-newsrooms-c_b_172397.html

The public has a lack of trust in Wall Street and the reporters covering the financial beat. Good news for US workers is bad news for the Street.

Tracking the daily gyrations of the Dow has one obvious advantage: On days when it’s down, the GOP can blame Obama for not fixing the economy. On days when it’s up, the GOP can talk about earmarks that sound funny or something.

The stock market pretty much does whatever it wants to. Everyone tries to find some cause and effect link to it. Companies down size and their stock goes up. A company downsizes and the stock market goes down, then up some, then sideways. Maybe they’re just anticipating the change to daylight savings time?

I’m afraid Wall Street and their enablers like CNBC through their constant temper tantrums and whining are getting me to despise them even more.

Wall Street always rejoices when things that are bad for Main Street happen – lay offs – YEAH! Cut workers pay – AWESOME! Outsource to China – Huge Rally! Cut workers benefits, slash employees health care – Wall Street Approves!!!

As I said in an earlier thread, I believe the American public has lost faith in our financial institutions and those who “run” them. The fact that even smart people like David Brooks try to make a case for the bonuses because those cash prizes allowed companies to keep “talent” shows you how far from reality we’ve been.

I wish there was some sort of 401(K) plan that was quasi-public. There are young people in my office who are truly shocked, as they believed their retirement plans were “safe” and didn’t realize if you had money in stocks you could be a big loser.

Between the clueless CEOs and the braindead “pundits” on networks like CNBC, Americans have had a rude awakening about the abilities of our executives to create real wealth.

why is scherer, who doesn’t know crap about the health care issue and writes like he’s a fully owned subsidiary of Aetna or Humana, writing about the health care summer when Karen was also there, and understands what’s at stake here?

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The people trading in the market are somewhat irrational, and observing its day-to-day ups and downs will make you that way as well.
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KT: The NYT explains, however, that this is because the news wasn’t even worse..
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… which makes some traders take bets that we’re near the bottom, and are looking to buy some good companies at what they think are fire sale prices. Monday, Geithner could sneeze in the middle of a news conference…which interpreted negatively, could send the markets for another tumble. Irrational.
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My opinion is that paying attention to (and overvaluing the importance of) the gyrations of the stock market is one of the big faults of business reporting. Much of the current set of economic difficulties we have are centered around wealth ‘created’ when we shuffle pieces of arbitrarily and indeterminately-valued paper back and forth…the true measure is what we are making. What new techniques/technologies or homes or machines or roads or stuffed animals are we producing here at home? I mean, it’s not enough to just buy American, which amounts to more shuffling of paper, but to make American…

People are actually complaining about the GOP holding up Obama nominations. Gimme a break–Bush totally got screwed on this front. The GOP also has swallowed some pretty crappy nominees (e.g., Holder).

KT, why would it surprise you that the market is down? What in Obama’s package actually is good for business? They’re going to jack up taxes, put the screws to energy companies, put the screws to American companies with overseas operations, impose huge energy costs on American business thru carbon cap and trade. Building a bridge in rural Missouri just doesn’t make up for this. Big Pharma also just took a huge hit with Wyeth v. Levine–so that’s not helping (by the way, at some point Big Pharma is going to leave the US, with all of the jobs, help to balance of trade etc.)

People wonder why California is in such trouble. They have some of the highest taxes in the nation (and still run huge deficits), unfriendly business climate (with regs and tort lawyers), has anyone thought about cause and effect here. Basically, Obama wants to do to the US what California gov has been doing to California.

Most days I’m rather happy that I don’t have any money.

………………The GOP also has swallowed some pretty crappy nominees

Why does Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, etc come to mind when the words nominee and crappy are used in the same sentence?

Regarding Wyeth versus Levin, even Clarence Thomas voted with the majority in that case because Justice Thomas’s role on the Court is largely to be the upholder of rigid, formalistic federalism based on his view of the framers’ vision. That’s the role he’s staked out on the Court. He’s not a compromiser; he’s not a balancer; he’s not a consensus-maker. He doesn’t believe states surrender their sovereignty except where expressly provided under the Constitution–and neither the Constitution nor the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act specifically divest state power over civil litigation.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/03/04/a-big-day-for-state-tort-law-a-closer-look-at-wyeth-v-levine/

Here’s my favorite part of the article:

Economists worry that mounting job losses could make it harder for homeowners to make their mortgage payments

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I can’t tell if that’s the economists being stupid, or the author being stupid.

rmrd, AGAG sucked. No doubt, but he wasn’t a crappy nominee in the sense that he could be stopped given issues. Rumsfeld gets a bad rap.

Holder has in your face disqualifying issues. And the GOP let him go. Bush didn’t get anywhere close to that courtesy. Look at how Ashcroft was treated and delayed.

As for Wyeth, I didn’t say it was wrong as a matter of the law. I said it’s a problem. And if you don’t think that tort lawsuits aren’t a problem, then you just don’t pay attention. I am NOT suggesting that we get rid of them or what have you, but they do create issues, and I think everyone knows it. Just ask any of the docs whose careers were ruined when Edwards used junk science.

The Dow (which has no relationship whatever with its Chinese homophone) has become the Schadenfreude Index. Given all those smart guys’ recent indicia of performance I can’t see why we care too much.

All I want is an indication of which companies are replacing their top echelons with rational beings – that’s where I’ll put my scarce clams.

KT:
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Some reporting on Health Care Reform has suggested that the burden on America’s businesses might be alleviated.
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What would be the most business-friendly (not including the health insurance industry, of course) Health Care Reform proposition?
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Wouldn’t it be a proposal that takes the cost of health insurance off of American companies’ balance sheets completely? Wouldn’t it be a plan involving the total extrication of American business (again not including the health insurance industry, of course) from the health insurance market?
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If this is so, then wouldn’t the markets spike dramatically at a lede like “Federal government to provide health insurance to all citizens, Federal business taxes previously had been compounded drastically by enormous health insurance costs“?

SZ, there are arguments that Canada is more competitive when it comes to attracting business b/c companies don’t have to pay for health care. Of course, there’s also the problem that people have to come to the US for care a lot.

spob, if you are talking about CP cases against OB/GYNs, As I recall the Academy of Peditrics and the Academy of OB/GYN published a joint study paper in 2003 that cast large doubt on whether CP was caused by any event at the time of birth. Once that study hit, wasn’t it harder for such lawsuits to be successful?

What was the consensus about delivery and CP earlier?

This is a snippet from a review article in the New England Journal of Medicine regarding Cerebral Palsy published in 1994….Some authors assume that problems during the birth process (such as midforceps delivery) and signs and symptoms in the newborn infant (such as low Apgar scores) are related to the subsequent development of cerebral palsy. However, their reports often fail to discuss the limitations of the studies on which these conclusions are based. Like most disorders, cerebral palsy has multiple risk factors, both causes and modifiers. For example, as Freud pointed out,8 difficulties during labor and delivery are most often seen among women who have had problems earlier in pregnancy.

A study in the American Journal of Pediatrics published in 1991 had this abstract…….How much of neonatal encephalopathy is due to birth asphyxia?

K. B. Nelson and A. Leviton
Neuroepidemiology Branch, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Bethesda, Md.

In the literature on neonatal encephalopathy, the pervasive assumption is that once infants with major malformations or infections have been excluded, most of the remaining cases are due to birth asphyxia. Assessing the proportion of neonatal encephalopathy that is due to asphyxia during birth is difficult because of problems in defining asphyxia and neonatal encephalopathy and in recognizing the cause of neonatal neurologic illness. Available evidence indicates that neonatal neurologic signs are not strongly related to obstetric complications, signs of fetal distress, or biochemical markers usually considered to indicate perinatal asphyxia. Most studies that have sought positive evidence of independent markers of intrapartum asphyxia have found them to be absent in a large majority of neurologically symptomatic neonates. We conclude that the proportion of neonatal encephalopathy that is asphyxial in origin is not known but warrants examination, especially in view of the probable need in the near future to identify, on the basis of evidence available in the first hour or so of life, suitable candidates for clinical trials of powerful but risky treatments of birth asphyxia.

The point is that Edwards may have been operating on a theory that was not outlandish up to the 90′s, that delivery injury was a significant factor in cerebral palsy.

rmrd, tell that to the docs who lost their careers because the correct info came too late . . . . I am sure they feel good about it.

Edwards was an ambulance chaser–pure and simple. And it hurt real people who did nothing wrong. Tort suits are a problem that hurt American business.

Tort suits are a problem that hurt American business.
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What a coincidence. Fraud, malpractice and public endangerment are a problem that hurt American consumers.

spob
If you don’t want torts abolished and you hate torts, what do you want?

Your initial contention seemed to be that the “ambulance-chaser” was presenting faulty data to juries. I proposed that the medical literature was unclear at the time.

There are patients who died of heart disease in the 1920′s and 1930′s who would have been alive with current medical therapy. There are people dying of medical conditions today who would be thriving with therapies that will be available in the future. How do we escape our temporal trap legally and medically?

rmrd, the medical literature was unclear, but there was liability imposed over the “unclear” medical literature–junk science, since he got an expert to argue causation when causation just wasn’t shown.

Your 20s and 30s argument is off point. If the science were simply wrong, then that’s one thing, but this crap wasn’t proven and it was used to ruin careers. Did, pray tell, John Edwards even f’ing apologize? He went around America indicting greedy people for ruining livelihoods–pot meet f’in kettle. And of course, no one in the media pointed out that hypocrisy.

I don’t know what the answer is with tort litigation, but there is a lot of abuse, and it needs to end.

Hey Paul, genius. No one is saying that fraud etc. shouldn’t be punished. But docs had their careers ruined over bullshit. Get that right, moron.

spob-
I’ve seen both sides of the tort system, and it looks like a good idea to me.
At my neighborhood pool one day, my daughter was playing with a neighbor’s daughter. The neighbor’s daughter happened to be the one who thought to see what it would be like to sit on the wading pool drain. Owing to a faulty design, it essentially sucked her guts out her butt. It was touch-and-go for weeks, but she ultimately survived.
John Edwards himself helped that family recover their high-six-figure out of pocket medical costs, and pay for her lifelong treatments. The settlement was so extravagant that they could afford a lavish lifestyle and retire young.
My daughter’s friend was not the first such victim, and in fact this still happens — I saw a TV story just this past year. The threat of punitive damages is necessary to force companies to responsibly treat the safety of their products. Certainly it’s an effective motivator for the electrical business that employs me.
Whenever I’m attending a product safety review, I think about that family in that emergency room that night, with all our neighbors alongside.
So if you don’t think legal protection for consumers is a good idea, then please take yourself somewhere that doesn’t have it.

KT -

You must really considering updating your picture on this blog. I saw you in Chris Matthews’ HardBall yesterday and you look nothing like the picture posted above. No offense.. I am just pleasantly taken aback Really…

Karen,
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Thank you for your story on your bother. It is a great piece, beautifully written, and explains in simple terms the issues we face in this country around health care.
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I have forwarded it to many people as a way of explaining why something needs to be done at the federal level on health care.

Try overlaying graphs of malpractice premiums, insurance company investment income and the cumulative value of malpractice verdicts. The first two track inversely; the third has little relation to either of the others.

And KT – If you don’t like Wall Street I’m still selling fractional interests in my phlogiston generator product. We expect to go into production any day now, before the FTC and FDA get re-staffed.

The problem, Joe, is not that we punish wrongdoers harshly, so your comment about taking myself elsewhere is, to put it charitably, ridiculous. Only a damned fool would think that tort liability and punitives don’t motivate companies (of course, it’s funny how people in here seem to miss the fact that tax policies also motivate people, and in ways that you won’t like, but that’s another issue). However, handing out millions of dollars when there has been no wrongdoing is nuts. And that’s what happens in this country–routinely. And we all pay for it. Edwards collected on some legitimate claims–he also collected on some that were not so legitimate.

spob
I understand your frustration. However in the case the CP cases, if the prevailing wisdom included delivery injury as a cause for cerebral palsy, what would you have wanted to see happen?

But that’s the problem, it didn’t. It was as a possible cause, not proven, and you need that to support the coercive extraction of money from a free citizen. He got hired-gun experts to “prove” up causation that really wasn’t proven. You’re being somewhat deliberately blind to what really goes on.

And it’s not like Edwards returned the money. We couldn’t have that, could we?

And the media completely missed the boat by not pressing Edwards on this, especially when he railed at others’ “greed”. Using the power of the courts to coerce the payment of money from others with the use of hired-gun expert testimony based on shaky science is the very definition of “greed”. And these guys have long bankrolled the Democratic party . . . .

spob
When Blalock proposed operating on children with congenital heart disease, he was criticized because the prevailing thought was that those hearts could not tolerate surgery. The children would die according to prominent surgeons at the time. Congenital heart surgery is now routine. The procedures done by Dr, Blalock would be considered malpractice given the advances in technique that has occurred.

When a paper appeared in the New England Journal in the 1980′s detailing what coronary vessels looked like during an acute heart attack, it was revolutionary. The prevailing wisdom was that the heart had to cool off for several days before it was safe to perform a cardiac catheterization in an infarcted heart. Angioplasty, stenting and surgery are now routine acute heart attacks.

I’m not a fan of lawyers who sue doctors, but the state of medical knowledge that exists at a given point in time is going to be obsolete years later.

One thing physicians can do to aviiod lawsuits, is to talk in more detail with patients. When complications occur, the physician and patient approach the problem as a team, rather than adversaries.
An acquaitance underwent bowel surgery for an inflammatory disease. A complication occured requiring repeat surgery. The surgeon explained the problem and was omnipresent during the hospitalizattion. No lawsuit.

When heart valves were being developed at the University of Minnesota, the lead surgeon actually told the first patient, who suffered a complication, that he (the patient) should sue him (the surgeon). No lawsuit because of the care that the claimant received.

My bone of contention is that the fund of scientific knowledge is never going to be perfect. This creates a dilemma for the legal system. I don’t see an easy solution.

The question about Edwards returning funds is interesting. However, if lawyers and patients had to return funds from a lawsuit, would doctors and hospitals be required to return the cost of hospitalization when a complication occurred?

I’m also putting my fingers in my ears, and saying, LALALALALA.
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What are the odds of getting any video of this?