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POPSThe Bond Market is Saying That It’s Safer to Lend to Warren Buffett Than Barack Obama
“It’s a slap upside the head of the government,” said Mitchell Stapley, the chief fixed-income officer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at Fifth Third Asset Management, which oversees $22 billion. “It could be the moment where hopefully you realize that risk is beginning to creep into your credit profile and the costs associated with that can be pretty scary.” Moody’s Warning While Treasuries backed by the full faith and credit of the government typically yield less than corporate debt, the relationship has flipped as Moody’s Investors Service predicts the U.S. will spend more on debt service as a percentage of revenue this year than any other top-rated country except the U.K. America will use about 7 percent of taxes for debt payments in 2010 and almost 11 percent in 2013, moving “substantially” closer to losing its AAA rating, Moody’s said last week. “Those economies have been caught in a crisis while they are highly leveraged,” said Pierre Cailleteau,
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POPSScience Shows That Markets Make People Fairer MORE: " ... a crucial ingredient in the rise of more-complex societies was the development of new social norms and informal institutions that are capable of domesticating our innate psychology for life in ever-expanding populations. Larger and more-complex societies prospered and spread to the degree that their norms and institutions effectively sustained successful interaction in ever-widening socioeconomic spheres, well beyond individuals’ local networks of kin and long-term relationships. It is these particular norms and their gradual internalization as proximate motivations that recalibrate our innate psychology for life in small-scale societies in a manner that permits successful larger-scale cooperation and exchange in vast communities... ... norms can facilitate trust, fairness, and cooperation in a diverse array of interactions, thereby allowing the most productive use of unevenly distributed skills, knowledge, and resourc
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POPS My Healthcare Plan by Ann Coulter In addition to saving taxpayer money and providing better health insurance, my plan also saves trees by being 2,199 pages shorter than the Democrats' plan. I have a plan! It's a one-page bill creating a free market in health insurance. In the first sentence, Congress will amend the McCarran-Ferguson Act to allow interstate competition in health insurance. We can't have a free market in health insurance until Congress eliminates the antitrust exemption protecting health insurance companies from competition. If Democrats really wanted to punish insurance companies, which they manifestly do not, they'd make insurers compete. Feel free to steal it, Republicans! ... more ... My Healthcare Plan by Ann Coulter http://bit.ly/9JrJ7M http://townhall.com
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POPSWhat is American Corporatism? Special thanks to Joanne Davis http://joannedavis.amplify.com/.... Clearly, the New Deal was the biggest jump forward into corporatism, though this was not fully understood at the time. Many people, both pro and con, misunderstood it as a move towards socialism.2 As is well known, Roosevelt was an empiricist, not a systematic thinker, and many elements of the New Deal that were tried, such as the notorious National Recovery Administration, were rightly discarded. But the fundamental proposition, that government should take responsibility for ensuring the flow of material goods to the people, was rapidly embraced by the American people, which continues to embrace it today whether it admits it or not. When people demand that the government "do something" about a falling stock market, they are playing at capitalism while practicing corporatism. http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=22594#comment-23360828
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POPSGOOD WORKS! - Hives for Lives
Hives for Lives is the brainchild of two suburban Philadelphia teen entrepreneurs Molly and Carly Houlahan, who share-CEO responsibilities. Launched six years ago, the company was inspired by their grandfather who died of throat cancer. What is Hives for Lives? “Hives for Lives is a non-profit organization that is powered completely by kids! Our motto is "Bee the Cure We Seek" …and our goal is to find a cure for cancer while empowering youth, spreading the awareness of the importance of honeybees, and making a difference in the world. Over the past six and half years we have expanded tremendously, raising over $170,000 towards bee-ting cancer, and increasing our sales into nine of the eleven Whole Foods Market regions across the nation.” What got you interested in beekeeping? How did you learn to make lip balm, create packaging, do marketing? “When we were five and seven years old our (maternal) grandmother (a hobby beekeeper for 11 years) strapped us in two mini bee suits
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POPSThe LOOTING of AMERICA
Short-sellers, who are appearing at a March 11 event at the libertarian Cato Institute, insist that they “provide liquidity and transparency to our capital markets” and that their operations “expose corporate fraud and mismanagement.” But Diamond strongly disagrees. He says the Managed Funds Association, the lobbying arm of the hedge fund short sellers, is crafty and deceitful. “When they tell you that short selling contributes liquidity to the market, that is a lie. Short selling destroys capital and takes away liquidity from the market. When they tell you that they are taking steps to remove manipulation from the stock market, that is a lie. They are taking steps to introduce manipulation to the stock market, and prime the stock market for manipulation and looting. When they tell you that the uptick rule is outdated, because of decimalization, that is a lie. They lie to deceive, to bring forth a big pay day from short selling, hence the looting of America and America’s weal
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POPSHealth Care Summit Fact Check: Will Premiums Go Up? Why are premiums going up? CBO cites the combination of three factors: 1. Premiums would be 27-30% higher because coverage would be better. The law, for example, requires that all policies cover maternity care, prescription drugs, mental health & substance abuse and no denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions. 2. Premiums would be 7 to 10 percent lower b/c of changes to the way the individual market is structured. 3. Premiums would be 7 to 10 percent lower b/c of an influx of more people, many of them healthy, into the insurance market. The net effect of those three factors: Premiums would be 10 to 13 percent higher for the average policyholders. President Obama’s claim of premium reductions of “14 to 20 percent” comes from adding factors two and three. The problem: You can’t ignore factor one. That’s why CBO’s conclusion is that, on average, people in the individual market would see their premiums go up 10 to 13 percent.
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POPSMr. Obama...."You Lie" .... insurance mandate, end up paying even higher premiums than they would under current law. But here’s the thing " many of them will. At least according to the CBO. And the White House is deliberately and irresponsibly misleading the public by claiming otherwise. Here is what the CBO had to say about this question in their analysis of the Senate bill from which the President’s proposal is largely based. CBO and JCT estimate that the average premium per person covered (including dependents) for new nongroup policies would be about 10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than the average premium for nongroup coverage in that same year under current law. About half of those enrollees would receive government subsidies that would reduce their costs well below the premiums that would be charged for such policies under current law. And the impact will be even worse for families who obtain coverage on the direct market as highlighted by this passage from the CBO:
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POPSSteve Jobs said: Googles don't be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” :-) I too think Google should not use this "don't be evil matra" anymore. It just doesn't fit to Googles behavior: "we want own the web" ;-) would maybe fit better now, even Google want not just own the web they want own the book market and the phone market too and let's see what comes next :-) ...
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POPSOkay; so we’re back to Square One. Where did the money come from? That’s right. According to Biderman, the money did not come from (a) companies (“which were a huge net seller”) (b) retail investor funds, (c) retail investors, (d) foreign investors, or (e) pension funds. What about the hedge funds? Biderman: “We have no way to track in real time what hedge funds do, and they may well have shifted some assets into U.S. equities. But we doubt their buying power was enormous because they posted an outflow of $12 billion from April through November.” Okay; so we’re back to Square One. Where did the money come from?
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POPSFaith in Free-Market Capitalism Is Being Rewarded The biggest source of economic stimulus is not the $800 billion Barack Obama spending package. It's the $4.6 trillion of capital gains thrown off by the stock market over the past three quarters. This is investment money, and it also enhances consumer spending. As a result, jobs are likely to start rising early in 2010. The other source of economic stimulus is the amount of money Michael Moore invests in Dominos Pizza and Krispy Kreme, only later to bemoan those same corporations in which he owns shares. Michael Moore-on's movie in which he capitalistically makes money off of gullible liberals’ hatred of capitalism? Seriously, not only did that movie bomb, but the hippo-like hypocrite became enchanted by the ideals of socialism when he took an economics class while coked out of his mind. Using socialism to help revive a failing economy is like putting angry weasels down your pants because you need some rest.
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POPSBusiness and ObamaCare "Democrats have defined success as dragging any bill into law as quickly as possible, no matter how damaging, while leaving the mess it creates to be cleaned up in the future once the entitlement is entrenched and higher taxes are inevitable."
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POPSU.S. Wars and the Opium Trade The opium bound for the US heroin market in S.E. Asia was produced primarily in Laos, flown on the CIA’s Air America to Vietnam, where it was converted into heroin then smuggled into the States by US military couriers.(4)(5)
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