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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (240357)	3/8/2010 11:05:59 PM
From: marcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

it's hard to imagine such a thing is possible, but... i dislike health insurance companies more than i dislike banksters. -ng-

To: Les H who wrote (240357)	3/8/2010 11:25:49 PM
From: Les H	Respond to of 306849

How They Killed the Economy By Roger E. Alcaly Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis by John B. Taylor Hoover Institution Press, 92 pp., $14.95 Taylor argues that if the Fed had started raising interest rates in 2002, shortly after the end of the recession that followed the bursting of the technology stock bubble, the housing market would not have grown as wildly as it did. He bases his argument on his own "Taylor rule," a guide to monetary policy he developed in the early 1990s, that quantifies how forcefully the Fed should adjust interest rates in response to changes in inflation and GDP. Taylor rules are widely used by economists and policymakers and there are many different versions reflecting variations in the way they are applied, particularly in how inflation is measured. Taylor measures inflation by the average change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) over the preceding four quarters, a choice that has a big impact on his conclusions.[7] By contrast, the Fed and many economists prefer using "core" inflation measures because they exclude the effects of food and energy prices, which can be very volatile. During the late 1980s and most of the 1990s the CPI and core measures of inflation largely moved in tandem and Fed policy was very close to that prescribed by the Taylor rule. In 2002 and 2003, however, the CPI and core inflation diverged sharply, the former rising rapidly and the latter falling, leading to conflicting implications for appropriate monetary policy. Both Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn in 2007 and Chairman Bernanke this January pointed to the importance of Taylor's choice of an inflation measure in convincingly criticizing his suggestion that the Fed should have begun raising interest rates in early 2002—when the recovery from the 2001 recession was still anemic and the risks of deflation were clear.[8] But Taylor's general contention that low rates after 2003 encouraged the housing bubble is largely persuasive, although mostly for different reasons than he provides. In June 2004 the Fed finally began raising the federal funds rate—the rate banks charge one another for overnight loans[9] —as the recovery stabilized and employment and inflation began rising more rapidly. It probably should have started raising rates slightly earlier. Most important, the Fed raised rates only in increments of a quarter of a percentage point (twenty-five basis points); after seventeen such increases the federal funds rate peaked again in June 2006. Fourteen of these "measured" rate rises were attributable to Greenspan and three to Bernanke, who replaced him in February 2006. Raising interest rates so slowly and steadily promoted excessive risk-taking, and should have concerned Greenspan, according to his stated views. The Fed's policies thus seem especially peculiar. They helped to create a false sense of security and stability that enticed financial institutions and investors to leverage their investments enormously, borrowing sums that dwarfed the capital they committed. nybooks.com

To: Les H who wrote (240357)	3/8/2010 11:38:06 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 306849

Marcia Angell doesn't want the current health insurance "reform" bill passed... And this is Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and now senior lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard University Medical School...she was interviewed by Bill Moyers in the last week... BILL MOYERS: So, has President Obama been fighting as hard as you wished? MARCIA ANGELL: Fighting for the wrong things and too little, too late. He gave away the store at the very beginning by compromising. Not just compromising, but caving in to the commercial insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry. And then he stood back for months while the thing just fell apart. Now he's fighting, but he's fighting for something that shouldn't pass. Won't pass and shouldn't pass. What this bill does is not only permit the commercial insurance industry to remain in place, but it actually expands and cements their position as the lynchpin of health care reform. And these companies they profit by denying health care, not providing health care. And they will be able to charge whatever they like. ... Not only does it keep them in place, but it pours about 500 billion dollars of public money into these companies over 10 years. And it mandates that people buy these companies' products for whatever they charge. Now that's a recipe for the growth in health care costs, not only to continue, but to skyrocket, to grow even faster. ...I think you really do have to separate the policy analysis from the political analysis and I'm looking at it as policy. And it fails as policy. Moreover, a lot of people say, "Let's hold our nose and pass it, because it's a step in the right direction." And I say it's a step in the wrong direction. But the bill as a whole, the more I look at it, the worse it gets. It's going to increase costs, not decrease them. And it's going to increase the rate of growth. It's not going to bend the curve, except in Medicare...