Blogs

Maybe letting GM go Bankrupt isn't such a great idea

Marketwatch reports that

Initial jobless claims rose 32,000 to a seasonally adjusted 637,000 in the week ended May 9, the Labor Department reported. ....

[A]nalysts have focused on the recent downward trend in claims. Claims hit a peak of 674,000 in late March.

Economists had expected claims to move higher this week. Roughly 27,000 hourly employees of Chrysler were laid off in the wake of the company's bankruptcy filing. There were also layoffs at parts suppliers.

A spokesman for the Labor Department said the government could not quantify the exact number of layoffs stemmed from Chrysler. But the increase in claims did come from the automotive sector.

In other words, take out Chrysler, and we would've been under 600,000. Not great by any stretch of the imagination, but a move in the right direction.

Geithner announces plan to regulate derivative trading

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner just announced that

Today, ... the Obama Administration proposes a comprehensive regulatory framework for all Over-The-Counter derivatives.

Moving forward, the Administration will work with Congress to implement this framework and bring greater transparency and needed regulation to these markets. The Administration will also continue working with foreign authorities to promote the implementation of similar measures around the world to ensure our objectives are not undermined by weaker standards abroad.

Unregulated, un-reported, and un-collateralized derivates are a huge part of the reason behind the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression in which we find ourselves.

I have been very critical of President Obama and Secretary Geithner previously for their kowtowing to banksters, but the framework unveiled this afternoon is Big News, and it is (yes, truly) Good News. The text of the announcement and some instant analysis below.

Ding, Ding - Real Estate Round Two.

No good news, No happy days are here again, No bottom in the housing market.

Leg Two Down


After that little head fake of an uptick in sales for March the RE market is resuming its downward trend. Those that still listen to the screaming heads of CNBC and FAUX news bought into this garbage journalism and unfortunately are going to pay dearly.
The housing crash that began with the subprime collapse in the summer of 2007 is set to resume this summer ... only this time .... higher up the food chain.
Even while the media was touting a bottom in housing as evidence by the uptick in sales, foreclosures were setting new records in March and April.

April was the second straight month with more than 300,000 households receiving a foreclosure filing, as the number of borrowers with mortgage troubles failed to abate.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about National Health Plans ….and maybe more - Brazil and Tiawan

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Brazil and Tiawan

Today will be an easy one because I didn't do an awful lot of research on these two plans. You rarely hear people talk about these plans, so I didn't spend much time on them.

Brazil

Private payers of health care in Brazil: characteristics, costs and coverage

The private sector is the predominant provider of health care in Brazil, particularly for inpatient services, and financing is a mix of public (through a prospective reimbursement system) and private. Roughly a quarter of the population has private insurance coverage, reflecting rapid growth in the past decade fuelled by the crisis in the public reimbursement system and the perceived deterioration of publicly provided care.

Four major forms of insurance exist:

April retail sales: Consumers stay zombified

The Census Bureau reported this morning that:

Retail trade sales were down 0.4 percent (±0.7%)* from March 2009 and 11.4 percent (±0.7%) below last year. Gasoline stations sales were down 36.4 percent (±1.5%) from April 2008 and motor vehicle and parts dealers sales were down 20.7 percent (±2.3%) from last year.

This drop was not anticipated by most observers.

As with March, it appears that almost all of the decline in consumer sales vs. a year ago is cars and gas. (Update: Ex-gas and cars, YoY retail sales are flat to -0.1%).

Last month's decline failed to take into account the early Easter from last year vs. this year. Thus we should probably average the two months' data, for a decline of -.9% YoY.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about National Health Plans ….and maybe more - United Kingdom

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United Kingdom

Britain’s public provider of health care is known as the National Health Services (NHS). Services provided by the NHS include hospitals, family doctors, specialists, dentists, chemists, opticians and the ambulance service.

Not all services provided by the NHS are free of charge. Unless exempt, patients pay (subsidised) fixed costs for prescriptions, sight tests, NHS glasses and dental treatment. Hospital treatment, the ambulance service and medical consultations remain free.
 

The UK’s NHS was the first state organisation in the world to provide free universal healthcare. Today, it is an organisation with some severe structural problems which means:

U3 and U6 Unemployment during the Great Depression

A frequent meme propounded in the economic blogosphere is that U6 unemployment, running near 17% now, is a truer measure (and there are good reasons to believe it is), so that means we have unemployment already approaching Great Depression levels of 25%. Left out of the comparison is the fact that U3 and U6 measurements didn't exist during the 1930s. So, is the 25% unemployment peak for the Great Depression a fair comparison to U6 unemployment today?

N. Andrews compared historical versions of unemployment statistics with the modern U3 and U6 versions, published as "Historical Unemployment in Relationship to Today" , has an answer. He writes:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about National Health Plans ….and maybe more - Netherlands and Sweden

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Netherlands and Sweden

In both countries, the majority of the population buys supplemental policies, often purchased from the insurer providing basic coverage. Insurers providing supplemental coverage are subject to fewer (Netherlands) or no (Switzerland) risk-rating restrictions. This has had complex effects on competition and mobility of the insured in the supplemental insurance market.

Tight regulation of basic health insurance markets, with requirements for open enrollment and community rating. Both countries require that insurers accept all applicants and prohibit variations in premiums by health status—community rating, with guaranteed offer and renewal.

What do Corporate Insiders Know?

One well-known contrary sentiment indicator for what the next direction of the stock market is corporate insider trading. In the aggregate, insiders are more likely to purchase their company's stock when they think it's cheap, and to sell when it is expensive. In that way, they also tell us something about the health of the overall economy.

At the exact market bottom in March, when people thought the economy was about to drop into a black hole, I copied the insider trading graph from Barron's (which is a terrific weekly financial magazine and the best way imho to educate yourself about what is really going on in the markets and to become more sophisticated about the economy. Anyway, I digress). Here's what caught my eye about the graph then:

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