I wish I could have gone to Wall Street today when I was in New York, but there was not enough time.*
*I wanted to go to Freedom Zuccotti Park and talk/offer moral support to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
When traveling via bus, bring a travel pack of tissues, in case the bus bathroom is out of toilet paper.
Yes, Paul Krugman is correct in noting that the US dollar is overvalued, and that the
Chinese Yuan is undervalued.
He only has 800 words, so what should also be noted is that the dollar is not just overvalued versus the Yuan, but versus the whole world, though he does note that the Chinese are deliberately pushing the value of the Yuan in addition.
Since the undervalued Yuan is, at its core, a tariff on Chinese imports, and a subsidy of their exports, it is clear that the sanctions bill in the Senate is justified.
That being said, there are also structural issues that overvalue the US dollar, to the advantage of Wall Street and the disadvantage of Main Street (Hence Robert Rubin's* full throated support of a "strong dollar policy when he was SecTreas), and these need to be addressed as well.
*Why is this corrupt ratf%$# not under criminal investigation?
And then onto Monsey, NY.
My mother-in-law is moving to Baltimore, but spending the next month or so in Memphis while her apartment comes open, so I am ferrying her car down.
Against my wife's better advice, I will be using the "avoid tolls" option on the route on Google Maps, which avoids most but all, of the tolls, and doesn't have me doing it all on interstates
Interstate highways are boring.
View Larger Map
(On Edit)
I'm taking Bolt Bus, which has WiFi and power outlets. Kewl.
Last Friday was International Blasphemy Rights Day.
As I have always considered the right to blaspheme to be among the most basic of human rights, I should have made note of this.
It seems like ir was just earlier this evening, I was wondering what political calculus could be driving numerous states Attorneys General to walk away from the so-called "50 State Deal" on "Robosigning". (Wait, it was just earlier this evening)
Well, now we know why. The New York Times just described the recent transition of New York AG Schneiderman from a very (for New York, anyway) low key Attorney General to Political superstar:
The other day, in his office down on Wall Street, Eric T. Schneiderman owned up to an awkward truth.The cynic in me wonders if perhaps the fact that the flood of adoring correspondence was accompanied by, "Small tsunami of campaign donations," might have something to do with the increasing numbers of Attorneys General who are balking at signing an agreement exchanging a token payment for immunity for the banksters.
Until fairly recently, he acknowledged, if you had asked the average passer-by to name New York’s attorney general, you might have gotten a mystified “Huh?” or the answer that it was Andrew M. Cuomo (the governor who used to have the job) or Eliot Spitzer (the disgraced former governor who had it before that), rather than the correct response: Mr. Schneiderman.
In the eight months since he has assumed the office, the emphatically unglamorous Mr. Schneiderman has maintained a low profile for the state’s top law-enforcement officer, charting a busy but anonymous course between Spitzerian aggression and Cuomoesque charm. Even his own press aide, Danny Kanner, recently confessed that, before this summer, his own parents did not know who Mr. Schneiderman was. “And I’m their kid; I work for the guy,” Mr. Kanner said.
But then came August, when Mr. Schneiderman, 56, rejected a proposed nationwide settlement releasing some of the country’s biggest banks from a lawsuit brought by the states claiming misconduct in the mortgage markets. Almost overnight, he found his own name mentioned in a series of laudatory articles in publications as varied as Rolling Stone, The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and the Web site Gawker.
Adding fuel to the profile-raising fire were the phone calls Mr. Schneiderman received this summer from officials in the Obama administration who pressured him to smarten up and join his counterparts in other states in settling the case. There were reports that a Federal Reserve official, Kathryn S. Wylde, had harangued him in public for his stubbornness (at the funeral for Hugh L. Carey, the former New York governor, no less). At the end of August, an unrepentant Mr. Schneiderman was kicked off the executive committee of attorneys general in charge of the case by its leader, Tom Miller, the attorney general of Iowa.
It's a battle between an insurance company and a pharmaceutical company over a drug that probably doesn't work but has a lot of fans:
Blue Shield of California will no longer pay for the use of the drug Avastin to treat breast cancer, a sign that support for the widely debated and expensive treatment may be eroding among health plans.Until people realize that there is not a problem with the cost of prescription drugs because the real problem is the price of drugs, and so private solutions to innovation, with the associated exclusivity provisions, are the problem, not the solution.
Blue Shield, with 3.2 million members, is apparently the first large insurance company to end payments since a federal advisory committee unanimously recommended in June that the Food and Drug Administration rescind Avastin’s approval as a treatment for breast cancer, saying the drug did not really help patients.
The F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, has not made a final decision, so Avastin retains its approval for now.
Because it is an emotional and politically contentious issue, with some women saying the drug is keeping them alive, many insurers have said they will wait until a final decision from the F.D.A. before re-evaluating their coverage policies. And Medicare has indicated it will continue paying for the drug even if the F.D.A. revokes the approval.
