Buffett Bets $5 Billion on BofA
Bank of America said it will get a $5 billion infusion from Warren Buffett, giving the nation’s biggest bank a desperately needed jolt of confidence at a time when investors are questioning its health.
Bank of America said it will get a $5 billion infusion from Warren Buffett, giving the nation’s biggest bank a desperately needed jolt of confidence at a time when investors are questioning its health.
UK Only Article: standard article Issue: Going, going… Fly Title: Economics focus Rubric: Should the Fed target nominal GDP? Main image: 20110827_FND000_0.jpg OVER a decade ago a frustrated Ben Bernanke, then an economics professor at Princeton University, called for Japanese central bankers to show some “Rooseveltian resolve” and to act more boldly as total nominal demand in Japan was “growing too slowly for the patient’s health”. He might have been delivering a stern advance warning to himself in his current job as head of America’s Federal Reserve. Judged by its record on inflation, the usual yardstick, the Fed is performing fairly well. But judged by the criterion Mr Bernanke had used for the Japanese economy in the late 1990s, something has gone badly wrong. America’s nominal gross domestic product—GDP before adjusting for inflation—collapsed during the recession and is now nearly 12% below where it would be if its pre-recession trend had continued. The slump in nominal GDP has …
You’ve seen the headlines: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has upheld a lower-court ruling that Obamacare’s individual mandate — which requires all U.S. residents to purchase health insurance — is unconstitutional. The case in question, Florida v. Health and Human Services , is the most important of all the Obamacare constitutional challenges thus far, because the plaintiffs include the governors and attorneys general from 26 states. In January, when lower-court judge Roger Vinson overturned the entirety of Obamacare in the same case, I wrote that Vinson’s ruling “could go down as an important landmark in the history of American liberty.” The new ruling is even more significant. The 207-page majority opinion of the Eleventh Circuit, penned by appointees of Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, is the most rigorous and complete repudiation of the mandate ever written. It stands in stark contrast to the blitheness of the 26-page lead opinion from the Sixth Circuit decision in June upholding the mandate. The Eleventh Circuit judges persuasively make the case that “the government’s position amounts to an argument that the mere fact of an individual’s existence [means that] Congress may regulate them at every point of their life.” Keep reading this post . . .
Men who start the day with cereal are 19 percent less likely to have high blood pressure than people don’t have cereal for breakfast, according to a study presented this week at an American Heart Association meeting in Atlanta.
On the eve of the one-year anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, a Consumer Reports poll suggests that the inability to pay medical bills and buy prescription medications are still the most persistent financial woes facing consumers. For the quarter ending in March 2011, 14.7 percent of people in the survey said they were unable to pay their medical bills or buy prescription drugs, versus 13.9 percent a year earlier.
You wouldn’t describe my dad as an anxious person, not by a long shot. But that didn’t mean he was immune to the “white coat” effect—namely, that his blood pressure would spike whenever a doctor or nurse approached him with a blood pressure cuff.
A study out this week in the online journal PloS Medicine exposes what might be a common way drug companies try to influence doctors. The authors, from Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., looked at articles about hormone-replacement therapy in post-menopausal women that were written by doctors with financial relationships with the manufacturers of those hormones.
As the drama over Japan's earthquake-damaged nuclear power plant unfolds, many in the U.S. are worried about the risk of radiation exposure—and causing a shortage of a radiation prophylactic: potassium-iodide pills.
Latest from the Consumer Reports – Health Blog: It hasn’t been all that easy to buy sustainably-caught seafood at your local supermarket, where labels on fresh or frozen fish often can be confusing. But the fish counter may soon be less daunting. Last week, Costco announced that it would stop selling 12 species of [...]
Latest from the Consumer Reports – Health Blog: Older stroke victims who experience atrial fibrillation, a kind of irregular heartbeat, are about twice as likely to develop dementia as others who’ve had a stroke, according to an analysis out this week in Neurology. The analysis combined the results of 14 prevous studies that included almost [...]