The largest publicly-owned health insurers in America are United Healthgroup, WellPoint, Cigna International, and Aetna. (Blue Cross and Blue Shield are also dominant players in this industry, but it’s harder to get financial data on them.) A couple of important points: Health insurance isn’t the inordinately profitable industry that Obama and his surrogates say it is. By my rough count, the four big public insurers | Read More »
How much would you pay for “New GM”? About a year ago, all of GM’s common stock put together was worth maybe $2 billion, give or take, depending on the day. Go back three years, when things were merely bad instead of catastrophic for them, and people laughed at me whenever I said that GM was going to die. Back then, the stock was worth | Read More »
I’ve been telling people privately to watch the bond market for about a week now. Since last Thursday, we’ve seen a very sharp, fast drop in prices for medium and long-term US Treasury securities, which (in consequence) increases yields. The yield of the 10-year note, which is a critical indicator for mortgage rates, has leapt up above 3.70%, from below 3% just a few weeks | Read More »
Ok, so the essence of Obama’s fiscal policy is to increase taxes and fees on business and on the top-earning 5% of the population. Everyone else gets tax cuts and vast increases in services, like national health insurance and enforced production of electric cars. And of course, the government has to keep stimulating the economy, because shlubs like you and I are so uncertain about | Read More »
This one is odd, and it has a few moving parts I haven’t figured out yet, but you still need to know about it. In case you hear the Administration start bragging about a sudden reduction in this year’s deficit by about $175 billion, here’s what they’re talking about: they’re going to reduce the amount of the TARP outlays by that much. No, that doesn’t | Read More »
Somewhat peevishly, the President went to some lengths to portray his current budget as fiscally disciplined. One supposes that he gave his people the mandate to find some impressive number of programs to cut, amounting to some impressive dollar amount. In the event, he got 121 cut programs (most of the cuts had already been announced, like the F-22 Raptor), amounting to $17 billion. Now | Read More »
Tim Geithner went to market today to sell 30-year bonds, and he got plastered. The interest rate shot up past 4.28%, and it pulled up the rest of the right side of the yield curve. The auction went unexpectedly bad as there were relatively fewer bids than in the past. Before you rush to say it, no, the Chinese weren’t in there buying. But that | Read More »
This is a very quick initial response to the extraordinary announcement of the Chrysler LLC bankruptcy filing. We don’t have all the answers, but that’s partly because we don’t even have all the questions. Something very new and different is happening here. It’s very far from clear to me that this is a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in any normal sense. For one thing, why is | Read More »
This isn’t going to be a major story, but I’m awfully sore about it, and I’m not the only one. Shortly before 10am this morning, a low-flying airliner buzzed New York Harbor just south of Manhattan, tailed by a pair of fighter jets. In case you weren’t here one dazzling September morning eight years ago, that’s exactly the flight path taken by the airplane that | Read More »
Your RedState front-page contributors have a lively back-channel communications system, in which we plot and plan strategy and discuss the critical issues of the day. (And yes, we talk about you too, Dear Readers.) One of my colleagues just expressed the meaning of his life thusly: “I absolutely LIVE to drive fast. I work and advance my career so that I can have frakking fast | Read More »
You’ve seen the reports that Freddie Mac’s CFO was found dead at home this morning, an apparent suicide. One unstable newbie CFO doesn’t bother me too much, and the event isn’t causing much of a ripple in the bond markets this morning. The interesting thing about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is that, quite below the radar, they’ve morphed into practically full-faith-and-credit debt issuers. The | Read More »
“We cannot continue to excuse poor decisions” and “cannot make the survival of our auto industry dependent on an unending flow of taxpayer dollars.” Thus Barack Obama, on the subject of General Motors. This was in the course of a speech given yesterday, which indeed rewarded poor decisions by giving the company 60 more days to keep operating on taxpayer life-support. Obama is the Revolution | Read More »
The President of the United States is a man who has succeeded largely by substituting charisma for substance. It’s critically important for him to look like a heavyweight. Understanding this well, the New York Times is obliging Mr. Obama with the headline “Obama Issues Ultimatum to Carmakers,” accompanied by a picture of the Great Man looking stern and powerful by contrast with the non-entities who | Read More »
The big headline yesterday was that GM CEO Rick Wagoner is being dismissed in favor of Fritz Henderson. This isn’t remarkable in itself, because no one expected him to last, despite having the oft-expressed (in public, anyway) full confidence of GM’s board . Today, the President of the United States is expected to make significant announcements about GM’s warranty policy. No, that’s not a typo, | Read More »
In the late 1960s, there was a well-publicized furor over corporations and individuals with very high incomes who, through combinations of legal tax-avoidance activities, wound up not paying income taxes. So Congress responded with the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), which now hits millions of individuals and can’t easily be adjusted because it brings in too much revenue. I’m now hearing stories about employees of Wells | Read More »
We’ve been watching the President of the United States hyperventilate in shock over the fact that publicly-owned financial companies pay bonuses even when they lose money. It’s really hard not to get the impression that Obama is playing to the galleries here. He and David Axelrod were probably blindsided by the public furor that this news kicked up, even though the Administration was well aware | Read More »
With yesterday’s declines, we now have an “official” Obama bear market, defined as a 20% decline. The S&P 500 index closed at 850 on the last trading day before Obama’s inauguration, and now it’s at 682. And it barely took six weeks. Don’t let ANYONE tell you that this is Bush’s fault, or that Obama inherited the decline. The stock market by definition is a | Read More »
More pieces fell into place today regarding the new Administration’s desire to end America’s access to low-cost energy, and replace it with high-cost wind and solar power. Yesterday, the Senate Finance Committee heard from Treasury Secretary Geithner, who said that it’s the wrong policy choice to “subsidize” oil, gas and coal producers by allowing them to operate as they always have. Today, Energy Secretary Steven | Read More »
I’ve been quite surprised at the number of very strange things Treasury Secretary Geithner has said recently. You get a distinct sense that the man either isn’t doing his own thinking, or else he’s not strong enough to resist being told what to say by the White House. The latest one was yesterday in the Senate Finance Committee. He said, get this, “We don’t believe | Read More »
Ok, this one floored me. Some elected official with a funny name, “Obama” or something like that, just called a stock market bottom. Forget about he’s one of maybe a million nimrods trying to do the same thing, for the same reason: valuation. Apparently this clown was over in London talking to some other politician, I think he’s named after a color or something, or | Read More »
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