NewGround Technologies » Financial Crisis

Source of Healthcare Price Increases

Jim — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 23:09:52 +0000

This chart illustrates the decline in personal responsibility for healthcare costs over the last 50 years. Now I have to find the best source for healthcare cost increases over the same time period, but I would guess the correlation between these two factors will be quite high. It’s what always happens when people can use “OPM” – other people’s money – to purchase anything for themselves. Note: This chart was created by Dan Mitchell, using data obtained from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ national health expenditures data website and originally posted at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com.

Goldman “Profits” ? Even the NY Times scorns them.

Jim — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:35:15 +0000

Goldman, with it’s agent Henry Paulson, operating as Secretary of the Treasury and using the full power of the US government, eliminates competitors (Lehman and Merrill) and gets bailed out indirectly via AIG. And now they are making “profits”? This is crony capitalism in extremis.

Even the New York Times scorns these scoundrels, and amazingly, applauds bill O’Reilly at Fox News for doing likewise.

Something closer to the current zeitgeist was captured last week by Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News commentator, who likened Goldman Sachs bankers to pigs during a scathing segment on his TV show. “You’ve got to make an example of the big boy,” he fumed in a rant about the company’s tax-avoidance methods, suggesting Goldman ought to be punished for failing to cough up its fair share of taxes. “And this is the big boy.”

See Windfalls for Bankers, Resentments for the Rest – NYTimes.com for more details on

Robert Reich says it will be a very slow recovery

Jim — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:57:13 +0000

I rarely agree with Robert Reich on anything, so i found myself shocked to be in complete agreement with this post regarding the long, slow climb we face in resurrecting the US economy, Reich says

In a recession this deep, recovery doesn’t depend on investors. It depends on consumers who, after all, are 70 percent of the U.S. economy. And this time consumers got really whacked. Until consumers start spending again, you can forget any recovery…

Problem is, consumers won’t start spending until they have money in their pockets and feel reasonably secure. But they don’t have the money, and it’s hard to see where it will come from. They can’t borrow. Their homes are worth a fraction of what they were before, so say goodbye to home equity loans and refinancings. One out of ten home owners is under water — owing more on their homes than their homes are worth. Unemployment continues to rise, and number of hours at work continues to drop. Those who can are saving. Those who can’t are hunkering down, as they must.
Eventually consumers will replace cars and appliances and other stuff that wears out, but a recovery can’t be built on replacements. Don’t expect businesses to invest much more without lots of consumers hankering after lots of new stuff. And don’t rely on exports. The global economy is contracting.

Trial Lawyer Bonanza

Jim — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:52:25 +0000

Looks like this will be Obama’s first play during his opening possession. Damn this is gonna be a long painful four years, watching OPR (Obama, Pelosi and Reid) wreck our economy for the next 20 – 30 years. It just sucks.

Science of Evil and the Financial Crisis

Jim — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 07:07:19 +0000

The Belmont Club describes how the WSJ and the Washington Post, while searching for the culprit in the financial crisis, pass one another like ships in the night, yet both arrive at the conclusion that more regulation could have prevented this mess. The author, Richard Fernandez, then goes on to wonder whether any regulator could have stopped the gravy train that was sloshing so much gravy. He then posits an alternative suggested by “ponerology”, which defines itself as the science of evil. A basic tenet of ponerology holds that approximately 5% of the population is psychopathic, and that over time, they accumulate in the upper echelons of organizations (due to their ruthlessness?) and are well positioned to breed corruption within and without their organization and those related to it. His closing and provocative thought:

It’s amusing until one realizes how often we discover, at intervals of 50 or so years, how a cohort of people more or less simultaneously learn to game a system until it crashes.