I wonder if this is one of the things Gingrich was paid to advise them to do?

Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-owned mortgage giant, has placed multibillion-dollar bets that pay off if homeowners stay trapped in expensive mortgages with interest rates well above current rates.

Freddie began increasing these bets dramatically in late 2010, the same time that the company was making it harder for homeowners to get out of such high-interest mortgages.
[...]
Freddie’s charter calls for the company to make home loans more accessible. Its chief executive, Charles Haldeman Jr., recently told Congress that his company is “helping financially strapped families reduce their mortgage costs through refinancing their mortgages.”

But the trades, uncovered for the first time in an investigation by ProPublica and NPR, give Freddie a powerful incentive to do the opposite, highlighting a conflict of interest at the heart of the company. In addition to being an instrument of government policy dedicated to making home loans more accessible, Freddie also has giant investment portfolios and could lose substantial amounts of money if too many borrowers refinance.

A new law promising internet users the “right to be forgotten” will be proposed by the European Commission on Wednesday. It says people will be able to ask for data about them to be deleted and firms will have to comply unless there are “legitimate” grounds to retain it…

“These rules are particularly aimed at young people as they are not always as aware as they could be about the consequence of putting photos and other information on social network websites, or about the various privacy settings available,” said Matthew Newman…

Although the existing directive already contains the principle of “data minimisation”, Mr Newman said that the new law would reinforce the idea by declaring it “a right”…

The commissioner, Viviane Reding, said that firms would have to explicitly seek people’s permission to use data about them and could not proceed on the basis of “assumed” consent in situations where approval was required.

Her proposed law says that internet users must also be notified when their data is collected, and be told for what purpose it is being processed and for how long it will be stored…

The bill also suggests people must be given easier access to the data held on them…in addition to the right to have it deleted.

However, the commissioner said that she recognised there were some circumstances under which this right would not apply. “The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right of the total erasure of history,” Ms Reding told delegates.

RTFA. There’s a certain amount of regulatory crap I’ve left out. The core of the concept is worth discussing.

…The Obama administration is poised to require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment. Many researchers have found evidence that such payments can influence doctors’ treatment decisions and contribute to higher costs by encouraging the use of more expensive drugs and medical devices…

Under the new standards, if a company has just one product covered by Medicare or Medicaid, it will have to disclose all its payments to doctors other than its own employees. The federal government will post the payment data on a Web site where it will be available to the public.

Manufacturers of prescription drugs and devices will have to report if they pay a doctor to help develop, assess and promote new products…Royalty payments to doctors, for inventions or discoveries, and payments to teaching hospitals for research or other activities will also have to be reported…

Although the Congressional Budget Office does not predict immediate savings, it has said that, “over time, disclosure has the potential to reduce spending,” by reducing instances of overprescribing.

The law also requires drug and device companies to report the amount of “any ownership or investment interest” held by doctors or their immediate family members, other than holdings of publicly traded stocks.

The administration intends to apply the same disclosure requirements to doctor-owned companies that distribute medical devices. Such companies allow doctors to benefit financially from sales of devices they use in surgery.

Do corporate payoffs and kickbacks inspire confidence in your doctor?

Click pic to embiggen

Deregulation — engine of monopolies.

The freight railroad industry in the U.S. is highly concentrated with a handful of full of firms dominating the market. With the passage of the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 which deregulated the industry and sparked an era of mergers and acquisitions, the number of Class I railroads dramatically shrank from over 30 to just four. Contrary to the teachings of the free-market capitalism, U.S. Federal regulators and politicians seem to believe in the “four is few and six is many” phrase with respect to one of the main modes of freight transportation in the country.
[...]
The railroad industry can be considered as a oligopoly and for many captive shippers it is actually a monopoly since they are serviced by only one railroad.For example, two-thirds of coal shipped by rail is captive to a single railroad. With over 90% of rail traffic shared among the four rail carriers and healthy competition mostly eliminated, railroads enjoy enormous pricing power.

The airline industry is likely to see another major consolidation. American Airlines, a wholly owned subsidiary of AMR Corporation, is looking for a suitable partner to merge with. In this regard, Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL), US Airways Group Inc. (LCC) and private equity firm TPG are mulling bids to acquire American Airlines.

Hostess Brands, maker of Twinkies and Wonder Bread, is seeking bankruptcy protection, blaming its pension and medical benefits obligations, increased competition and tough economic conditions…

The privately held company, based in Irving, Texas, said it will be able to maintain routine operations thanks to a $75 million financing commitment from a group of lenders led by Silver Point Capital…

The company said it does not anticipate any disruptions in production or delivery of its breads or cake products and said its popular brands, which also include Drake’s, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos, will still be available.

Hostess said it is looking to “create a sustainable cost structure with competitive employee benefit plans.” It also hopes to modernize its systems, fleets and plants to keep pace with customer needs.

“This company has tremendous potential if we can remove the barriers to success,” Driscoll said.

Ever consider that a possible barrier to success might be continuing to produce nothing but crap food?

A Saudi Arabian man is attempting to sell his own son on Facebook. His asking price is 73 million UAE Dirhams, or around $20 million.

The man in question, Saud bin Nasser Al Shahry, saw his illegal debt-collection business shut down by a local court. He told a Quatari news outlet Al Sharq that the human trafficking was his only option to avoid “living in poverty” along with his wife and daughter.

Al Shahry stated that he would go to the courts if necessary to complete the sale and that, in addition to the $20 million, all he wanted to know about the buyer of his child is the city in which the buyer is located.

Federal drug regulators announced Wednesday that farmers and ranchers must restrict their use of a critical class of antibiotics in cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys because such practices may have contributed to the growing threat of bacterial infections in people that are resistant to treatment.

The medicines belong to a class of antibiotics known as cephalosporins and include such brands as Cefzil and Keflex. They are among the most common antibiotics prescribed to treat strep throat, bronchitis, skin infections and urinary tract infections. Surgeons also often use them before surgery to prevent bacterial infections.

The drugs’ use in agriculture has, according to many microbiologists, led to the development of bacteria that are resistant to the drugs’ effects, a development that many doctors say has endangered the lives of patients.

Antibiotics are often added to animal feed and are used routinely to encourage rapid growth of livestock, but officials at the Food and Drug Administration have been increasingly vocal in their concerns that overuse of antibiotics in agriculture is endangering human health. The agency proposed rules in 2010 to slow the use of penicillin, tetracycline and other antibiotics simply to promote growth or prevent disease in feed animals, but those rules have yet to be made final…

The F.D.A. initially proposed its cephalosporin restrictions in 2008 but withdrew the rule before it became effective because of opposition from farmers and ranchers. The rule announced Wednesday is less strict than the one proposed in 2008; it allows for unrestricted use of cephapirin, an older member of the class of cephalosporins that is not thought to contribute significantly to antimicrobial resistance. And the new rule allows veterinarians to continue to use the drugs to treat many illnesses in feed animals as long as they follow guidelines about dosing and duration of use…

Let us us honor two of the three oldest professions: politicians and lobbyists.

This is a fascinating article on how the business of business is no longer about the product or the customer, but the share price and, often, nothing but the share price.

In today’s paradoxical world of maximizing shareholder value, which Jack Welch himself has called “the dumbest idea in the world”, the situation is the reverse. CEOs and their top managers have massive incentives to focus most of their attentions on the expectations market, rather than the real job of running the company producing real products and services.
[...]
“What would lead [a CEO],” asks Martin, “to do the hard, long-term work of substantially improving real-market performance when she can choose to work on simply raising expectations instead? Even if she has a performance bonus tied to real-market metrics, the size of that bonus now typically pales in comparison with the size of her stock-based incentives. Expectations are where the money is. And of course, improving real-market performance is the hardest and slowest way to increase expectations from the existing level.”

In fact, a CEO has little choice but to pay careful attention to the expectations market, because if the stock price falls markedly, the application of accounting rules (regulation FASB 142) classify it as a “goodwill impairment”. Auditors may then force the write-down of real assets based on the company’s share price in the expectations market. As a result, executives must concern themselves with managing expectations if they want to avoid write-downs of their capital.

Have you ever dreamed of traveling to distant planets, meeting exotic alien women and having sex with them? If so, you — and possibly Captain Kirk — are the target audience for brothel owner Dennis Hof’s newest Southern Nevada business venture.

The reality television star and outspoken sex merchant recently bought a rundown bordello 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas and unveiled plans to renovate and reopen it with a science fiction theme. He is calling it Alien Cathouse and promising “girls from another world.”
[...]
Hof, whose Moonlite Bunny Ranch east of Carson City is the setting for a long-running HBO reality show, expanded his adult empire into Southern Nevada last year when he bought Richards’ two brothel properties in the tiny town of Crystal, north of Pahrump. With his latest acquisition, Hof now holds five brothel licenses, the most ever by a single owner. He hopes to add one or two more in the near future.

“Unless they’re married, I don’t want anyone in Nevada having sex unless I get a cut of the money,” he said with a laugh.

Since your Uncle Dave lives in the Las Vegas area, perhaps John would front the expenses for a… um… full bodied review of the place when it opens?

[Get the price list. That should be educational enough. -- jcd]

There are some truths so hard to face, so ugly and so at odds with how we imagine the world should be, that nobody can accept them. Here’s one: It is obvious that a class system has arrived in America — a recent study of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility. But nobody wants to admit: If your daddy was rich, you’re gonna stay rich, and if your daddy was poor, you’re gonna stay poor. Every instinct in the American gut, every institution, every national symbol, runs on the idea that anybody can make it; the only limits are your own limits. Which is an amazing idea, a gift to the world — just no longer true. Culturally, and in their daily lives, Americans continue to glide through a ghostly land of opportunity they can’t bear to tell themselves isn’t real. It’s the most dangerous lie the country tells itself.
[...]
In the United States, the emerging aristocracy remains staunchly convinced that it is not an aristocracy, that it’s the result of hard work and talent. The permanent working poor refuse to accept that their poverty is permanent. The class system is clandestine.

Given the state of the economy, the unwillingness of our politicians to do anything about pretty much anything, the realization by business at all levels that they just don’t need as many people as before, manufacturing jobs moving to other countries that are never coming back, computerized equipment requires less people for the remaining manufacturing jobs, etc., is there any real hope for reversing what the article talks about?

Holiday shoppers are increasingly pulling out their phones instead of their debit cards when it comes time to pay for a purchase, but what risks are they exposing themselves to when they do that?

If you are charging items to your phone bill, you have limited protection, according to a new study by Consumers Union, which is telling consumers not to use pay-by-phone programs that pass charges through the phone company. The advocacy group has been urging mobile carriers to recognize the responsibilities that come with being a financial intermediary.

While the largest carriers assert they already provide adequate protection, the nonprofit advocacy group asserts that what the carriers say and what’s in writing aren’t the same, and that purchase protection policies vary widely. The new study appears on its defendyourdollars.org site.

Cisco’s general counsel Mark Chandler has criticised rival HP for allegedly suing another former employee that sought to change jobs…With ongoing hearings in California and an attempt by Cisco to resolve the matter out of court, HP reportedly filed a surprise suit in Texas, aiming to get a judge there to make a decision without Perez being present…
HP found itself on the receiving end of a similar claim from IBM over its former general manager Giovanni Visentin, however as in HP’s case, IBM’s aggressive behaviour was not appreciated by the courts

Do these companies think their employees are escaped slaves?

The number of ebooks available for libraries to loan has just shrunk as Penguin Group USA has decided, for now, to no longer make digital editions of new titles available for library lending. Erica Glass, the media relations manager for Penguin Group (USA) sent LJ the following statement today:

Penguin has been a long-time supporter of libraries with both physical and digital editions of our books. We have always placed a high value on the role that libraries can play in connecting our authors with our readers. However, due to new concerns about the security of our digital editions, we find it necessary to delay the availability of our new titles in the digital format while we resolve these concerns with our business partners.

Is Microsoft taking inspiration from Dwight Schrute these days?

It almost seems that way based on a newly surfaced patent application from the Redmond company. The filing describes a computer system that would monitor behavior in the workplace with the goal of stopping bad habits such as co-workers cutting each other off during meetings and bosses bugging their direct reports on their lunch breaks — but at no small cost to workplace privacy.

The idea is to analyze interactions over video conferences, telephone, text messages and other forms of digital communication to look for patterns of behavior that have been defined in advance as negative or positive, and then assign a score to each person based on what the system finds.

How much you wanna bet the government has or will have something like this in public places? A few mics here, a few cameras there, and this kind of software. All to keep us safe, of course.