College students all over the country are now in panic mode…
The reason behind this filing is that Jolt promised to buy 90 million cans from a supplier and sales are nowhere near what they were hoping for.
Archive for September, 2009
Bankruptcy Watch – Jolt Cola
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009The “bad” FDIC
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009The FDIC is out of money as of this week.
If the FDIC tries to assess banks to raise emergency funds, they’ll push more banks into receivership, or at least make them unprofitable. The FDIC decided today to REQUIRE all banks to prepay their insurance premiums through 2012 to raise cash.
What will the FDIC use for income for the next 2 years after it burns through this cash?
The insurance fee is based as a rate per $100 on deposit – how can a bank prepay a premium when it doesn’t know how much it will owe in 2012?
Don’t let local property tax people think this is legal to do…
Congress has approved allowing the U.S. Treasury to lend up to $500 billion to the FDIC (on top of the $2.5 trillion the FDIC is currently administering for the non-bank emergency bailouts/guarantees). But Tim Geithner wants to control the FDIC and make it play by his rules – as soon as the FDIC takes bailout money, they lose control of their destiny. So the FDIC is looking to borrow money from “good banks” in order to continue the implosion of zombie banks.
Bankruptcy Watch – Holley
Monday, September 28th, 2009Holley Performance Products – the maker of carburetor and fuel injection systems becomes the next bankruptcy case in the automobile related business sector. This is not their first time in Chapter 11, but sales are down 40% this year.
52.2% youth unemployment! – wrongo… bzzzzt….
Sunday, September 27th, 2009This is a great example of the reason you shouldn’t believe things on the internet, especially sites with an “Agenda”.
It’s listed on Drudge, and that link points to a New York Post Story that says “The unemployment rate for young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept. — ”
There is just NO WAY that’s right, no matter how much you want to blame President Obama…. that “statistic” is now bouncing around all the right wing blogosphere.
Here was the original press release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/youth.pdf
It’s talking about summer employment (age 16 to 24) and there IS one number in the report that says 52.2% – it is the EMPLOYMENT rate of young men during the summer. What the statistic said is that 52.2% employment was the lowest employment rate since WW II. Not all 16-24 year olds are looking for work during the summer. A lot are in school, many don’t need or want a job, some are probably working for cash “off the books”… the actual youth unemployment rate in July was 18.5%
My OldGM(tm) Carco dealership
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
In the spirit of full disclosure, it stopped being a GM dealership years ago.
Barack Obama, M.D.
Saturday, September 26th, 2009Barack Obama has declared that it would greatly improve health care if women got more mammograms, and save us a lot of money in reduced health care costs.
While some feminists have been pushing this notion as an agenda item, the science says otherwise. Routine mammograms INCREASE the risk of breast cancer because of the radiation used in the procedue – which more than offsets the value of detecting a few cancers a little bit earlier.
There is nothing more dangerous than a man who believes things are true soley because he said them.
It will be interesting to see how Dr Dean Edell handles this situation – he’s long been an advocate of keeping politicians away from driving decision making in medicine. Will Dr Edell take on President Obama’s uninformed statements and beliefs?
Save health care costs by stopping obesity? Think again
Saturday, September 26th, 2009This Dutch study is one more coming to the same conclusion:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029
Conclusions
Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures.
Or to put it more bluntly, people who live an “unhealthy” life style die earlier and quickly – people with a “healthy” lifestyle live long enough to end up with Alzheimer’s and wind up in a nursing home for 20 years…
That’s not even considering the effect on the Social Security system. The medical system (and government’s) goal measures success by quantity of life, not quality of life. But no matter how hard medicine works, you will not live forever.
What next?
Friday, September 25th, 2009
Bannkruptcy Watch – Simmons
Friday, September 25th, 2009Simmons, the mattress folks have filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The bedding business is being transferred to a teacher’s pension fund as part of a prepackaged bankruptcy.
Market Manipulation
Friday, September 25th, 2009Last year, when oil prices went nuts, there were cries from everywhere that the government needed to step in and limit the manipulation of prices by speculators that was keeping prices artifically high, and we’re getting close to the point of seeing those new rules become law.
But the Federal Government has done the same thing since the 1930s, and the FDR programs have generally been considered a “good thing”, at least by FDR Democrats. The Federal Government sets artificial price levels and limits the down side risk to farmers – that if the crops are plentiful and prices would normally drop due to excess supply and low demand, the taxpayers jump in and buy up the excess crops and put them in government storage. The social purpose is that by protecting farmers from losing money, we make sure there will always be a stable supply of food.
What’s the difference? Why is it okay for government to manipulate prices?