Lame Ducks in Bali

clipped from blogs.wsj.com Frustration with U.S. negotiating tactics at the climate conference burst wide open Thursday, with countries from Germany to Tuvalu blaming the U.S. for torpedoing a new climate-change deal. Europeans have threatened to skip the U.S.-sponsored global warming fest in Hawaii in January in retaliation for the slow-go tactics of U.S. negotiators. But another crew of Americans, skippered by Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, and John Kerry, are getting a hero’s welcome. “People are turning away from the official delegation and they’re starting to face toward the future,” he says. They can’t afford to wait around for the next president.” America’s official negotiators are seen as an increasingly irrelevant nuisance International frustration peaked after the U.S. team blocked language that would establish concrete targets for greenhouse-gas reductions. Sen. Kerry promised the U.S. would take the lead fighting climate change — eventually.

The Housing Bubble

The chart on House-Price-to-Rental Ratio is one of the best illustrations I have seen of the current housing bubble. In many places it is now substantially cheaper to rent then own. In fact, in many places the cost of ownership is more then 150 percent of the cost of renting after calculating in the tax benefits.

Comments?

clipped from online.wsj.com HOME OWNERSHIP U.S. home ownership rates from 1900 through the current year HOUSE PRICE-TO-RENTAL RATIO Reflecting the booming real-estate market since 2000, the ratio of home prices to rent expenditures has risen sharply. Ratio of OFHEO house price index to personal consumption expenditures on rent Source: Congressional Budget Office; Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight; Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis COMMERCIAL PAPER Earlier this year, many mortgage-backed assets held by SIVs went bad suddenly. Assets could be downgraded from top to bottom overnight. Asset prices stop falling when markets conclude that all the bad news has been factored in. Overnight commercial paper interest rates, daily through Nov. 20, 2007 PRICES OF SUBRPRIME MORTGAGE TRANCHES Source: Markit ABX.HE index published by Markit

A New Way for Doctors to Get Sued?

I would be interested in hearing comments to this one.

clipped from blogs.wsj.com A man taking several prescription drugs passes out at the wheel, drives off the road and hits and kills a 10-year-old boy. Can the boy’s mother sue the doctor who prescribed the drugs? The answer is yes at least according to a ruling made yesterday by Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court, reported in the Boston Globe. The mother’s lawyers allege that the doc failed to warn his patient about the side effects of the medications and the potential danger of driving while taking them. The patient was reportedly 75 years old and had emphysema, high blood pressure and metastatic lung cancer. He had prescriptions from his doctor for a handful of drugs whose side effects include drowsiness, dizziness, and fainting He reported no side effects in the months before his accident In a dissent, Justice Robert J. Cordy wrote that the ruling “introduces a new audience to which the physician must attend — everyone who might come in contact with the patient.”

Straight Dope on Baseball’s Drug Problem

The complete Q and A is available at the source site. The Health Blog.

clipped from blogs.wsj.com If you’re ever going to talk to the guy who wrote a book called Performance-Enhancing Substances in Sports and Exercise, today’s the day. As the clock ticked on the release of the big Mitchell report on doping in baseball, the Health Blog managed to get Charles Yesalis on the phone. Yesalis, a professor emeritus of health and human development at Penn State, has been studying doping in sports for years. Here are the highlights of our conversation. How did performance-enhancing drugs get into baseball? It goes back to World War II. Immediately afterward, professional baseball players who served in the Army brought back amphetamines. It was absolutely rampant. It was mainly to deal with the long season — the mental wear and tear. It was also to help them recuperate from hard nights on the town. I think stimulants are clearly still involved as a significant aspect of the game. What about steroids? How much benefit does an athlete need from a drug to improve performance?

Financial Ties to Parents and Children Affect Boomer Retirement

This was extracted from a good and interesting blog-- Sometimes I Feel Like a Piece of Bologna. This blog is worth visiting and adding to the reader.

clipped from generationsandwich.blogspot.com Boomers, though arguably the most prosperous generation in American history, face mounting demands on their financial resources from both their adult children and their aging parents. In fact, one in six Boomers surveyed is "sandwiched," providing assistance to both their parents and adult children, according to Ameriprise Financial’s Money Across Generations study. Boomers are torn between helping their adult children pay off debts and get started, and helping their aging parents with necessities. This help often comes at the expense of funding their own retirement. My husband and I have very different perspectives on this. His parents provided everything for him through college, and were generous until their deaths. My parents provided nothing. I paid for college, grad school, and all expenses from junior high forward. Yes, it was very hard and I missed out on a lot. But I learned to be independent and make my own way. Sometimes I Feel Like a Piece of Bologna

Scientists: 'Arctic Is Screaming,' Global Warming May Have Passed Tipping Point

clipped from www.foxnews.com An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years. Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data 2007 shattered records for Arctic melt in the following ways: 552 billion tons of ice melted this summer from the Greenland ice sheet A record amount of surface ice was lost over Greenland this year Alaska's frozen permafrost is warming White sea ice reflects about 80 percent of the sun's heat off Earth Earth has hit one of his so-called tipping points "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

Democracy?

clipped from blogs.wsj.com Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, women have faced more restrictions as the formerly secular Iraq becomes religious. Few women leave their hair uncovered in Baghdad. Women’s activists fear women will suffer if the new constitution eventually allows individuals to decide domestic issues according to Islamic religious traditions. Policewomen in Iraq have been told to hand in their guns, in the latest sign of cultural and religious conservatism taking hold in the country, reports the Los Angeles Times’s Tina Susman. Most of the few policewomen who worked in street patrols have been reassigned to desk jobs. Gen. Phillips says when he questioned Iraqi Interior Ministry officials about the diminishing role of women in the force, he was told, “Females are taken care of by men in this country.”