Financing FAQ

Posted on Sunday, 3rd July 2011 by Emily Smith

Exchange traded funds that follow Japanese stocks and the movement of the yen have seen assets move in the door after the country’s devastating earthquake and tsunami.

The most popular single-country ETF this year is iShares MSCI Japan , while WisdomTree Japan Total Dividend , ProShares UltraShort Yen and WisdomTree Japan Small Cap have also been big sellers.

After the earthquake and tsunami, “ETF investors clearly think the reconstruction of Japan is an important investable theme,” according to one market strategist.

The $7.2 billion iShares MSCI Japan lost 3.6% in the first half of 2011, according to investment researcher Morningstar. The ETF dropped sharply in March as Japan was hit with the natural disasters and a nuclear crisis. It is trading below the February high.

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Tags: Japan, Japan Etfs
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Posted on Sunday, 3rd July 2011 by Emily Smith

NEW YORK – Leaders of healthcare systems, hospitals and healthcare payers are on the fence when it comes to their participation in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ shared savings program (MSSP) – the Medicare ACO program – according to a recent poll led by KPMG LLC.

According to responses to webcast polls conduct in April, 39 percent of hospital and health system executives didn’t know their organization’s position on participating in the MSSP. Another 25 percent said they were taking a wait and see approach, which wouldn’t allow them to be ready for the launch of the program, currently slated for January 1, 2012, under the current rules proposed by CMS.

Among the payer group, nearly half said they didn’t know what their organization’s stance was on the MSSP and 21 percent were taking a wait-and-see approach.

“There are still important questions about how accountable care fits into an organization’s current strategy and business model, along with competing investment decisions, such as those related to ICD-10 and upgrading information technology,” said Brad Benton, KPMG Healthcare’s national account leader in a press release announcing the results. “There are also e

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Tags: Medicare, Medicare Aco
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Posted on Saturday, 2nd July 2011 by Emily Smith

Jack Straw: Car insurance premiums need reform Former Justice Secretary Jack Straw has called for a reform of rising car insurance premiums which he labelled “a racket”.

Speaking to the Today programme, Mr Straw said that too many insurers are referring their clients to personal injury lawyers, who then “bombard” people with calls and texts to encourage them into making a claim, the BBC reports.”It’s become a huge racket,” Mr Straw told the news provider”The insurance companies are complicit in this. They should and could have said this is outrageous.”The rise in personal injury claims arising from accidents is widely blamed for increasing car insurance premiums, which a report from business advisers Mazars suggested could rise by 50% in the future.Director General of the Association of British Insurers (ABI) , Nick Starling, agreed with Mr Straw that referral fees should be banned.”It is not right that people take cash for tipping off lawyers about accidents which fuel personal injury claims, driving up costs for all motorists,” he told the BBC. Read more…

Tags: Need Reform, Premiums Need, Premiums Need Reform, Reform
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Posted on Saturday, 2nd July 2011 by Emily Smith

Mortgage lenders cut fixed-rate offers Mortgage lenders Santander and Northern Rock have cut the prices of their fixed-rate products, helping more people get onto the property ladder.

Santander has cut the rate on its two-year fixed-rate mortgage product to 4.64% with a £995 fee, or 4.69% for re-mortgagers.And Northern Rock has also improved its rates by 0.5 percentage points, so buyers with a 30% deposit are offered a 2.99% deal, and its Everyday two-year mortgage can be obtained at 3.19% with a £995 product fee for those with a 25% deposit.But this has led to warnings from experts that these products only offer short-term security and borrowers may have to pay a higher rate when the deal expires.Ray Boulger, from John Charcol, told the Guardian: “The shorter the timeframe, the less risk there is of significant rate rises and hence for clients in this category there is often a strong case for choosing a variable rate, either a tracker or a discount off the standard variable rate, to take advantage of the lower rates initially offered by such mortgages.”The Halifax Housing Market Confidence tracker revealed recently that worries about job security, inflation, the price of housing and raising a deposit have all led Brits to doubt whether they can afford to buy a house. Read more…

Tags: Lenders Cut, Mortgage Lenders, Mortgage Lenders Cut, Offers
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Posted on Saturday, 2nd July 2011 by Emily Smith

HOUSE Speaker John Boehner is fond of saying that a debt-ceiling deal that raises taxes cannot pass the House of Representatives. Slice the numbers a bit more carefully and you can easily conclude the opposite: a deal that doesn’t raise taxes won’t pass, either.

Why is this? Mr Boehner’s party controls 240 of the 435 seats in the house. That means that if more than 22 of his members vote against a deal, he will need some Democrats to pass it. I don’t know of any precise count of Republicans who have sworn to vote against any increase in the debt ceiling. But Chuck Conlon, the veteran budget guru over at CQ (a sister publication of The Economist) points me to the Republican Study Committee’s “Cut-Cap-Balance” letter. Its 103 signers imply they won’t vote to raise the ceiling unless three conditions are met: halving of the deficit via spending cuts next year; implementation of a statutory spending cap of 18% of GDP; and a balanced-budget amendment to the constitution. (The letter is here; the signatories are here.)

Needless to say the odds even one of these conditions are met, much less all, are close to zero. The signatories

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Tags: Numbers
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Posted on Friday, 1st July 2011 by Emily Smith

Every time the Fed’s key policy committee met last year, almost everybody in the group agreed on what the Fed should do.

On today’s Planet Money, we talk to the one guy who, meeting after meeting, cast the lone “no” vote: Thomas Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Fed.

Hoenig thinks the Fed is repeating mistakes of the past, keeping interest rates too low for too long. That risks creating another bubble — and another crash, he says.

Hoenig says the Fed’s decision to lower interest rates in 2003 helped fuel the credit bubble that led to the recession:

…unemployment is high today because we tried to make it lower, faster than we should have in 2003. We should learn from that. … I want to see pepole back to work. But I want them back to work permanently. I don’t want them back to work until the next bubble pops and we have unemployment back up to 11 or 12 percent.

…during that boom period of the decade of the 2000s, America leveraged itself up tremendously. Co

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Tags: Dangerously Fed, Fed
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