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from Breakingviews:
Former junk bond king has more leverage than ever
By Jeffrey Goldfarb
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Former junk bond king Michael Milken has more leverage than ever. Three decades after mastering the art of raising money, the man whose indictment on securities violations brought down Drexel Burnham Lambert now trades more heavily in intellectual capital.
This year, Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man, and one-time British Prime Minister Tony Blair joined familiar faces from his Drexel days at his annual Beverly Hills jamboree. These growing introductions and networks in areas such as education and healthcare arguably make Milken even more powerful than when he was the hub of high-yield debt.
The Milken Institute Global Conference and its approximately 3,000 attendees may as well be a giant game of Six Degrees of Michael Milken. Though his own program biography understandably omits any reference to Drexel and his time in jail, the panels are populated by the defunct investment bank’s vast diaspora. Among them: Joshua Friedman, co-founder of Canyon Partners; Jonathan Sokoloff, managing partner of Leonard Green; Ted Virtue, chief of MidOcean Partners and; Andrew Whittaker, vice chairman of Jefferies.
from The Great Debate:
President must address Obamacare ‘train wreck’
When even a key architect of Obamacare says the law’s implementation will resemble a “train wreck,” it is clear that its biggest remaining supporters need to finally level with the American people about what’s in store — starting with President Barack Obama.
The president must step into the breach and explain to the public that skyrocketing premiums and a raft of new taxes, penalties and fees are coming their way.
from Breakingviews:
Hostile drug deal gets too clever for its own good
By Robert Cyran
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Royalty Pharma is suffering from some self-inflicted wounds in its hostile pursuit of Elan. The finance firm tried to use the drug maker’s $1 billion stock buyback to swoop up the entire company. But it devised a puzzlingly complex tender offer that was too clever for its own good. The scheme ended up replacing a long-term shareholder with other investors far more likely to demand a chunkier premium.
from Chrystia Freeland:
The sorrow and the pity of Obama’s budget
Pity Barack Obama. Everything in his life experience prepared him to be the president who would take on the big challenge of the 21st century: rising income inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class.
His peripatetic youth taught him about the price of plutocracy. In an interview unearthed by Zachary A. Goldfarb of the Washington Post, in 1995 Barack Obama, plugging his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," recalled that experience for the Hyde Park Citizen, his neighborhood edition of a newspaper that bills itself as the "Premiere African American Weekly" in Chicago.
from The Great Debate:
Obama’s Two Choices: Good and Better
President Barack Obama must like the view from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue right now. Politically speaking, the sky is clear, and the few clouds on the horizon have silver linings.
Because where things now stand with Congress, if he wins – he wins. And if he loses – he wins.
from The Edgy Optimist:
Obama sees the limits of government
President Barack Obama made the middle class the focus of his State of the Union address on Tuesday. He was lauded by some as fighting for jobs and opportunity, and even for launching a “war on inequality” equivalent to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1960s War on Poverty. He was assailed by others for showing his true colors as a man of big government and wealth redistribution.
Yet the initiatives Obama proposed are striking not for their sweep but for their limited scope. That reflects both pragmatism and realism: Not only is the age of big government really over, so is the age of government as the transformative force in American society. And that is all for the best.
from The Great Debate UK:
Quality of care the missing link between coverage of care and health improvements
--Jocalyn Clark (@jocalynclark) is Senior Editor at PLOS Medicine. The opinions expressed are the organisation's own.--
While coverage of health care has increased considerably since the international community defined its millennium development goals to improve health around the world, health gains remain stubbornly elusive, especially in developing countries, and poor quality of care may be the reason why.
from Breakingviews:
Flu epidemic exposes U.S. risk management flaws
By Robert Cyran
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
In a typical year influenza inflicts about $90 billion worth of economic damage and kills about 36,000 Americans - and this year’s epidemic is shaping up to be worse. Yet Uncle Sam spends far more on homeland security than on flu prevention. Poor resource allocation can be a hard thing to cure.
from Expert Zone:
Weighing the Obama-Romney calculus
(The views expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not represent those of Reuters)
Much is at stake in the United States presidential elections this year, perhaps more in terms of policy than in the past few election cycles. The presidency of Barack Obama has been fraught with battles in a deeply divided Congress, leading to paralyses on some major agenda such as government debt, and significant compromises on others such as healthcare reform.
from David Cay Johnston:
A tale of two healthcare plans
No issue affecting taxes so clearly divides the two parties in the U.S. election as healthcare. The two parties, in their platforms, describe very different approaches to healthcare economics. Both use political plastic surgery to cover up ugly truths.
The stakes are huge. Americans spend $2.64 per person for healthcare for each purchasing power equivalent dollar spent by the 33 other countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD data shows the U.S. spends $8,233 per capita compared with an average of $3,118 in the other 33 countries.
