Mystery Economic Theatre 2013

[cheesehead]

I've never been in a Costco store, but you two have inspired me to look up the locations of the nearest ones (and shun Amazon).

[Brian-E]

Originally Posted by huffingtonpost.com quoted by only_human

3. The CEO makes a reasonable salary. Costco's CEO makes far less than most executives, with a total compensation package of about $4.83 million in 2012. In contrast, Walmart CEO Mike Duke made roughly $19.3 million during the same year. Walmart's CEO earns as much as 796 average employees, according to CNN Money, compared to Costco's CEO making 48 times more than the company's median wage.

I can't resist adapting a joke I've just heard for this context:

Four people, whose occupations are (1) benefit claimant, (2) Fox News viewer, and (3) and (4) the CEOs of Costco and Amazon, are sitting at a table sharing a plate of 30 biscuits. The CEOs immediately grab their share (Amazon's boss manages to grab 22, Costco's gets 7). Munching away, the Costco boss warns the Fox News viewer: "Watch out for the benefit claimant, he wants your biscuit!"

[Batalov]

I've been a member for 18-19 years (since 1994/95, when the PriceClub store was conveniently close to us in Edison, NJ; walking distance: we didn't have a car for a year). I still remember how they first had their own store credit card, then they carried Discover for some years and then went into partnership with AmEx - the Costco membership covers AmEx dues, conveniently. Interestingly, the original "Price Club" store is still right here on Morena Blvd in San Diego; we used to go there often, but now we live closer to Poway.

One perk is that: The executive membership pays for itself. In fact for us, it is just hundreds of dollars payback to us, each year. There are certain things that are not very good there, like fruit and vegetables? don't get them there; these are not bad but just mediocre.

[Spherical Cow]

Originally Posted by jasonp

There have been a lot of requests for details of how Bitcoin work (plus a lot of LaurV chiding us for not understanding it).

This was recently linked on the Bogleheads forum, and looks extremely well written. I'm grinding through it slowly; enjoy!

Thanks for posting that link- haven't made it all the way through either, but its already explained a lot that I misunderstood. Good stuff.

Norm

[jasonp]

The most surprising factoid was the current difficulty needed to 'win' a bitcoin payout: something like 2^61 hashes. By way of comparison, a hot AMD GPU can manage something like 2^29 hashes per second. No wonder everyone is farming up.

[Fusion_power]

/begin OT/
Cheesehead, re Costco, I got a membership a year ago on the advice of a friend and after visiting a couple of Costco stores to see what they carry. If you do your due diligence, you can find some significant bargains that are well worth the price of membership. Recent examples include: Craisins in bulk, spaghetti noodles, bread flour, LED light bulbs, cheese, milk, apples, and pillows. All of these had up to 10% discounts off the regular prices. Be discriminating, some of their items are not such good deals to start with. If you don't try anything else, grab one of their pumpkin pies. They are pretty good for the price. You can purchase presciptions at their pharmacy for ridiculously low prices and you don't even have to have a membership to shop at the pharmacy.

One significant tip I can give, all stores don't carry the same items. I visited the Costco in Kent Wa and was surprised to find a complete line of restaurant cooking and serving items. I had not seen them until going to that particular store.
/end OT/

The Fed has committed to easing off the accelerator by reducing debt purchases to $75 billion per month. It is interesting to see how carefully they are handling this to avoid spooking the markets. They run a significant risk of inflation if they continue to pump money into the market, but at the same time if they stop pumping money, the market could go into a tailspin.

Maybe we should have named this new emoticon "Federal Reserve".

[ewmayer]

@Fusion: Central wankers never see inflation as a risk, because they see only the inflation they choose to see, and the other stuff (bubble-priced markets) is all salubrious "wealth effect" to them, which makes consumers "feel rich ad want to spend", thus promoting a "virtuous cycle" of demand-driven economic growth, and stuff. No, they are not shy in proclaiming that the real bogeyman is disinflation, and their job is to fight it by any means necessary.

========================

o Target holiday cyber breach hits 40 million payment cards: (Reuters) - Target Corp said hackers have stolen data from up to 40 million credit and debit cards of shoppers who visited its stores during the first three weeks of the holiday season in the second-largest such breach reported by a U.S. retailer.

In terms of the speed at which the hackers were able to access large numbers of credit cards, the data theft was unprecedented. The operation was carried out over just 19 days during the heart of the crucial Christmas holiday sales season: from the day before Thanksgiving to this past Sunday.

Target, the third-largest U.S. retailer, said on Thursday that it was working with federal law enforcement and outside experts to prevent similar attacks in the future. It did not disclose how its systems were compromised.

Target did not detect the attack on its own, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

The retailer uncovered the breach after it was alerted its systems might have been compromised by credit card processors who had noticed a surge in fraudulent transactions involving credit cards that had been used at Target, according to the source, who was not authorized to discuss the matter.

For Target, the timing of the breach could not have been worse, coming just before three of the four busiest days of what has been a bruising holiday season for retailers, with the highest level of discounting in years. Target itself last month lowered its profit forecast for the year after disappointing sales in the third quarter.

o In healthcare experiment, patients pay more for 'bad' medicine | Reuters

One of the central features of a value-based system is a financial "stick." If patients insist on medical procedures that science shows to be ineffective or unnecessary, they'll have to pay for all or most of the cost.

Ineffective or unnecessary procedures - You mean, like the ones so many doctors like to foist on their trusting patients?

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Ineffective or unnecessary procedures - You mean, like the ones so many doctors like to foist on their trusting patients?

How does one individual's case say anything about ineffective or unnecessary procedures on other patients?

Which procedures performed foisted on Mish were ineffective or unnecessary? If none (I missed seeing any described in his article), then what did you intend your link to his article to mean in regard to ineffective or unnecessary procedures and their being foisted upon trusting patients?

[kladner]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

How does one individual's case say anything about ineffective or unnecessary procedures on other patients?

Which procedures performed foisted on Mish were ineffective or unnecessary? If none (I missed seeing any described in his article), then what did you intend your link to his article to mean in regard to ineffective or unnecessary procedures and their being foisted upon trusting patients?

Mish does describe procedures which were urged upon him. That he chose another path does not predict what many other people might do under expert medical pressure. I have known of one other man who took the non-official road with some success, though what I know is third-party in that case.

There is, however, the old adage that when one's only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I do believe that this can be applied to those who use scalpels instead of hammers. Then too, one sometimes has to wonder, if nail driving pays much better than monitoring, whether there might be any financial influence on the medical opinion.

[kladner]

http://www.truthdig.com/eartothegrou...eet_fraudsters

Excerpt:

U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff has written a scathing indictment of the federal government’s approach to prosecuting Wall Street finance and banking executives, concluding that timidity, lack of resources, and a desire by individual prosecutors to pluck the low hanging fruit of fraud cases has left the country’s top financial wheeler-dealers unscathed by the likely crimes that seized up the world economy.
Particularly galling, Rakoff writes in The New York Review of Books, is the sense among Justice Department officials that some financial institutions are too big to be disciplined. “This excuse—sometimes labeled the ‘too big to jail’ excuse—is disturbing, frankly, in what it says about the department’s apparent disregard for equality under the law,” wrote Rakoff, who previously rankled Justice officials and corporate executives by refusing to approve civil settlements over corporate wrongdoing that did not include an admission of guilt.
And there likely were many crimes committed in the financial collapse. While pointedly saying he has no opinion on whether crimes occurred, Rakoff cites the findings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that fraud lurked behind the transactions that collapsed the economy. Yet U.S. Justice Department officials “have been more circumspect,” and point to three factors in their decisions not to prosecute: Proving fraud is hard; the sophisticated buyers of ill-fated mortgage-backed securities should have known better; and that going after the crooks could destabilize the economy.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by kladner

Mish does describe procedures which were urged upon him.

But I asked about ineffective and unnecessary procedures, not just procedures in general.

There is, however, the old adage that when one's only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I do believe that this can be applied to those who use scalpels instead of hammers.

Yes, indeed. When that hammer is general distrust of doctors, the nail may be inappropriately driving patients away from proper treatment.

Mish's closing advice about being one's own medical advocate is sound, but he doesn't seem to offer directions on just how best to go about that. Where does he discuss how to tell the difference between reliable and unreliable advice on the Internet?

Mish seems only to urge readers to disregard their doctors' recommendations and to perform their own research, without any discussion of cases in which the doctors' recommendation may be superior to anything the patient might find in Internet forum postings by people with no medical qualification.

Then too, one sometimes has to wonder, if nail driving pays much better than monitoring, whether there might be any financial influence on the medical opinion.

... and the evidence Mish's article supplies that is applicable to that issue is ... ?