Monday, January 19, 2015

Tuesday January 20 Housing and Economic stories

TOP STORIES:

Closely Watched Inflation Gauge Falls to Lowest Level in 14 Years - (online.wsj.com)  An inflation gauge closely watched by Federal Reserve officials has fallen to the lowest level in more than 14 years, extending a decline that investors and analysts say could complicate the central bank’s plan to raise interest rates this year. The so-called five-year forward five-year break-even rate, which measures annual inflation currently expected by investors between 2020 and 2025, tumbled to 1.8648% on Tuesday. That is the lowest level since Dec. 22, 2000, said Jonathan Rick, interest-rate derivatives strategist at Crédit Agricole in New York, and below the 2% inflation that Fed officials have set as the ideal level for annual price increases. The decline is noteworthy because many analysts and traders believe officials will be loath to raise interest rates, tightening financial conditions, when the economy is showing signs of softness.

The Great Obamacare-Medicaid Bait 'n' Switch - (www.cnbc.com) Hey, are you one of the 9.7 million Americans who have been put onto the Medicaid rolls since 2013 mostly as a result of the Affordable Care Act? Congratulations! But that and $2.75 will get you one ride on the New York City subway. That's because finding a doctor who accepts Medicaid payments – never all that easy to do even before 2013 – is getting harder than ever thanks to a steep drop in reimbursement rates for doctors who treat patients on Medicaid. When I say "steep," I mean it. We're talking an average of 43 percent nationwide and almost 60 percent in California. Incidentally, California has added 2.7 million more people to Medicaid since 2013. The result is simple: more and more doctors are simply not accepting Medicaid patients and/or dropping the ones they already have. And before you call those doctors greedy or evil, consider the alternative: Most private-practice doctors literally care for Medicaid patients at a personal financial loss. Do that too much and you start not being able to practice at all, and that will hurt everyone.

Obamacare: You can't fix stupid - (www.cnbc.com) It was supposed to be the most burning crisis in America: the 30 million, 40 million, or even 50 million of us, (depending on which politician was screaming the loudest), who didn't have health insurance and were clamoring to get it in order to avoid everything from bankruptcy to death. So the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress, gave us the Affordable Care Act. And they did it with such urgency that they didn't care that not a single Republican in Congress voted for it, and they didn't care that it took legislative chicanery to pass it despite the Democrat super-majority. Nope, the millions of uncovered Americans desperate for affordable health insurance just couldn't wait any longer. So when the Obamacare exchanges finally opened for business in October, of course the tens of millions of insurance-starved Americans stampeded over each other to sign up and finally get covered. Except they didn't. The reality has been shocking even to the biggest Obamacare detractors. A McKinsey Report estimates that just 10 percent of the roughly 4 million enrollees in the ACA are people that did not previously have health insurance. Just 1 in 10! 

Venezuela Just Had A 'Let Them Eat Cake' Moment - (www.businessinsider.com) In Venezuela, a plunge in oil prices, the country's main export, has turned a goods shortage problem into an unmitigated national disaster, but the tragedy seems lost on the country's food minister, Yván José Bello Rojas. Venezuelans can wait in grocery-store lines for days to find products that may not even be on the shelves — this has been the case for over a year. But when a reporter asked Rojas if he ever waits in lines, he said: "I've been in tons of lines. I went to my favorite sports team's game this weekend, and I had to get in line to get a parking space. I got in line to buy my ticket. And then ... I made a line to get into the stadium. And you know what, I made a line to find my seat. And then you know what," Bello finished with satisfaction, "I went to go buy an arepa [Venezuelan sandwich] ... and I had to wait in line there, too." Reporter Ana Vanessa Herrero then asked him about a woman she'd recently interviewed who was looking for diapers for two days and couldn't find them. NTN24Venezuela's Food Minister Yván Bello Rojas. "She's exaggerating," he said, "no one would wait in line for six days for anything," he added, interrupting the chorus of reporters throwing out anecdotes to the contrary.

What Matters Is the Debt Shale Drillers Have, Not the Oil - (www.bloomberg.com)  U.S. shale drillers may tout how much oil they have in the ground or how cheaply they can get it out. For stock investors, what matters most is debt. The worst performers among U.S. oil producers in a Bloomberg index owe about 5.7 times more than they earn, before certain deductions, compared with 1.7 times for companies that have taken less of a hit. Operations, such as where the companies drill or how much oil versus gas they pump, matter less. “With oil prices below $50 and approaching $40, we’re in survivor mode,” Steven Rees, who helps oversee about $1 trillion as global head of equity strategy at JPMorgan Private Bank, said via phone. “The companies with the higher degrees of leverage have underperformed, and you don’t want to own those because there’s a fair amount of uncertainty as to whether they can repay that debt.”





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