Despite Hardships, Medicine Gives Cause for Thanks * By BENJAMIN BREWER,

I often wonder how family medicine will survive in places like this. Nearly half the primary care doctors in this country plan to quit, retire early or cut back on their practices, according to a recent national survey. If those physicians follow through on those intentions, the shortages of doctors in Illinois, and elsewhere, could be severe.

It gives me pause to think that we've lost our way that much. Yes, there are challenges, both personal and financial, in being a primary care doctor. Those challenges can break your spirit, if you let them. But I still find reasons to give thanks for being a country doctor.

Panel Calls for Changes in Doctor Training

A national panel of medical experts proposed significant and costly changes for training new doctors in the nation’s hospitals, recommending mandatory sleep breaks and more structured shift changes to reduce the risk of fatigue-related errors.
The report, issued by the Institute of Medicine, focused on the grueling training of medical residents, the recent medical school graduates who care for patients under the supervision of a fully-licensed physician. The medical residency, which aims to educate doctors by fully immersing them in a particular specialty and all aspects of patient care, is characterized by heavy patient workloads, 80-hour workweeks and sleep deprivation.

Fat Tails in Stock Returns

Ever wondered:

1. What percentage of stocks beat their benchmark index over their lifetime?

2. What percentage of stocks have a negative return over their lifetime?

3. What percentage of stocks lose essentially all of their value?

The answers are in the great white paper "The Capitalism Distribution" by the guys at Blackstar Funds.

Answers:
1. 36%
2. 39%
3. 18%
(via Mebane Faber at Realmoney.com)

Going Off to College for Less (Passport Required)

I am all in favor of overseas education, to some extent. However, if you want to get into a top-notch college here in the U.S., make sure you check out Mychances.Net.

With higher education fast becoming a global commodity, universities worldwide — many of them in Canada and England — are competing for the same pool of affluent, well-qualified students, and more American students are heading overseas not just for a semester abroad, but for their full degree program.

THE MORAL STAGE OF WALL STREET

Swiss bankers are not known as paragons of transparency and moral accountability, so it’s a nice surprise to read that the top officials of UBS, the foundering financial institution recently bailed out by the Swiss government, will forgo twenty-seven million dollars in compensation and bonuses. It appears that these Swiss bankers have a faint pulse of shame.

It has not gone remarked upon enough that their American counterparts apparently have none. Having brought the American and global economy to its knees through their reckless, short-sighted, downright stupid investments, and then looked to the government for a very expensive lifeline, the leaders of Citigroup, A.I.G., Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman, and other financial giants are maintaining a carefully nonchalant public posture. Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Attorney General, had to hold a threatening press conference on Wall Street in order to frighten A.I.G. into announcing that raises, bonuses, and lavish retreats will be suspended.
But fear is not the same thing as shame. Morally speaking, it’s inferior.

Radical Solutions for A Crazy Crisis

A lucid explanation from Dr. Doom (Nouriel Roubini) on the deflationary spiral...
The U.S. economy is confronting a toxic mixture: deflation, a liquidity trap and debt deflation, as well as rising household and corporate defaults. Put plainly, the signs of a "stag-deflation"--a deadly combination of stagnation/recession and deflation--are now clear.
(..)
The problem with many of these "extreme" policy actions is that they were tried in Japan in the 1990s and the last few years, and they failed miserably. Once you are in a liquidity trap and there are fundamental deflationary forces in the economy as the excess aggregate supply of goods faces a falling aggregate demand, it is very hard--even with extreme policy actions--to prevent deflations from emerging.

Some very aggressive policy actions--such as letting the dollar weaken sharply--may do the job, but they may also be beggar-thy-neighbor policies that would export even more deflation to other countries. The world economy has been massively imbalanced for the last decade with the U.S. being the consumer of first and last resort, spending more than its income and running ever larger current account deficits while creating a massive excess productive capacity via over-investment.

All the while, China and other emerging markets have been the producers of first and last resort, spending less than their income and running ever larger current account surpluses. With U.S. spending now faltering, a global glut of unsold goods may lead to persistent and perverse deflationary forces that may last for a longer time unless proper policy actions--mostly non-necessary monetary--are undertaken.

Thus, dealing with this deadly combination of deflation, liquidity traps, debt deflation and defaults that I termed a global stag-deflation may be the biggest challenge that U.S. and global policy makers have to face in 2009.

It will not be easy to prevent this toxic vicious circle unless (1) the process of recapitalizing financial institutions via temporary partial nationalization is accelerated and performed in a consistent and credible way; (2) such actions are combined with massive fiscal stimulus to prop up aggregate demand while private demand is in free fall; (3) the debt burden of insolvent households is sharply reduced via outright large debt reduction (not cosmetic and ineffective "loan modifications"); and (4) even more unorthodox and radical monetary policy actions are undertaken to prevent pervasive deflation from setting in.

Dying of Consumption

From the Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia...

IT’S game over for the American consumer. Inflation-adjusted personal consumption expenditures are on track for rare back-to-back quarterly declines in the second half of 2008 at a 3.5 percent average annual rate. There are only four other instances since 1950 when real consumer demand has fallen for two quarters in a row. This is the first occasion when declines in both quarters will have exceeded 3 percent. The current consumption plunge is without precedent in the modern era.
(..)
Americans need to save. They don’t need another flat-screen TV made in China.

Can She Save Our Schools?

Read this profile of Michelle Rhee, the new Chancellor of Education for the D.C. School System.
I like her style!-
"Teachers hate her. Principals are scared of her. How Michelle Rhee became the most revolutionary — and polarizing — force in American education."

The U.S. spends more per pupil on elementary and high school education than most developed nations. Yet it is behind most of them in the math and science abilities of its children. Young Americans today are less likely than their parents were to finish high school. This is an issue that is warping the nation's economy and security, and the causes are not as mysterious as they seem. The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research.

An Uneasy Peace Plan For Congo's Gorillas

The Democratic Republic of Congo is home to some of the world's last remaining mountain gorillas. But for more than a year, that gorilla sector in the nation's east has been mostly off-limits — and in the hands of a rebel army. But a new agreement between Congo's leaders and the rebels calls for official, government monitoring of the gorillas to resume.

Mychances.net

Woohoo!!
My friends James and Brent Pirruccello had their website, mychances.net, mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. This is a website to help college students get into their college of choice!

Acute Mountain Sickness

With ski season upon us here in Reno, this is a relevant post, as it highlights symptoms and remedies for acute mountain sickness...

The incidence of acute mountain sickness (AMS) varies with location, depending on both absolute altitude reached and rate of ascent to altitude. It has been estimated that 15 to 40% of Colorado resort skiers (depending on the altitude of the resort) develop AMS, and studies have shown an incidence of 40% in Mt. McKinley climbers and 70% in Mt. Rainihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifer climbers. Given the huge numbers of Colorado tourists (10 million a year), this is not a trivial problem. High altitude cerebral edema (HACE), or brain swelling, is defined as the progression of cerebral symptoms and findings of ataxia (difficulty with balance, walking, and muscular coordination) and change in consciousness.

Giving Thanks to Heroes

It is worth reading this entire column by Nicholas Kristof...

This is a column to give thanks to you, the reader. You don’t know it, but some of you are keeping women like Sajida Bibi alive here in this remote Pakistani village. And that is a far grander reason to celebrate Thanksgiving than even the plumpest turkey.

Sajida is a 29-year-old college-educated woman from a Christian family here (and a reminder that oppressive values in Pakistan are not rooted just in Islam). She scandalized her family by marrying a man she chose herself — and then becoming pregnant.

The next step was brutal: Several women held Sajida down as a midwife conducted an abortion, while she struggled and wept.

Then her brothers weighed what to do next. Sajida’s eldest brother wanted to sell her to a trafficker who offered $1,200, presumably intending to imprison her inside a brothel. Two other brothers just wanted to kill her.

The brothers fought for days over this question. So Sajida ground up sleeping tablets and baked the powder into chapati bread that she fed her brothers for dinner — and then sneaked out as they slept.

Sajida made her way to Mukhtar Mai, one of my heroes, and that is why this is a Thanksgiving column. For years, I’ve written about Mukhtar, an illiterate woman who used compensation money after being gang-raped to build a small school in which she herself enrolled.

Undergoing Heart Bypass Surgery

From the BBC--an interesting video of cardiac bypass surgery

Advertisement Jeffrey Fairlamb from County Durham has allowed the BBC to film him having a double heart bypass operation at Middlesbrough's James Cook University Hospital.

Desperate Measures by Desperate Policy Makers in Desperate Times: the Fed Moves to Radically Unorthodox Policies as Economy Is in Free Fall and Stag-D

The latest from Professor Roubini..

Another batch of worse than awful news greeted today Americans getting ready for the Thanksgiving holiday: free falling consumption spending, collapsing new homes sales, falling consumer confidence, very high initial claims for unemployment benefits, collapsing orders for durable goods. It is hard to get any worse than this but the next few months will serve even worse macro news. At this rate of contraction as revealed by the latest data it would not be surprising if fourth quarter GDP were to fall at an annualized rate of 5-6%.

Let us discuss next the financial consequences of such desperate news and the desperate policy actions undertaken to stem this nasty stag-deflation…

The Paulson Plan: ‘Truly Idiotic’

Charles Calomiris is angry. Hank Paulson’s plan to save the economy? “Truly idiotic,” says Calomiris, who is the Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia University’s business school. “This whole thing has been complete nonsense. We did it in the 1930s ten times better than this. This isn’t complicated.”

The US Treasury Market Reaches Breaking Point

The Settlement System for the US Bond market has broken down

says it all

Bailouts May Scare U.S. Economy to Death

From the Cato Institute...
I find it astonishing that so many keep referring to Obama as a socialist in the light of this Bush/Paulson 7.7 TRILLION DOLLAR legacy(as of today) he gets to inherit two months from now...I really worry about the future of our children as these "bailouts" are now basically beyond belief.

A Pew Research poll conducted more than a week ago found that 57 percent of Americans are terrified by Bailout Mania 2008. That was several days, and many billions of dollars, before Bloomberg reported that U.S. taxpayers are now on the hook for $7.7 trillion in bailout bucks — half of the nation’s entire GDP for the past year. At this point, not even Carl Sagan could get a handle on the numbers we’re talking about.
What do people do when they’re scared about the state of the economy? They stop spending. With each new government “investment” announced by our new overlord Hank Paulson, Americans are going to clutch ever more fiercely at their wallets. They will eat out even less than they’ve been doing. They will rediscover the true spirit of Christmas and give each other hugs instead of Blue-Ray disc players. They will forgo that new coat or pair of winter boots. And they will bring the U.S. economy to a halt.

Scientists Find Clues to Aging in a Red Wine Ingredient’s Role in Activating a Protein

A new insight into the reason for aging has been gained by scientists trying to understand how resveratrol, a minor ingredient of red wine, improves the health and lifespan of laboratory mice. They believe that the integrity of chromosomes is compromised as people age, and that resveratrol works by activating a protein known as sirtuin that restores the chromosomes to health.

Eat, Exercise and Be Merry

Research shows that people who write down what they are grateful for may exercise more. Rachel Mahan reports.