prices

Bernanke's Intrigue?

By Numerian
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Does Ben Bernanke even know what he is doing? I've certainly wondered about that point, and it is increasingly a topic of conversation among stock market analysts who have come to understand that all the major US stock market indexes are pushing relentlessly upward because of the Bernanke put.

There hasn't been a significant correction in the stock market since early September, when the S&P 500 left the 1040 range to its present very lofty height of 1330. This rally has set a number of records, including days when the stock market moves less than 1%, and number of stocks above their 200 day moving average. While some analysts credit this advance to improving economic conditions, most observers point to the Fed's deliberate policy to keep the stock market "higher than it would otherwise be", fueling it with hundreds of billions of dollars from the quantitative easing program.

The Euphoric Drug of Profit - Part II - A Brief History of Drug R&D

Submitted by on

In the previous post, The Euphoric Drug of Profit, I asked the simple question, should pharmaceutical drugs be for profit at all? They are life saving compounds after all, something for the public welfare and good.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), funds billions of taxpayer dollars in public research.

Before 1980, the results of publicly funded research, often performed at United States universities, was considered public domain (de facto).

Some of the problems with this scenario were:

  • basic research was not taken to product and final development
  • funding basic research does not fund the 75% additional costs of bring results to use by the general public