Rights group: Teenager sentenced after being caught with banned device
Mideast/North Africa video MORE VIDEO
Passenger jet crashes in 'ball of fire' off Beirut
Jan. 25: The Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed shortly after takeoff near Beirut. Officials do not suspect terrorism in the accident. ITV's Harry Smith reports.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Deadly blasts rock Baghdad
Bin Laden purportedly claims bomb plot
updated 8:30 a.m. ET, Sun., Jan. 24, 2010
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - A teenage girl has been sentenced to a 90-lash flogging and two months in prison as punishment for assaulting a teacher, a Saudi judge said in an interview published Sunday.
Human rights group Amnesty International said the assault happened after the girl was caught with a camera phone at school.
The teenager's name was not immediately available. She could be spared with a pardon from King Abdullah, said Judge Riyadh al-Meihdib.
"The verdict was read out to her at the court and she did not object," al-Meihdib told Al-Watan, a national Saudi daily newspaper.
He said the teacher refused to forgive the girl, who will not appeal the case. The teacher's condition was unknown, and the newspaper had no details about the dispute.
Camera phones are banned at the school.
Al-Watan quoted the school headmaster describing the girl as "about twenty" years old.
Call for royal intervention
However, Amnesty said the girl is 13.
In a statement Friday, the London-based rights watchdog urged Abdullah to "intervene immediately to ensure that the flogging sentence is rescinded."
"He must also take steps to reform Saudi Arabian law and criminal procedure to ban the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, in particular floggings of children," Amnesty interim Secretary General Claudio Cordone said.
Judge al-Meihdib said his court will issue instructions to local authorities in Jubail to carry out the sentence within two days.
Jubail is located on the Red Sea. Its court sentenced the teenager with the harsh punishment Tuesday.
Comment
Here in the USA she might get a suspension or a detention. 90 lashes and 2 months in jail for a 13-year old?
Monday, January 25, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
What Caused the Great Recession?
Jacob Weisberg
It's finally ending. Let the blaming begin.
Published Jan 9, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Jan 18, 2010
As the financial crisis of 2008–09 draws to a close, narratives of the meltdown are flooding bookstores, think tanks are cranking out white papers, and four different congressional committees are investigating what went wrong. Now that the debate over how to prevent the next collapse has begun, it might not be a bad idea to figure out how the last one happened. The only near-consensus is on the question of what triggered the not-quite-a-depression. In 2007 the housing bubble burst, leading to a high rate of defaults on subprime mortgages. Exposure to bad mortgages doomed Bear Stearns in March 2008 and then led to a banking crisis that fall. A global recession became inevitable once the government decided not to rescue Lehman Brothers. But right about here, agreement ends.
There are no strong candidates for what logicians call sufficient conditions—a single factor that would have caused the crisis in the absence of any others. There are, however, a number of plausible necessary conditions—factors without which the crisis would not have occurred. Most analysts find former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan at fault, for varying reasons. Conservatives tend to blame Greenspan for keeping interest rates too low between 2003 and 2005 as the real-estate bubble inflated, spurring a frenzy of irresponsible borrowing.
Liberal analysts are more likely to focus on the way that Greenspan's aversion to regulation turned innovative financial products into lethal weapons. In this view, the emergence of an unsupervised market for more and more exotic derivatives—credit default swaps (CDSs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), CDSs on CDOs—allowed heedless financial institutions to put the entire financial system at risk. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke also echoes this view, attributing the crisis to regulatory failure.
A bit further down on the list are factors that didn't cause the crisis but enabled it or made it worse than it might have been. These include global savings imbalances, which put upward pressure on asset prices and downward pressure on interest rates during the bubble years; misjudgments by the bond-rating agencies Moody's and Standard & Poor's about the safety of mortgage-backed securities; a lack of transparency about the risks borne by banks, which used off-balance-sheet entities to hide what they were doing; excessive reliance on mathematical models, which under-priced unpredictable forms of risk; and a flawed model of compensation that encouraged traders and executives at financial firms to take on excessive risk.
Other analysts look to the underlying mindset that encouraged the meltdown: shortsightedness, stupidity, and greed. But those are weak explanations, unless you think human nature changed in the final decades of the 20th century to make people greedier or more foolish. A subtler psychological argument is that investors fell prey to recurring delusions about risk and bubbles, which the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff describe in their book, ThisTime Is Different. In another new book, How Markets Fail, John Cassidy of The New Yorker focuses on the fallacies of free-market fundamentalism (Greenspan again). Still other writers, like Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, in his new book, Freefall, point to the way globalization spread the toxicity from the U.S. mortgage market to the rest of the world. Not all such explanations fall according to ideological expectations. The conservative jurist Richard Posner argues in his book A Failure of Capitalismthat the free market itself is to blame for the recent troubles. Unfortunately, what these "root causes" explanations have in common is that they don't lend themselves to practical solutions.
I've left out some farther-fetched interpretations of the cause of the crisis. Libertarians and The Wall Street Journal editorial page continue to insist that government did it. In I.O.U., the only truly entertaining book I've read on the subject, the British writer John Lanchester theorizes that after the Cold War, capitalism could go wild because Western governments no longer had to worry about competing with communism. This is a fascinating idea, with no evidence to support it.
Historians are still debating what caused the Great Depression, so it's not likely this argument will be settled any time soon. But if we haven't at least learned that our financial markets need stronger regulatory supervision to prevent bad bets by big firms from going viral, we'll be back in the same place faster than you can say "30 times leverage."
Jacob Weisberg is chairman of the Slate Group, and is the author of The Bush Tragedy and In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington.
Comment
A good overview.
It's finally ending. Let the blaming begin.
Published Jan 9, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Jan 18, 2010
As the financial crisis of 2008–09 draws to a close, narratives of the meltdown are flooding bookstores, think tanks are cranking out white papers, and four different congressional committees are investigating what went wrong. Now that the debate over how to prevent the next collapse has begun, it might not be a bad idea to figure out how the last one happened. The only near-consensus is on the question of what triggered the not-quite-a-depression. In 2007 the housing bubble burst, leading to a high rate of defaults on subprime mortgages. Exposure to bad mortgages doomed Bear Stearns in March 2008 and then led to a banking crisis that fall. A global recession became inevitable once the government decided not to rescue Lehman Brothers. But right about here, agreement ends.
There are no strong candidates for what logicians call sufficient conditions—a single factor that would have caused the crisis in the absence of any others. There are, however, a number of plausible necessary conditions—factors without which the crisis would not have occurred. Most analysts find former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan at fault, for varying reasons. Conservatives tend to blame Greenspan for keeping interest rates too low between 2003 and 2005 as the real-estate bubble inflated, spurring a frenzy of irresponsible borrowing.
Liberal analysts are more likely to focus on the way that Greenspan's aversion to regulation turned innovative financial products into lethal weapons. In this view, the emergence of an unsupervised market for more and more exotic derivatives—credit default swaps (CDSs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), CDSs on CDOs—allowed heedless financial institutions to put the entire financial system at risk. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke also echoes this view, attributing the crisis to regulatory failure.
A bit further down on the list are factors that didn't cause the crisis but enabled it or made it worse than it might have been. These include global savings imbalances, which put upward pressure on asset prices and downward pressure on interest rates during the bubble years; misjudgments by the bond-rating agencies Moody's and Standard & Poor's about the safety of mortgage-backed securities; a lack of transparency about the risks borne by banks, which used off-balance-sheet entities to hide what they were doing; excessive reliance on mathematical models, which under-priced unpredictable forms of risk; and a flawed model of compensation that encouraged traders and executives at financial firms to take on excessive risk.
Other analysts look to the underlying mindset that encouraged the meltdown: shortsightedness, stupidity, and greed. But those are weak explanations, unless you think human nature changed in the final decades of the 20th century to make people greedier or more foolish. A subtler psychological argument is that investors fell prey to recurring delusions about risk and bubbles, which the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff describe in their book, ThisTime Is Different. In another new book, How Markets Fail, John Cassidy of The New Yorker focuses on the fallacies of free-market fundamentalism (Greenspan again). Still other writers, like Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, in his new book, Freefall, point to the way globalization spread the toxicity from the U.S. mortgage market to the rest of the world. Not all such explanations fall according to ideological expectations. The conservative jurist Richard Posner argues in his book A Failure of Capitalismthat the free market itself is to blame for the recent troubles. Unfortunately, what these "root causes" explanations have in common is that they don't lend themselves to practical solutions.
I've left out some farther-fetched interpretations of the cause of the crisis. Libertarians and The Wall Street Journal editorial page continue to insist that government did it. In I.O.U., the only truly entertaining book I've read on the subject, the British writer John Lanchester theorizes that after the Cold War, capitalism could go wild because Western governments no longer had to worry about competing with communism. This is a fascinating idea, with no evidence to support it.
Historians are still debating what caused the Great Depression, so it's not likely this argument will be settled any time soon. But if we haven't at least learned that our financial markets need stronger regulatory supervision to prevent bad bets by big firms from going viral, we'll be back in the same place faster than you can say "30 times leverage."
Jacob Weisberg is chairman of the Slate Group, and is the author of The Bush Tragedy and In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington.
Comment
A good overview.
Friday, January 15, 2010
More furor likely as banker bonuses hit $145 billion
The eye-popping compensation will almost certainly raise cries for a bonus tax.
Posted by InvestorPlace on Friday, January 15, 2010 10:21 AM
The banking industry clearly does not care about the outcry from Congress, the President and taxpayers regarding the extravagant bonuses being paid on the heels of the greatest credit crisis in four generations. The Wall Street Journal reports that it has put together research which shows bankers will make $145 billion this year, which is even higher than the phenomenal amount that they made in 2007.
Most of the money will be paid to the top managements and traders at the blue chip firms which include Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM), which posted a huge increase in fourth-quarter net income early today. Earnings per share rose to $.74 from $.06 in the same period a year ago.
It is clear that the culture clash between Wall Street and Main Street is becoming more violent.
A number of financial company CEOs objected to the new tax proposed by The White House to raise $90 billion over ten years by placing a 0.15% tax on balance sheet liabilities. The top 50 financial companies will bear almost this entire burden. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon reacted by saying the taxes should not be used as a form of punishment.
Politicians, on the other hand, will seize on the $145 billion number as a sign that bailed out banks used TARP money to survive the crisis and then prosper shortly thereafter. The eye-popping compensation will almost certainly raise cries for a bonus tax similar to the one instituted in the U.K. this year.
Wall Street executives will counter by saying that they already pay high income taxes on their bonuses and that their companies pay high corporate taxes. The Treasury will do just fine by its levies on the financial industry. But, that is a sign that the financial community has a tin ear. The populist reaction to the $145 billion number will drive new legislation to tax Wall Street pay or cap it at levels well below where it was last year.
By ignoring the anger of the average man, Wall Street has put itself in a position to be the government’s whipping boy as it prepares the budget for next year.
Comment
Arrogance such as this needs to be addressed by Congress. They screw up the works, coming close to dropping us into another Depression, we bail them out, and they continue to rob, rape, and plunder the system like it never happened. They use OUR bailout money to reward themselves for this series of fiscal mistakes. Ridiculous.
Posted by InvestorPlace on Friday, January 15, 2010 10:21 AM
The banking industry clearly does not care about the outcry from Congress, the President and taxpayers regarding the extravagant bonuses being paid on the heels of the greatest credit crisis in four generations. The Wall Street Journal reports that it has put together research which shows bankers will make $145 billion this year, which is even higher than the phenomenal amount that they made in 2007.
Most of the money will be paid to the top managements and traders at the blue chip firms which include Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM), which posted a huge increase in fourth-quarter net income early today. Earnings per share rose to $.74 from $.06 in the same period a year ago.
It is clear that the culture clash between Wall Street and Main Street is becoming more violent.
A number of financial company CEOs objected to the new tax proposed by The White House to raise $90 billion over ten years by placing a 0.15% tax on balance sheet liabilities. The top 50 financial companies will bear almost this entire burden. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon reacted by saying the taxes should not be used as a form of punishment.
Politicians, on the other hand, will seize on the $145 billion number as a sign that bailed out banks used TARP money to survive the crisis and then prosper shortly thereafter. The eye-popping compensation will almost certainly raise cries for a bonus tax similar to the one instituted in the U.K. this year.
Wall Street executives will counter by saying that they already pay high income taxes on their bonuses and that their companies pay high corporate taxes. The Treasury will do just fine by its levies on the financial industry. But, that is a sign that the financial community has a tin ear. The populist reaction to the $145 billion number will drive new legislation to tax Wall Street pay or cap it at levels well below where it was last year.
By ignoring the anger of the average man, Wall Street has put itself in a position to be the government’s whipping boy as it prepares the budget for next year.
Comment
Arrogance such as this needs to be addressed by Congress. They screw up the works, coming close to dropping us into another Depression, we bail them out, and they continue to rob, rape, and plunder the system like it never happened. They use OUR bailout money to reward themselves for this series of fiscal mistakes. Ridiculous.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Biotech: Savior ?
With the battles over genetically engineered (GE) crops quieting down, at least
temporarily, it’s a good time to take stock of a technology that has been portrayed as either the scourge or savior of the world’s food supply. Genetic engineering has been used almost exclusively to make corn, soybeans, canola, and sugar beets resistant to herbicides or to make them produce their own insecticide. Both advances offer real benefits to farmers by increasing yields or farm income.
(Yes, organic farming would be better, but it won’t replace conventional farming
any time soon.)
Don’t bother looking for consumer benefits, though. The current biotech crops have not made any foods more nutritious, tastier, or cheaper. The nutritionally improved crops closest to market:
a novel soybean with omega-3 fats, which may help prevent heart attacks, and a soybean whose oil could replace oils that contain trans fats. But both are still a few years away.
On the other hand, the engineered crops currently being grown are safe and cause less
environmental damage than their conventional cousins. Some GE crops allow farmers to use fewer chemical pesticides. Others support notill farming, which protects topsoil and reduces agricultural runoff into rivers and streams. Meanwhile, in developing nations with millions of poor subsistence farmers, GE crops are proving highly popular. Farmers in India and China who are growing cotton engineered to produce the Bt pesticide benefit because they can use fewer chemical pesticides and enjoy sharply increased yields. That translates into fewer pesticide poisonings and
higher income. In India, cotton production doubled between 2002 and 2007. (Critics
charge that failed harvests of Bt cotton in India have led to farmer suicides, but independent researchers have found no link.)
Consumer benefits probably will come sooner overseas than in the United States.
India soon could market two dietary mainstays from genetically engineered crops: water-conserving mustard and insect-resistant eggplant. And China is becoming
a powerhouse with its own biotech crops, which won’t bear the Monsanto or DuPont logo.
The Gates Foundation is funding projects to boost nutrients in sorghum and cassava,
two staple African crops. And, with the Rockefeller Foundation’s help, Golden Rice may soon move from the lab to fields in Southeast Asia. That long-awaited variety produces betacarotene, which can prevent vitamin A deficiency and blindness. What about future genetically engineered crops (and animals)? Congress should require
the Food and Drug Administration to formally approve new GE foods to ensure that they
are safe for humans. With stronger, but not stifling, regulations, consumers should be able to continue to trust the safety of GE foods.
2 N U T R I T I O N A C T I O N H E A LT H L E T T E R ■ J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9
M E M O F R O M M F J
JULY/AUGUST 2009
Volume 36 Number 6
The contents of NAH are not intended
to provide medical advice, which
should be obtained from a qualified
health professional.
The use of information from
Nutrition Action Healthletter
for commercial purposes is prohibited
without written permission
from CSPI.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is
the nonprofit health-advocacy group that publishes
Nutrition Action Healthletter. CSPI mounts educational
programs and presses for changes in government
and corporate policies.
Design and production by The Page Group
(www.pagegroup.com).
© 2009 by Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Look for Michael
Jacobson’s column on The
Huffington Post Web site
(huffingtonpost.com/living).
Now Blogging...
Congress should require the FDA to formally approve new
genetically engineered foods, to make sure that they’re safe.
Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Center for Science in the Public Interest
Photo: © ryasick/fotolia.com.
temporarily, it’s a good time to take stock of a technology that has been portrayed as either the scourge or savior of the world’s food supply. Genetic engineering has been used almost exclusively to make corn, soybeans, canola, and sugar beets resistant to herbicides or to make them produce their own insecticide. Both advances offer real benefits to farmers by increasing yields or farm income.
(Yes, organic farming would be better, but it won’t replace conventional farming
any time soon.)
Don’t bother looking for consumer benefits, though. The current biotech crops have not made any foods more nutritious, tastier, or cheaper. The nutritionally improved crops closest to market:
a novel soybean with omega-3 fats, which may help prevent heart attacks, and a soybean whose oil could replace oils that contain trans fats. But both are still a few years away.
On the other hand, the engineered crops currently being grown are safe and cause less
environmental damage than their conventional cousins. Some GE crops allow farmers to use fewer chemical pesticides. Others support notill farming, which protects topsoil and reduces agricultural runoff into rivers and streams. Meanwhile, in developing nations with millions of poor subsistence farmers, GE crops are proving highly popular. Farmers in India and China who are growing cotton engineered to produce the Bt pesticide benefit because they can use fewer chemical pesticides and enjoy sharply increased yields. That translates into fewer pesticide poisonings and
higher income. In India, cotton production doubled between 2002 and 2007. (Critics
charge that failed harvests of Bt cotton in India have led to farmer suicides, but independent researchers have found no link.)
Consumer benefits probably will come sooner overseas than in the United States.
India soon could market two dietary mainstays from genetically engineered crops: water-conserving mustard and insect-resistant eggplant. And China is becoming
a powerhouse with its own biotech crops, which won’t bear the Monsanto or DuPont logo.
The Gates Foundation is funding projects to boost nutrients in sorghum and cassava,
two staple African crops. And, with the Rockefeller Foundation’s help, Golden Rice may soon move from the lab to fields in Southeast Asia. That long-awaited variety produces betacarotene, which can prevent vitamin A deficiency and blindness. What about future genetically engineered crops (and animals)? Congress should require
the Food and Drug Administration to formally approve new GE foods to ensure that they
are safe for humans. With stronger, but not stifling, regulations, consumers should be able to continue to trust the safety of GE foods.
2 N U T R I T I O N A C T I O N H E A LT H L E T T E R ■ J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9
M E M O F R O M M F J
JULY/AUGUST 2009
Volume 36 Number 6
The contents of NAH are not intended
to provide medical advice, which
should be obtained from a qualified
health professional.
The use of information from
Nutrition Action Healthletter
for commercial purposes is prohibited
without written permission
from CSPI.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is
the nonprofit health-advocacy group that publishes
Nutrition Action Healthletter. CSPI mounts educational
programs and presses for changes in government
and corporate policies.
Design and production by The Page Group
(www.pagegroup.com).
© 2009 by Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Look for Michael
Jacobson’s column on The
Huffington Post Web site
(huffingtonpost.com/living).
Now Blogging...
Congress should require the FDA to formally approve new
genetically engineered foods, to make sure that they’re safe.
Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Center for Science in the Public Interest
Photo: © ryasick/fotolia.com.
Healthy Movie Popcorn?
BIG
Ready to sit back and enjoy the movie? Not yet. First, the theater is hoping you’ll stop by the concession stand for a snack. You know, something light…like, say, a bucket of popcorn with the calories of a Hamburger plus a Quarter Pounder plus a Big Mac at McDonald’s. Surely, no one expects you to sit through a two-hour movie
with nothing to eat or drink. After all, you’re burning dozens of calories in there, what with all that leg crossing, shifting around in your seat...and reaching for some popcorn. With all that activity, you can really work up an appetite,
especially if you’re still growing. And, sad to say, many
adults are.
Continued on p. 2.
2 N U T R I T I O N A C T I O N H E A LT H L E T T E R ■ D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9
POPCORN
C O V E R S T O R Y
A “medium” (20 cups) or a “large” (also 20 cups) has 60 grams of sat fat. Of course, a large means a free refill (Yay!), so there’s no limit to the damage you can do.
Suggestion: Move your cardiologist’s phone number to your speed dial before
the lights go down. Just kidding. It takes years to clog those arteries…and years for your blood pressure to respond to the salt shock (550 milligrams of sodium—a third of a day’s worth—for a small and 980 mg for a medium or large). The calories, on the other hand, may show up much sooner...and where you least want them.
Budget 670 for a small and 1,200 for a medium or large. You could think of each
small as a Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pepperoni Pizza and each medium or large
as two. But the two pizzas pack “only” a day’s worth of sat fat—nowhere near the
three days’ worth in a medium or large popcorn. How can a medium and large at Regal
each hold the same 20 cups of popcorn? Simple. The taller medium comes in a bag with straight sides, while the squatter large comes in a tapered tub that’s wider at the top (see photo). The tub sure looks like it holds more. Other than for the free refill (shudder), why else would moviegoers pay $8 for a large (a medium is $7)?
What’s the healthiest snack to buy at the movies? You can go for 400 to 1,200
calories’ worth of popcorn that (at many theaters) is essentially fried in one to
three days’ worth of saturated fat. Or you can buy a package of candy with 300
to 1,100 empty calories (plus at least half a day’s sat fat if it’s chocolate). Soft
drinks dispatch another 150 to 500 calories to your thirsty fat cells. The best snack at the movies? No snack at all.
Information compiled by Amy Ramsay, with help from Melissa Pryputniewicz.
“ Did you know that popcorn is among the healthiest—and tastiest—snacks around?” asks the Web site of the Popcorn Board, an industry group. “It’s a whole
grain food that’s low in calories and fat and it’s a complex carbohydrate.”
Maybe that’s one reason people fork over $4 to $8 for a bag or tub of popcorn
when they enter a movie theater. It sounds like they’re munching on a stalk
of broccoli, for goodness sakes.
Turns out the Popcorn Board is right...if you’re talking low-fat popcorn or (fat-free) air-popped. Eating a tub of movie theater popcorn is more like eating an 8 oz. bag of potato chips, and that’s assuming your theater pops in the best oil available and you get it without the “buttery” topping.
Nutrition Action Healthletter (ISSN 0885-7792) is published 10 times a year (monthly except bi-monthly in Jan./Feb. and Jul./Aug.).
POSTMASTER: Send changes to Nutrition Action Healthletter, 1875 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009-5728.
Application to mail at Periodical postage rates approved at post office of Washington, DC, and at additional offices.
© 2009 by Center for Science in the Public Interest. One-year subscription (10 issues): $24. Two years: $42. - Vol. 36 No. 10
Movie Theaters Fill Buckets …and BELLIES
Here’s what we found when we sent samples of popcorn and toppings from the three largest theater chains to an independent lab for analysis. (Each gave us nutrition facts for its popcorn. But just to be sure, we analyzed samples from three different theaters for each chain. For two of the chains—Regal and AMC—we went to theaters in the Washington, D.C., area. For Cinemark, our samples came from Texas, Illinois, and
Maryland.)
WITH 548 theaters in 39 states plus the District of Columbia, Regal is the largest chain in the United States. It pops in coconut oil, which is 90 percent saturated. (In contrast, lard is 40 percent saturated.) Translation: A “small” popcorn
(that’s about 11 cups’ worth) with no buttery topping has 34 grams of saturated fat. So even if you split it with a friend (unlikely), you each get nearly a day’s worth of artery paste. And it gets worse from there.
At Regal, a medium (left) and a large popcorn each has 1,200 calories and three days’ worth of saturated fat. POPCORN
BIG
Photos: © Valery Potapova/fotolia.com (top), Stephen Schmidt (bottom).
N U T R I T I O N A C T I O N H E A LT H L E T T E R ■ D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9 3
C O V E R S T O R Y REGAL
(popped in coconut oil)
AMC
(popped in coconut oil)
CINEMARK
(popped in non-hydrogenated canola oil)
11 cups
20 cups
20 cups
2 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
260 calories 5 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1 Tbs. butter topping adds
130 calories 9 g sat fat 0.4 g trans fat
2 Tbs. butter topping adds
260 calories 18 g sat fat 0.7 g trans fat
9 cups
16 cups
370 calories
420 calories
LARGE MEDIUM Small
210 mg
sodium
690 mg
sodium
550 mg
sodium
670 calories
60 g sat fat
1,200 calories
1,200 calories
980 mg
sodium
980 mg
sodium
1,030 calories
57 g sat fat
580 mg
sodium
760 calories
910 calories
1,240 mg
sodium
1,500 mg
sodium
Another oopsy-daisy: According to Regal, a medium has 720 calories, while a large has 960 calories. Both are lower than our lab results. Oh well. What’s an extra 200 to 500 calories when your snack hovers around the 1,000-calorie mark? They don’t call them tubs for nothing.
Toppings: For customers who think plain popcorn isn’t soaked in enough oil, Regal offers a “buttery” topping. According to Regal and the topping manufacturer, it adds 130 calories to a small, 200 calories to a medium, and 260 calories to a large.
We analyzed the topping to make sure that it had no trans fat. But we didn’t check to see how much topping the concession staff at Regal—or any other chain—adds. Odds are, it varies. And odds are, it’s more than what Regal claims.
> > > > >
590 calories
330 mg
sodium
Notes: Cup estimates based on 11 grams of popcorn per cup. Topping serving sizes for all chains based on Regal numbers. Daily limits for 2,000 cals: Sat Fat: 20 g, Sodium: 1,500 mg.
34 g sat fat
20 g sat fat
2 g sat fat
33 g sat fat
3 g sat fat
60 g sat fat
4 g sat fat
1 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
130 calories 2 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1½ Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
200 calories 3 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
120 calories 2 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1½ Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
180 calories 3 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
2 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
240 calories 4 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
130 calories 2 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
8 cups
17 cups
14 cups
6 cups
1½ Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
200 calories 3 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
2 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
260 calories 4 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1½ Tbs. butter topping adds
200 calories 14 g sat fat 0.6 g trans fat
4 N U T R I T I O N A C T I O N H E A LT H L E T T E R ■ D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9
AMC, the nation’s second-largest chain (with 307 theaters in 30 states and the District of Columbia), also pops in coconut oil. The only good news: AMC’s popcorns aren’t as super-sized as Regal’s. But they’re bigger than the company acknowledges.
According to AMC, a small popcorn contains 225 calories. In fact, the small AMC popcorns that we bought weighed about 50 percent more than the company claimed.
Our AMC smalls contained 370 calories and 20 grams of saturated fat—about what you’d get from that classic healthy snack: eight pats of butter. Based on what we were served, AMC lowballs its other sizes as well. For example, the company’s 430-calorie
medium morphed into 590 calories and 33 grams of saturated fat. And the 660-calorie large became a 1,030-calorie behemoth with 57 grams of sat fat. It’s like eating a pound of baby back ribs topped with a scoop of Häagen-Dazs ice cream (except for the extra day’s worth of sat fat in the popcorn).
What’s next: fun-house mirrors that make you look skinny on your way out of the theater? Toppings: Fake-butter fans must love AMC. The chain lets patrons pump
their own “buttery” topping. No skimpy tablespoon of extra fat on a small or two
tablespoons on a large, like Regal claims to use. With 120 calories per tablespoon,
you should be able to squeeze another 200 to 500 calories into the bucket of fat
cells in your lap.
Cinemark, with 296 theaters in 39 states, deserves some applause. The nation’s third largest chain pops in non-hydrogenated canola oil instead of coconut. Assuming you add no “buttery” topping,your heart can escape a Cinemark popcorn relatively unscathed. Your belly (and blood pressure) won’t be so lucky. If you share an unbuttered (8-cup) small with a fellow moviegoer, each of you will walk away with about 200 calories (seasoned with 340 milligrams of sodium). That’s the best you can expect from movie theater popcorn, unless you ask the theater to pop you a batch without salt. (All the Cinemark, AMC, and Regal locations we called said they would do that.) A medium popcorn (14 cups) at Cinemark reaches 760 calories and a large
(17 cups) hits 910 calories (and 1,500 mg of sodium—an entire day’s quota). Since
when is half-a-day’s-calories’ worth of corn, oil, and salt called a “snack”?
Maybe since America started competing in the Sumo Belly-Lifting Olympics.
Small at Cinemark
Small at
AMC
Small at Regal ,
Medium at AMC
Medium at CINEMARK
Medium at Regal ,
Large at AMC
Large at CINEMARK
Large at Regal
16 fl. oz.
150 calories
10 tsp.
sugar
Notes: Ice takes up about a quarter of the cup. There are 4 grams of sugar in every teaspoon.
54 fl. oz.
500 calories
33 tsp.
sugar soda
21 fl. oz.
200 calories
13 tsp.
sugar
32 fl. oz.
300 calories
19 tsp.
sugar
44 fl. oz.
400 calories
26 tsp.
sugar
combos
Calories Sat Fat (g)
REGAL
1 medium popcorn, 1 medium soda 1,610 60
1 large popcorn, 2 medium sodas 2,020 60
AMC
1 large popcorn, 1 large soda 1,440 57
1 large popcorn, 2 large sodas 1,850 57
CINEMARK
1 large popcorn, 1 large soda 1,320 4
1 large popcorn, 2 large sodas 1,730 4
A combo at Regal (medium popcorn plus medium soda) has 1,610 calories. That’s like eating six scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese, four bacon strips, and four
sausage links before the lights come up. Photo
Comment
I love popcorn and am eating some now, but I never knew the movie popcorn was so bad for us. I just knew that it tasted good.
Ready to sit back and enjoy the movie? Not yet. First, the theater is hoping you’ll stop by the concession stand for a snack. You know, something light…like, say, a bucket of popcorn with the calories of a Hamburger plus a Quarter Pounder plus a Big Mac at McDonald’s. Surely, no one expects you to sit through a two-hour movie
with nothing to eat or drink. After all, you’re burning dozens of calories in there, what with all that leg crossing, shifting around in your seat...and reaching for some popcorn. With all that activity, you can really work up an appetite,
especially if you’re still growing. And, sad to say, many
adults are.
Continued on p. 2.
2 N U T R I T I O N A C T I O N H E A LT H L E T T E R ■ D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9
POPCORN
C O V E R S T O R Y
A “medium” (20 cups) or a “large” (also 20 cups) has 60 grams of sat fat. Of course, a large means a free refill (Yay!), so there’s no limit to the damage you can do.
Suggestion: Move your cardiologist’s phone number to your speed dial before
the lights go down. Just kidding. It takes years to clog those arteries…and years for your blood pressure to respond to the salt shock (550 milligrams of sodium—a third of a day’s worth—for a small and 980 mg for a medium or large). The calories, on the other hand, may show up much sooner...and where you least want them.
Budget 670 for a small and 1,200 for a medium or large. You could think of each
small as a Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pepperoni Pizza and each medium or large
as two. But the two pizzas pack “only” a day’s worth of sat fat—nowhere near the
three days’ worth in a medium or large popcorn. How can a medium and large at Regal
each hold the same 20 cups of popcorn? Simple. The taller medium comes in a bag with straight sides, while the squatter large comes in a tapered tub that’s wider at the top (see photo). The tub sure looks like it holds more. Other than for the free refill (shudder), why else would moviegoers pay $8 for a large (a medium is $7)?
What’s the healthiest snack to buy at the movies? You can go for 400 to 1,200
calories’ worth of popcorn that (at many theaters) is essentially fried in one to
three days’ worth of saturated fat. Or you can buy a package of candy with 300
to 1,100 empty calories (plus at least half a day’s sat fat if it’s chocolate). Soft
drinks dispatch another 150 to 500 calories to your thirsty fat cells. The best snack at the movies? No snack at all.
Information compiled by Amy Ramsay, with help from Melissa Pryputniewicz.
“ Did you know that popcorn is among the healthiest—and tastiest—snacks around?” asks the Web site of the Popcorn Board, an industry group. “It’s a whole
grain food that’s low in calories and fat and it’s a complex carbohydrate.”
Maybe that’s one reason people fork over $4 to $8 for a bag or tub of popcorn
when they enter a movie theater. It sounds like they’re munching on a stalk
of broccoli, for goodness sakes.
Turns out the Popcorn Board is right...if you’re talking low-fat popcorn or (fat-free) air-popped. Eating a tub of movie theater popcorn is more like eating an 8 oz. bag of potato chips, and that’s assuming your theater pops in the best oil available and you get it without the “buttery” topping.
Nutrition Action Healthletter (ISSN 0885-7792) is published 10 times a year (monthly except bi-monthly in Jan./Feb. and Jul./Aug.).
POSTMASTER: Send changes to Nutrition Action Healthletter, 1875 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009-5728.
Application to mail at Periodical postage rates approved at post office of Washington, DC, and at additional offices.
© 2009 by Center for Science in the Public Interest. One-year subscription (10 issues): $24. Two years: $42. - Vol. 36 No. 10
Movie Theaters Fill Buckets …and BELLIES
Here’s what we found when we sent samples of popcorn and toppings from the three largest theater chains to an independent lab for analysis. (Each gave us nutrition facts for its popcorn. But just to be sure, we analyzed samples from three different theaters for each chain. For two of the chains—Regal and AMC—we went to theaters in the Washington, D.C., area. For Cinemark, our samples came from Texas, Illinois, and
Maryland.)
WITH 548 theaters in 39 states plus the District of Columbia, Regal is the largest chain in the United States. It pops in coconut oil, which is 90 percent saturated. (In contrast, lard is 40 percent saturated.) Translation: A “small” popcorn
(that’s about 11 cups’ worth) with no buttery topping has 34 grams of saturated fat. So even if you split it with a friend (unlikely), you each get nearly a day’s worth of artery paste. And it gets worse from there.
At Regal, a medium (left) and a large popcorn each has 1,200 calories and three days’ worth of saturated fat. POPCORN
BIG
Photos: © Valery Potapova/fotolia.com (top), Stephen Schmidt (bottom).
N U T R I T I O N A C T I O N H E A LT H L E T T E R ■ D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9 3
C O V E R S T O R Y REGAL
(popped in coconut oil)
AMC
(popped in coconut oil)
CINEMARK
(popped in non-hydrogenated canola oil)
11 cups
20 cups
20 cups
2 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
260 calories 5 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1 Tbs. butter topping adds
130 calories 9 g sat fat 0.4 g trans fat
2 Tbs. butter topping adds
260 calories 18 g sat fat 0.7 g trans fat
9 cups
16 cups
370 calories
420 calories
LARGE MEDIUM Small
210 mg
sodium
690 mg
sodium
550 mg
sodium
670 calories
60 g sat fat
1,200 calories
1,200 calories
980 mg
sodium
980 mg
sodium
1,030 calories
57 g sat fat
580 mg
sodium
760 calories
910 calories
1,240 mg
sodium
1,500 mg
sodium
Another oopsy-daisy: According to Regal, a medium has 720 calories, while a large has 960 calories. Both are lower than our lab results. Oh well. What’s an extra 200 to 500 calories when your snack hovers around the 1,000-calorie mark? They don’t call them tubs for nothing.
Toppings: For customers who think plain popcorn isn’t soaked in enough oil, Regal offers a “buttery” topping. According to Regal and the topping manufacturer, it adds 130 calories to a small, 200 calories to a medium, and 260 calories to a large.
We analyzed the topping to make sure that it had no trans fat. But we didn’t check to see how much topping the concession staff at Regal—or any other chain—adds. Odds are, it varies. And odds are, it’s more than what Regal claims.
> > > > >
590 calories
330 mg
sodium
Notes: Cup estimates based on 11 grams of popcorn per cup. Topping serving sizes for all chains based on Regal numbers. Daily limits for 2,000 cals: Sat Fat: 20 g, Sodium: 1,500 mg.
34 g sat fat
20 g sat fat
2 g sat fat
33 g sat fat
3 g sat fat
60 g sat fat
4 g sat fat
1 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
130 calories 2 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1½ Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
200 calories 3 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
120 calories 2 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1½ Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
180 calories 3 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
2 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
240 calories 4 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
130 calories 2 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
8 cups
17 cups
14 cups
6 cups
1½ Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
200 calories 3 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
2 Tbs. “buttery” topping adds
260 calories 4 g sat fat 0 g trans fat
1½ Tbs. butter topping adds
200 calories 14 g sat fat 0.6 g trans fat
4 N U T R I T I O N A C T I O N H E A LT H L E T T E R ■ D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9
AMC, the nation’s second-largest chain (with 307 theaters in 30 states and the District of Columbia), also pops in coconut oil. The only good news: AMC’s popcorns aren’t as super-sized as Regal’s. But they’re bigger than the company acknowledges.
According to AMC, a small popcorn contains 225 calories. In fact, the small AMC popcorns that we bought weighed about 50 percent more than the company claimed.
Our AMC smalls contained 370 calories and 20 grams of saturated fat—about what you’d get from that classic healthy snack: eight pats of butter. Based on what we were served, AMC lowballs its other sizes as well. For example, the company’s 430-calorie
medium morphed into 590 calories and 33 grams of saturated fat. And the 660-calorie large became a 1,030-calorie behemoth with 57 grams of sat fat. It’s like eating a pound of baby back ribs topped with a scoop of Häagen-Dazs ice cream (except for the extra day’s worth of sat fat in the popcorn).
What’s next: fun-house mirrors that make you look skinny on your way out of the theater? Toppings: Fake-butter fans must love AMC. The chain lets patrons pump
their own “buttery” topping. No skimpy tablespoon of extra fat on a small or two
tablespoons on a large, like Regal claims to use. With 120 calories per tablespoon,
you should be able to squeeze another 200 to 500 calories into the bucket of fat
cells in your lap.
Cinemark, with 296 theaters in 39 states, deserves some applause. The nation’s third largest chain pops in non-hydrogenated canola oil instead of coconut. Assuming you add no “buttery” topping,your heart can escape a Cinemark popcorn relatively unscathed. Your belly (and blood pressure) won’t be so lucky. If you share an unbuttered (8-cup) small with a fellow moviegoer, each of you will walk away with about 200 calories (seasoned with 340 milligrams of sodium). That’s the best you can expect from movie theater popcorn, unless you ask the theater to pop you a batch without salt. (All the Cinemark, AMC, and Regal locations we called said they would do that.) A medium popcorn (14 cups) at Cinemark reaches 760 calories and a large
(17 cups) hits 910 calories (and 1,500 mg of sodium—an entire day’s quota). Since
when is half-a-day’s-calories’ worth of corn, oil, and salt called a “snack”?
Maybe since America started competing in the Sumo Belly-Lifting Olympics.
Small at Cinemark
Small at
AMC
Small at Regal ,
Medium at AMC
Medium at CINEMARK
Medium at Regal ,
Large at AMC
Large at CINEMARK
Large at Regal
16 fl. oz.
150 calories
10 tsp.
sugar
Notes: Ice takes up about a quarter of the cup. There are 4 grams of sugar in every teaspoon.
54 fl. oz.
500 calories
33 tsp.
sugar soda
21 fl. oz.
200 calories
13 tsp.
sugar
32 fl. oz.
300 calories
19 tsp.
sugar
44 fl. oz.
400 calories
26 tsp.
sugar
combos
Calories Sat Fat (g)
REGAL
1 medium popcorn, 1 medium soda 1,610 60
1 large popcorn, 2 medium sodas 2,020 60
AMC
1 large popcorn, 1 large soda 1,440 57
1 large popcorn, 2 large sodas 1,850 57
CINEMARK
1 large popcorn, 1 large soda 1,320 4
1 large popcorn, 2 large sodas 1,730 4
A combo at Regal (medium popcorn plus medium soda) has 1,610 calories. That’s like eating six scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese, four bacon strips, and four
sausage links before the lights come up. Photo
Comment
I love popcorn and am eating some now, but I never knew the movie popcorn was so bad for us. I just knew that it tasted good.
Wall Street CEOs defend pay practices
But admit to mistakes in judgment before the financial crisis
Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
From left, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein; JPMorgan Chase & Company Chairman and Chief Executive Officer James Dimon; Morgan Stanley Chairman John Mack, and Bank of America Corporation Chief Executive Officer and President Brian Moynihan, testify on Capitol Hill in Washington before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
Financial crisis panel grills Wall Street CEOs
Jan. 13: Heather Murren, a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, questions the chief executives of Wall Street's biggest firms at a hearing to examine the roots of the financial crisis.
More from The Big Money
The Chinese Respond to Google's Move
Google's China Rival Hacked!
Babes in Carland
Electric Cars Need Infrastructure
Who Knows How To Present Digital Content?
(external links)
updated 20 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Top bank executives defended their bonus and compensation practices to a special commission investigating the 2008 financial collapse but the head of the panel asserted on Wednesday that risky financial actions led to devastating consequences for American families.
They also said they underestimated the severity of the 2008 financial crisis and apologized for risky behavior and poor decisions.
Americans are furious and "have a right to be" about the hefty bonuses banks paid out after getting billions of dollars in federal help, the commission's chairman told chief executives of four major banks, all survivors of the deepest and longest recession since the Depression.
As the hearings opened before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, chairman Phil Angelides pledged "a full and fair inquiry into what brought our financial system to its knees."
The panel began its yearlong inquiry amid rising public fury over bailouts and bankers' pay.
"We understand the anger felt by many citizens," said Brian Moynihan, chief executive and president of Bank of America. "We are grateful for the taxpayer assistance we have received."
'Significant cuts'
With Bank of America having repaid its bailout money, he said "the vast majority of our employees played no role in the economic crisis" and do not deserve to be penalized with lower compensation. Moynihan said compensation levels will be higher next year than they were in 2008 — but not at levels before the financial meltdown.
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said most of his employees took "significant cuts in compensation" in 2008. He said his company would continue to pay people in a "responsible and disciplined manner" to attract and retain top talent.
Still, Dimon said, "We did make mistakes and there were things we could have done better."
John Mack, chairman of Morgan Stanley, said the crisis was "a powerful wake-up call for this firm." He said he didn't take a bonus in 2009 and that his bank has overhauled its compensation practices to discourage "excessive risk-taking."
Angelides, a former Democratic treasurer of California, questioned Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein about packaging soured assets into bond-like securities and selling them to investors — even as Goldman Sachs was "shorting" the same securities, or making bets they would fail. These included risky mortgages that were extended to borrowers with poor credit records and helped cause the home-loan bust.
"It sounds like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on that car," Angelides said.
Responded Blankfein: "I do think the behavior is improper. We regret the consequence that people have lost money in it."
Like the other witnesses, Blankfein acknowledged lapses in judgment in some practices leading up to the crisis.
"Whatever we did, it didn't work out well," he said. "We were going to bed every night with more risk than any responsible manager would want to have."
The commission's vice chairman, former Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., said the inquiry would try "to get to the bottom of what happened and explain it in a way that the American people can understand."
Crucial blunder
Thomas, a former chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said one important question is, "If you knew then what you do now, what would you have done differently?"
Dimon said a crucial blunder was "how we just missed that housing prices don't go up forever." Added Mack: "We did eat our cooking and we choked on it."
Commissioner Heather Murren, a retired Merrill Lynch director, raised questions about banks that insisted on being paid in full by failed insurer American International Group Inc. on financial contracts that went bad.
She asked Blankfein why Goldman Sachs didn't offer to take less than 100 percent in payments from AIG, given the severity of the financial crisis and knowledge of the taxpayers' stake. "It didn't come up in any conversation that I can recall," Blankfein said.
Answer Desk: Don't look for caps on bank bonuses
Obama to announce bank fees Thursday
The bipartisan, 10-member commission was handed the job of writing the official narrative of what went wrong before the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008.
The commission is modeled on the panel that examined the causes of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the prototype could be the Pecora Commission, the Senate committee that investigated Wall Street abuses in 1933-34. It was named after Ferdinand Pecora, the committee's chief lawyer.
Congress has instructed the current commission to explore 22 issues, from the effect of monetary policy on terms of credit to bank compensation structures.
Comment
They are paid so well to exercise good judgement. When they dont do that they should take the losses just like the investors. If they dont, they have no motivation to look out for anybody but themselves.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
From left, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein; JPMorgan Chase & Company Chairman and Chief Executive Officer James Dimon; Morgan Stanley Chairman John Mack, and Bank of America Corporation Chief Executive Officer and President Brian Moynihan, testify on Capitol Hill in Washington before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
Financial crisis panel grills Wall Street CEOs
Jan. 13: Heather Murren, a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, questions the chief executives of Wall Street's biggest firms at a hearing to examine the roots of the financial crisis.
More from The Big Money
The Chinese Respond to Google's Move
Google's China Rival Hacked!
Babes in Carland
Electric Cars Need Infrastructure
Who Knows How To Present Digital Content?
(external links)
updated 20 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Top bank executives defended their bonus and compensation practices to a special commission investigating the 2008 financial collapse but the head of the panel asserted on Wednesday that risky financial actions led to devastating consequences for American families.
They also said they underestimated the severity of the 2008 financial crisis and apologized for risky behavior and poor decisions.
Americans are furious and "have a right to be" about the hefty bonuses banks paid out after getting billions of dollars in federal help, the commission's chairman told chief executives of four major banks, all survivors of the deepest and longest recession since the Depression.
As the hearings opened before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, chairman Phil Angelides pledged "a full and fair inquiry into what brought our financial system to its knees."
The panel began its yearlong inquiry amid rising public fury over bailouts and bankers' pay.
"We understand the anger felt by many citizens," said Brian Moynihan, chief executive and president of Bank of America. "We are grateful for the taxpayer assistance we have received."
'Significant cuts'
With Bank of America having repaid its bailout money, he said "the vast majority of our employees played no role in the economic crisis" and do not deserve to be penalized with lower compensation. Moynihan said compensation levels will be higher next year than they were in 2008 — but not at levels before the financial meltdown.
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said most of his employees took "significant cuts in compensation" in 2008. He said his company would continue to pay people in a "responsible and disciplined manner" to attract and retain top talent.
Still, Dimon said, "We did make mistakes and there were things we could have done better."
John Mack, chairman of Morgan Stanley, said the crisis was "a powerful wake-up call for this firm." He said he didn't take a bonus in 2009 and that his bank has overhauled its compensation practices to discourage "excessive risk-taking."
Angelides, a former Democratic treasurer of California, questioned Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein about packaging soured assets into bond-like securities and selling them to investors — even as Goldman Sachs was "shorting" the same securities, or making bets they would fail. These included risky mortgages that were extended to borrowers with poor credit records and helped cause the home-loan bust.
"It sounds like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on that car," Angelides said.
Responded Blankfein: "I do think the behavior is improper. We regret the consequence that people have lost money in it."
Like the other witnesses, Blankfein acknowledged lapses in judgment in some practices leading up to the crisis.
"Whatever we did, it didn't work out well," he said. "We were going to bed every night with more risk than any responsible manager would want to have."
The commission's vice chairman, former Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., said the inquiry would try "to get to the bottom of what happened and explain it in a way that the American people can understand."
Crucial blunder
Thomas, a former chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said one important question is, "If you knew then what you do now, what would you have done differently?"
Dimon said a crucial blunder was "how we just missed that housing prices don't go up forever." Added Mack: "We did eat our cooking and we choked on it."
Commissioner Heather Murren, a retired Merrill Lynch director, raised questions about banks that insisted on being paid in full by failed insurer American International Group Inc. on financial contracts that went bad.
She asked Blankfein why Goldman Sachs didn't offer to take less than 100 percent in payments from AIG, given the severity of the financial crisis and knowledge of the taxpayers' stake. "It didn't come up in any conversation that I can recall," Blankfein said.
Answer Desk: Don't look for caps on bank bonuses
Obama to announce bank fees Thursday
The bipartisan, 10-member commission was handed the job of writing the official narrative of what went wrong before the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008.
The commission is modeled on the panel that examined the causes of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the prototype could be the Pecora Commission, the Senate committee that investigated Wall Street abuses in 1933-34. It was named after Ferdinand Pecora, the committee's chief lawyer.
Congress has instructed the current commission to explore 22 issues, from the effect of monetary policy on terms of credit to bank compensation structures.
Comment
They are paid so well to exercise good judgement. When they dont do that they should take the losses just like the investors. If they dont, they have no motivation to look out for anybody but themselves.
Report: Prices of some drugs have doubled
Consolidation, repackaging of some medications may be behind increase
Passing health reform
Jan. 12: The New York Times’ Carl Hulse talks about the latest developments in the health reform debate including comments made by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., that the bill is “hanging by a thread.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Will health reform ‘beat up’ California?
Schwarzenegger: Congress was 'buying' votes on health care
Obama touts benefits of health care bill
Paying for reform
Dose of reality
Do health care reform headlines leave you saying “huh?” Visit msnbc.com's guide to health reform and send us claims you'd like fact-checked.
updated 4:53 p.m. ET, Mon., Jan. 11, 2010
WASHINGTON - Prices on a growing number of prescription medications have ballooned in recent years as consolidation in the drug industry leaves fewer companies manufacturing niche medications.
Congressional investigators say the number of extraordinary price hikes on drugs doubled between 2000 and 2008. The drugs affected are mostly specialty medications but also include some popular products like Bayer's antibiotic Cipro and the Eli Lilly schizophrenia treatment Zyprexa.
The Government Accountability Office report issued Monday attributed the rise to a combination of factors, including industry consolidation and price hikes by third-party providers who repackage drugs for patients.
The GAO's findings could put new pressure on drugmakers to contribute billions more to the health care reform effort being finalized by Congressional Democrats.
The drug industry originally pledged $80 billion to defray the costs of covering millions more Americans, but the package being negotiated between the House and Senate is expected to call for well over $100 billion in financing from drug companies.
GAO found more than 400 examples of unusual price jumps on brand name drugs during the eight-year period — most ranged from 100 to 499 percent, but several exceeded 1,000 percent.
But congressional investigators acknowledged that drugmakers often aren't to blame for the steep increases. More than half of the price hikes cited in the GAO report came from suppliers who repackage drugs for use by patients, according to the report.
Repackagers can include HMOs, pharmacies and stand-alone companies.
"Proponents of repackaged drugs believe that they offer convenience to patients and may reduce medication errors," states the report. "However, some experts suggest that repackaging drugs may unnecessarily increase drug prices and profits."
In other cases, GAO said there simply isn't enough competition to drive prices down for certain niche medicines. The group said consolidation in the drug industry means large drugmakers have bought up entire groups of similar drugs, allowing them to charge higher prices.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said the drugs cited by GAO represent a fraction of the overall pharmaceutical market. The group pointed to a government report issued last year showing total drug prices grew just 3.2 percent in 2008, the lowest pace in 50 years as use of low-cost generic drugs increased.
The GAO's report was requested by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee.
"It is hard to find a good-faith explanation for why drug prices could go up this much," Schumer said in a statement.
At the request of Senate Democrats, the Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general plans to investigate whether drug companies are raising prices of prescription drugs ahead of passage of the health care overhaul plan.
The drug industry lobby says the requested investigation is based on misleading data.
Passing health reform
Jan. 12: The New York Times’ Carl Hulse talks about the latest developments in the health reform debate including comments made by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., that the bill is “hanging by a thread.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Will health reform ‘beat up’ California?
Schwarzenegger: Congress was 'buying' votes on health care
Obama touts benefits of health care bill
Paying for reform
Dose of reality
Do health care reform headlines leave you saying “huh?” Visit msnbc.com's guide to health reform and send us claims you'd like fact-checked.
updated 4:53 p.m. ET, Mon., Jan. 11, 2010
WASHINGTON - Prices on a growing number of prescription medications have ballooned in recent years as consolidation in the drug industry leaves fewer companies manufacturing niche medications.
Congressional investigators say the number of extraordinary price hikes on drugs doubled between 2000 and 2008. The drugs affected are mostly specialty medications but also include some popular products like Bayer's antibiotic Cipro and the Eli Lilly schizophrenia treatment Zyprexa.
The Government Accountability Office report issued Monday attributed the rise to a combination of factors, including industry consolidation and price hikes by third-party providers who repackage drugs for patients.
The GAO's findings could put new pressure on drugmakers to contribute billions more to the health care reform effort being finalized by Congressional Democrats.
The drug industry originally pledged $80 billion to defray the costs of covering millions more Americans, but the package being negotiated between the House and Senate is expected to call for well over $100 billion in financing from drug companies.
GAO found more than 400 examples of unusual price jumps on brand name drugs during the eight-year period — most ranged from 100 to 499 percent, but several exceeded 1,000 percent.
But congressional investigators acknowledged that drugmakers often aren't to blame for the steep increases. More than half of the price hikes cited in the GAO report came from suppliers who repackage drugs for use by patients, according to the report.
Repackagers can include HMOs, pharmacies and stand-alone companies.
"Proponents of repackaged drugs believe that they offer convenience to patients and may reduce medication errors," states the report. "However, some experts suggest that repackaging drugs may unnecessarily increase drug prices and profits."
In other cases, GAO said there simply isn't enough competition to drive prices down for certain niche medicines. The group said consolidation in the drug industry means large drugmakers have bought up entire groups of similar drugs, allowing them to charge higher prices.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said the drugs cited by GAO represent a fraction of the overall pharmaceutical market. The group pointed to a government report issued last year showing total drug prices grew just 3.2 percent in 2008, the lowest pace in 50 years as use of low-cost generic drugs increased.
The GAO's report was requested by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee.
"It is hard to find a good-faith explanation for why drug prices could go up this much," Schumer said in a statement.
At the request of Senate Democrats, the Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general plans to investigate whether drug companies are raising prices of prescription drugs ahead of passage of the health care overhaul plan.
The drug industry lobby says the requested investigation is based on misleading data.
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