The House hearings on rescission – the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies – were over a month ago, but after its initial run through Daily Kos it seems to have waited a bit before popping up on Baseline and Slate. James Kwak at Baseline described the practice as rare, affecting only 0.5% of the population. The faint light bulb above my head began to flicker: could that be true…that’s not rare – that is amazingly common.
It is. In fact, from Don Hamm’s (CEO of Assurant) preparedtestimony, with the company logo nicely on the front of it in the original:
Rescission is rare. It affects less than one-half of one percent of people we cover. Yet, it is one of many protections supporting the affordability and viability of individual health insurance in the United States under our current system.
Yes, it’s ten days old; still have to post the Guardian’s explanation of Megan Fox’s casting in Transformers:
Talking to Megan Fox who was in town for the Transformers 2 premiere, I found her more forthright and intelligent than her performance in the mega-hit would suggest. The role demands that she drapes herself over motorbikes and runs around in a vest. How did she get the part which has made her what lads’ mags call the “hottest girl on the planet”. She told me she went to director Michael Bay’s house to audition and he made her wash his Ferrari while he filmed her. She said she didn’t know what had happened to that footage. When I put it to Bay himself, he looked suitably abashed. “Er, I don’t know where it is either.”
Try that at your place of work and don’t expect to finish the day. In Hollywood, that’s the sanitized version of the skills necessary to get cast. What a wonderful place.
“Attacks since 9/11″? Did you guys get sworn into office on September 11? Why does the clock start then? Did Emperor Hirohito claim to be undefeated in battle after 1945?
Since Cheney does not explode with shame at the thought of criticizing someone else’s handling of national security, I can only imagine he has managed to forget the four hijackings on 9/11 – you know, the ones after the President’s Daily Brief on August 6, 2001 said that bin Laden was trying to strike the US – missing bin Laden in Afghanistan, along with the rest of the Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, bungling the entire invasion and occupation of Iraq, getting caught completely flat-footed when a hurricane hit Louisiana, and for good measure bankrupting the country. But apart from that, what did Bush-Cheney ever do wrong?
Finally, thanks to Calculated Risk, we have the AIG document that put the fear of the apocalypse into Washington. It is worth reading the whole thing, but here are a few selections:
[P]ermitting AIG to fail would be even more serious today than in September, especially in view of the support of the U.S. government. Public confidence in financial institutions is at a nadir and it is questionable whether the economy could tolerate another shock to the system that a failure of AIG would produce.
A VALIC/AIG Annuity failure would be one of the largest failures in the history of life insurance, putting applicable retirement savings significantly at risk and causing a loss of confidence in the private penion system in the U.S.
Failure would produce and immediate “run on the bank,” which would likely lead to state seizures of local operations, causing a lock-up in customers’ retirement accounts and payment of monthly/quarterly annuity checks.
Failure to provide a wrap on $38 billion of stable value funds could result in millions of lost value on money market positions potentially “breaking the buck”
Credit protection on $63 billion in CDOs/CLOs may be eliminated
In each of these points, as in the rest of the document, the key issue that is not mentioned is that AIG is an extraordinarily inefficient vehicle to provide the funds described. We would be better off supporting insurance and money market reserve funds directly – and letting European governments deal with capital shortfalls in their banks – than spraying money through AIG to beneficiaries who may or may not be needy.
AIG’s arguments are completely time-independent. If you believe the document, AIG will always be too big to fail, since its managers have no incentive to shrink it, as mentioned here. I would turn it around; if AIG’s closure will always be a nightmare, why not get it over with today, when we still have the ability to borrow for virtually nothing, as opposed to a year into a recession after we have flushed hundreds of billions?
Beyond the arguments, though, is the sheer gall of the AIG folks. Here is the lead argument of their summary slide:
Insurance is the oxygen of the free enterprise system. Without the promise of protection against life’s adversities, the fundamentals of capitalism are undermined.
You jerks, you are the ones who undermined the promise of protection when you decided to stake several times your enterprise value in completely unrelated businesses. You are the ones who destroyed a fantastic franchise and put us all on the brink. Capitalism would have long since liquidated your business; it is only through the grace of the socialist aspects of our culture that taxpayers who had no input in your decisions and no benefit from your actions are being asked to bail you out of your mess.
The more I see these guys in action, the more I believe they have simply decided to hold themselves hostage. Check out 2:45 into the clip to see their guiding logic (includes some NSFW language):
The gigolo lover of Germany’s wealthiest woman – the owner of a large chunk of BMW – goes on trial today, charged with trying to blackmail her out of millions of euros of her family fortune.
He first met Ms Klatten in the summer of 2007 at the exclusive Lanserhof spa in the Austrian Tyrol. The indictment states that he had thoroughly researched Ms Klatten before approaching her – and that he was simultaneously playing along two wives of industrialists staying at the mountain resort. “He was charming, attentive,” said Ms Klatten in her later testimony to the Munich police, “and at the same time he seemed very sad. That stirred a feeling in me that we had something in common.” They went on long walks together and when Ms Klatten returned to her responsibilities at BMW and the chemical giant Altana they stayed in touch.
By August of that year, according to Ms Klatten’s version, the two were making love in a Munich hotel – but, unknown to her, they were being filmed from an adjoining room.
Letthis be a lesson to you – if your wife goes to the Lanserhof spa, you should probably feel free to have everything being served in the Champagne room…
The buyer of two bronze animal heads at the Christies auction of Yves Saint-Laurent’s estate now says that he will not pay, and indeed that he made the bid in protest to break up the auction.
I can understand that the auction touches on some raw nerves in China; the pieces were looted from the Summer Palace in 1860, and, as with works stolen or sold under duress in Europe in the 1930s/1940s, there is a point where the statute of limitations rewards some terrible actors.
The story of the pieces gets particularly interesting with Pierre Berge’s comment that China could have the pieces back for free if they would let Tibet have its freedom; if something stolen in 1860 is not considered settled, what about something stolen in 1950?
Beyond the political, though, what is with an auction house not requiring some sort of deposit to bid? What is the point of using a serious auction house if the house will let some random guy call in from China, bid €28mm and then walk away? I expected that sort of thing from the Bush Administration, which was in such a rush to issue oil leases in Utah that it allowed a protestor to walk into a Bureau of Land Management auction and claim a dozen parcels before giving the game away by simply leaving his hand in the air.
For that matter, isn’t this approach a plot device with the Faberge egg in Octopussy?
In hundreds of years of auctions, how has this problem not been addressed yet?
Freakanomics is asking why animated movies use famous actors to voice the parts. Levitt’s guesses are:
Stars are better at speaking than non-stars;
Stars don’t charge much for their voices;
People like to hear the voices of stars (a variant of #1);
Expensive stars are a credible signal of confidence in a movie.
I don’t think I agree. First of all, for most of the history of animation, the voices were anonymous. The most famous person in Little Mermaid was Buddy Hackett. But Jeff Katzenberg had the idea of including famous people in Lion King (Matthew Broderick, Jeremy Irons, James Earl Jones) along with some unknown voice actors. When he left to co-found Dreamworks, he went all-in and made Prince of Egypt with an entirely celebrity lineup (Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Patrick Stewart, Danny Glover, Steve Martin, Martin Short). It was a success, and the arms race was on.
So I would suggest the real reason is probably a bit of Freakanomics #3, plus:
Celebrities can promote a movie. It’s easy to get Val Kilmer on Letterman.
Covers your ass if the movie fails. Far from answer #4, I think it’s a case of wanting to be seen as checking every box. A big animated movie is a couple hundred million dollar proposition, fully loaded. If it flops and used no-name voices, the execs involved will forever be second guessed for saving $10mm. If it flops and they used celebrities, well, we did the best we could.
