Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

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• Doctors Chime in regarding Socialized Medical Care and the "Medicare Provider Bureaucratic Nightmare"
• Supreme Court Gives Fed 5 Days to Release Emergency Bank Loan Details; An Important Step in the Right Direction
• Current Decade of Job Losses vs. Great Depression; How Did Quasi-Public Jobs Fare? Who is Whining?

Doctors Chime in regarding Socialized Medical Care and the "Medicare Provider Bureaucratic Nightmare" Posted: 21 Mar 2011 02:46 PM PDT I received a number of interesting emails from a number of doctors in response to Medicare Provider Bureaucratic Nightmare, a post regarding the plight of John Peters, a practicing psychologist, and his quest to obtain a Medicare Provider Number. Please read the above link if you missed the original article. Here are some responses from doctors willing to sign their names. War of Attrition Dr. Denise Szczucki writes Dear Mish I am a physician and went through this exact scenario when I had to change my tax ID number a few years ago. 25 percent of my income was held up for over 6 months while the re-credentialing took place. Two things that helped me were: I hired my biller to do the work. An outside party is less emotional since it is not their food money on the line. I redid the entire application including the canceled check. They pulled that canceled-check stunt with me too. This is a war of attrition. CMS is a nightmare and it used to be so simple. When I renewed in 2000 it took a month and a single application, no check, to get it done. Now you have to keep calling, faxing and mailing (certified ideally) until it gets done and it takes forever. Even then it will take months to get the first set of checks. Good Luck Dr. Denise Szczucki Incentives to Delay Mark Woodward, O.D. writes ... Mish, It's not really hard to understand. By federal regulations Medicare should credential "any willing provider" who meets the credentialing process. However, Medicare is going bust as we speak. Medicare simply has no incentive to increase provider roles. One way to limit expenditures is to limit the number of providers. This is the same tactic used by HMO's and some other health plans. In a more global context I believe the transition to socialized medicine in this country will be exceptionally difficult. The only way government can move to a completely socialized delivery system is to co-op different participants in the delivery system and put the pressure on the non co-opted participants. Watch for government to increase contracting with "Healthcare delivery systems" like UHS, Tenet Healthcare, and HCA. While these delivery systems may be more efficient than civil service workers, they will also swallow greater and greater share of the reduced reimbursement amounts. Ultimately, government will abandon their co-opted partners when citizens are fed up with reduced benefits, limited access, and poor quality. People will then ask for a fully socialized system administered by the government. New and future graduates of medical training programs can only hope to start at salaries higher than the accountants hired by the feds to track the program. Those New doctors will become debt slaves. They graduate $250,000 to $350,000 in debt and will have to accept any wage. Veteran doctors will quit en mass rather than put up with all the bureaucratic red-tape with much less reimbursement. The sad thing is heath care expenses do not substantively alter our countries productive output. They really shouldn't be considered as part of the GDP just like the profits from the derivative finance industry should never have been considered part of the GDP. Mark Woodward, O.D. Suggested Course of Action for Dr. John Peters Allen Bennett, a retired M.D. has these suggestions for Dr. John Peters Hi Mish Regarding "Medicare Provider Bureaucratic Nightmare", John Peters might consider sending a letter by registered mail to Marilyn Tavenner, COO, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, 200 Independence Ave S.W., Room 445-G, Washington, D.C. 20201 with copies to Senators Boxer and Feinstein. He needs to include the names of all involved "analysts". The bureaucratic nightmare of John Peters appears to be a wonderful way to cut health care costs while keeping a largely unnecessary intermediate bureaucracy "busy". I have often worried about newly-minted health care providers and their ability to get on approved provider panels, so they can bill and get paid. It used to be no problem, but apparently it is now. Your daily analysis is always enlightening. Keep up the great work! Sincerely, Allen Bennett, M.D. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific.

Supreme Court Gives Fed 5 Days to Release Emergency Bank Loan Details; An Important Step in the Right Direction Posted: 21 Mar 2011 10:50 AM PDT In a rare victory for common sense, the Supreme Court has rejected appeals by banks and the Fed that disclosure of the emergency loans by the Fed to various banks in 2008 were "trade secretes". The court gave the Fed 5 days to release the information. Please consider Fed Must Release Loan Data as High Court Rejects Appeal The Federal Reserve will disclose details of emergency loans it made to banks in 2008, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an industry appeal that aimed to shield the records from public view. "The board will fully comply with the court's decision and is preparing to make the information available," said David Skidmore, a spokesman for the Fed. The order marks the first time a court has forced the Fed to reveal the names of banks that borrowed from its oldest lending program, the 98-year-old discount window. The disclosures, together with details of six bailout programs released by the central bank in December under a congressional mandate, would give taxpayers insight into the Fed's unprecedented $3.5 trillion effort to stem the 2008 financial panic. "I can't recall that the Fed was ever sued and forced to release information" in its 98-year history, said Allan H. Meltzer, the author of three books on the U.S central bank and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Under the trial judge's order, the Fed must reveal 231 pages of documents related to borrowers in April and May 2008, along with loan amounts. News Corp. (NWSA)'s Fox News is pressing a bid for 6,186 pages of similar information on loans made from August 2007 to November 2008. The records were originally requested under FOIA, which allows citizens access to government papers, by the late Bloomberg News reporter Mark Pittman. As a financial crisis developed in 2007, "The Federal Reserve forgot that it is the central bank for the people of the United States and not a private academy where decisions of great importance may be withheld from public scrutiny," said Matthew Winkler, editor in chief of Bloomberg News. "The Fed must be accountable to Congress, especially in disclosing what it does with the people's money." The Clearing House Association contended that Bloomberg is seeking an unprecedented disclosure that might dissuade banks from accepting emergency loans in the future. Bloomberg initially requested similar information for aid recipients under three other Fed emergency programs. The central bank released details for those facilities and others in December, after Congress required disclosure through the Dodd- Frank law. The New York-based Clearing House Association, which has processed payments among banks since 1853, includes Bank of America NA, Bank of New York Mellon, Citibank NA, Deutsche Bank Trust Co. Americas, HSBC Bank USA NA, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, U.S. Bank NA and Wells Fargo Bank NA. In trying to shield the documents from disclosure, the Clearing House invoked a FOIA exemption that covers trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential." The cases are Clearing House Association v. Bloomberg, 10- 543, and Clearing House Association v. Fox News Network, 10-660. Information-Wise, a Big Yawn The argument that information represents "trade secrets" is of course preposterous, as is the idea that "disclosure that might dissuade banks from accepting emergency loans in the future". If banks need money to survive, they will take it. We will know soon enough, but I expect the information to be a big yawn. We will see some loan amounts and names but everyone knows the names anyway. Perhaps there will be some excitement over loans to foreign banks. Important Step in the Right Direction Whatever excitement there is, will last all of a day. However, this was an important step in the right direction, that removes some unwarranted secrecy at the Fed. The Fed hides behind a cloak of secrecy, doing what they want, when they want, with no disclosure, and no accountability to anyone. Five Steps to Eliminate the Fed The first step is a full disclosure of what happened. The second step is a full and complete audit. The third step is a plan to phase out the the Fed. The fourth step is Congressional approval of that plan. The fifth and final step is removal of the Fed itself. This first step was a very small one actually, but every trip begins with a single step. It will take years to get rid of the Fed. I am hoping I live to see the day it happens. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific.

Current Decade of Job Losses vs. Great Depression; How Did Quasi-Public Jobs Fare? Who is Whining? Posted: 21 Mar 2011 01:51 AM PDT It may surprise you to learn that job losses in the most recent decade ending February 2011 are reasonably comparable to the job losses from 1929-1939. Moreover, if we exclude government and "quasi- government" jobs, the latest decade is the worst ever, by far. Please consider A Decade of Labor Market Pain by Mike Mandel. In February 2001, nonfarm payrolls hit their business cycle peak of 132.5 million. Ten years later, the latest data pegs February 2011 payrolls at 130.5 million, a 1.5% decline. To put this in perspective, the ten-year period of the Great Depression, 1929-39 saw a 2.3% decline in nonfarm employment, roughly the same magnitude. But even that 1.5% understates the extent of the pain for most of the workforce. I divide the economy into two parts. On the one side are the combined public and quasi-public sectors, and on the other side is the rest of the economy. Public, of course, refers to government employees. 'Quasi-public', a term I just invented, includes the nominal private-sector education, healthcare, and social assistance industries. I call them 'quasi-public' because these industries depend very heavily on government funding. For example, social assistance includes 'child and youth services' and 'services for the elderly and disabled', which are often provided under government contract. The chart below shows employment growth in the public/quasi-public sector, compared to employment growth in the rest of the economy, with February 2001 set to 100. We can see that public/quasi-public employment rose steadily over the past ten years, and is now up 16%. By comparison, the rest of the private sector is down 8% in jobs over the past 10 years. Once again, we look at the Great Depression for an analogy. From 1929 to 1939, government employment rose by about 30%. If we back that out, then private sector non-ag jobs fell by 6% over the Depression decade. That compares to the contemporary 8% decline in private non-ag non-quasi-public jobs since 2001. So by this measure, the past 10 years have been worse for the labor market than the decade of the Great Depression. The first chart below is from the BLS, the second chart below is from Mandel. Nonfarm Payroll Employment - Seasonally Adjusted Total The above chart shows the 1.5% drop between February 2001 and February 2011. Note that nonfarm employment is below where it was 11 years ago dating back to February 2000. The next chart is the one Mandel created. Public and Quasi-Public Jobs vs. Everything Else Please see Mandel's article for a state-by-state breakdown. Who is Doing all the Whining? Who is doing all the whining and all the pissing and moaning? The answer of course is those who fared the best in the last decade: the police and fire unions, the teachers' unions, transit unions, and public unions in general. Many in private sector fields have been hammered silly with rapidly rising healthcare costs and lower paychecks (assuming they have a job at all). Meanwhile those with the most benefits and those who have suffered the least are the ones unjustifiably bitching to high heavens about how unfairly they are being treated. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific.

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

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Defining Your True Competitors Posted: 20 Mar 2011 02:05 PM PDT Posted by Benjamin Estes One of the first things to figure out for an SEO campaign is who your site is competing against in the SERPs.  If you are consulting for a client, just asking what they know about their competitors might not be enough.  Many clients will have a good handle on who their business competitors are, but these may differ substantially from the sites ranking for competitive terms.  If you are running your own site, or are doing in-house SEO, you’ve probably spent a good deal of time getting comfortable with how strong the site is and for which terms it is ranking well.  Either way, a more systematic approach to this preliminary competitive research can do wonders for prioritizing your SEO efforts. Why Competitive Research? It is true that competitive research can provide a survey of competitive link building tactics, many of which may be replicable for your own site.  But more importantly, competitive research can show you which of your potential strategies is most likely to provide your site unique value, value that your competitors will probably have a harder time getting or which they seem to have neglected so far.  For more on the nitty-gritty of competitive research, check Justin Briggs' guide to competitive backlink analysis. A First Look At The SERPs We all know what we’re here for: rankings!  traffic!  And rank is directly related to click through rate.  We've all seen the pretty charts from place like Eyetools: These eye-tracking studies are great for measuring usability, and they make really pretty pictures.  But for what we're trying to accomplish here, some more concrete numbers will be useful. In Kate Morris' blog post about predicting site traffic she cited a source of click-through rates from Chitika which I still use.  There are probably more recent studies now; if you have numbers you trust more feel free to use them instead.  The click-through percentage drops off very steeply as rank increases—note that the first position has about twice the click-through rate of the second:   It's easy enough to see which sites are in the SERP and which rank higher or lower than your own site—just load up the search page!  But often a site will have multiple pages listed in the SERP.  So, on a per-search-term basis, I like to add these together per-site.  Take the following SERP, which I put in a spreadsheet to make it easier to work with (check out Tom Critchlow's post if you'd like to speed up your own result scraping).  The search is "the clash guitar tabs": So I would say to myself at this point that www.ultimateguitar.com is receiving 51.31% of the traffic for this search query (or 62.73% if I wanted to include tabs.ultimateguitar.com in the figure).  On the other hand, www.guitaretab.com, though occupying three places in the SERP as well, is receiving 18.75% of the traffic.  Simple enough? Taking It To The Next Level This is all very straightforward so far, but also intuitive, simple, and not exceptionally useful.  But... ...what if, instead of restricting myself to a single SERP, I was to aggregate data from multiple searches and sum the click-through rate for each domain across these searches?  Searches for "the clash guitar tabs" and "pink floyd guitar tabs" are listed below, one atop the other.  I've highlighted www.ultimate-guitar.com and www.guitaretab.com for reference: Using the magic of pivot tables I can then sum these values per-domain (if you need a pivot table refreshed, check out Mike's Excel for SEO guide): The most powerful domains rise to the top of this list quickly.  This is, of course, a very small data set.  It is also a market that a few sites have dominated.  If you want an interesting data set to practice this method with, try a market with many different brands ("vacuum tubes" works well—"svetlana vacuum tubes", "groove vacuum tubes", "ehx vacuum tubes" and so forth). Get Creative Once you've collected ranking data, you can organize it in any number of creative ways to navigate the data more intuitively—and hopefully make the data more actionable.  Here is one of my favorite pivot tables, which shows how much strength each domain is receiving from results in each position (rank 1-10) in the SERPs: This makes it easy to see which sites aren't meeting a certain threshold (e.g. never rank above position five), even though they show up in the SERPs frequently.  You can also limit the list of sites in question to those with at least one page in the first page of search results. Where Do I Go From Here? There are many ways to tweak this process.  You could use only results for hight-traffic terms, or only for long-tail terms.  You could throw in a representative sample of both.  I also like to get the standard devation from the average for each domain and set a threshold (e.g. any site greater than 2 SDs above the average is a competitor worth looking in to). I’m sure there will be criticisms of this method based on my disregarding accurate search traffic numbers in my assessment.  I know that the more perfect solution would seek out such figures, or other ways of assessing quantitatively how important individual search terms are.  In fact, traffic aside, click-through rates can vary widely based on other factors like stacked results, mixed search results with maps and videos and images, and so forth.  There is a trade off to be made, though, between the time this process takes and the power of the data it provides.  When I’m looking for a quick overview of the competitive landscape, I want my method to work fast so I can start digging into competitor’s practices and backlink profiles.  Does it really matter exactly where my competitors stand against each other?  Isn’t it enough to be able to find the top five or ten competitors quickly?  I recommend finding the balance of detail and time, that you are comfortable with.  A solid ROI, if you will.  Do you like this post? 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Link Building London: Absolutely Remarkable Posted: 20 Mar 2011 12:14 PM PDT Posted by randfish I have attended an extremely large number of SEO-focused events in the past 7 years, planned and run seminars and training myself, contributed keynotes and sessions to major conferences and yet, I believe Distilled's Link Building day in London has just, in my opinion, grabbed the title of "best single day of content" ever at an SEO event. In the past, I've been impressed in particular by the more expert-level shows like SMX Advanced, SES London and SEOmoz's own PRO Training (now officially MozCon), but this one took the cake. I'm, apparently, not the only one who thinks so:   I obviously can't give away all of the phenomenal tips and content from the day, but I can share a few of my notes: Martin MacDonald of SEOForums showed the remarkable power of updatable, embedded widgets and how these can be remotely controlled to shift link locations, anchor text, etc. on the fly. He ran a specific experiment to show it off that had the crowd gasping and Tom Critchlow tweeting: _ _ Wil Reynolds, founder of SeerInteractive explained a tactic his team's put to remarkable use over the years. First, check pages 10+ of the SERPs for your target keyword and you'll often find sites that have been abandoned or largely neglected. Use the top pages functionality from Open Site Explorer or Majestic to find the resources those sites built that earned links, then remake modern, updated versions on your site (or for your client). Now, simply contact the sites/pages that linked to the old version and presto - a huge opportunity for the revitalization of great content and a direct path to links. Jane Copland, link specialist and SEO extraordinairre at Ayima talked about the problems with aggressive anchor text links, even if they come from good sources. She explained that risk can be mitigated by diversifying with branded anchor text and "click here" style links. Her recommendation, strange though it might seem, is to use the trusted, relationship links for non-optimized anchor text to help build a greater profile of trust. Even good links from partners and completely white-hat endorsements can look suspicious if they constantly use your top keywords as anchors. Russ Jones of Virante looked deeply into how to leverage classic "linkbait" now that Digg has (mostly) died. His findings with regard to Reddit are remarkable - even a few votes on a medium-popularity subreddit have sent him 35K+ visits (which is as high as Digg in the past). What's more, though links are hard to come by, Facebook shares/likes and Tweets aren't, and these can help with rankings, too. And there's good coverage from a few bloggers, too: Link Building Summary 2011 from Mike Essex at Impact Media Backlink Building at #LinkLove from Andy Morley Takeaways from LinkLove London by Tom Baldwin Tickets are still available for New Orleans this coming Friday, but sales close Tuesday, March 22nd around 12 noon Eastern (less than 40 hours away). I can promise you'll get more value and link building goodness in that one day than anywhere else, and at a great value. I just checked Kayak, and many US cities have roundtrip rates under $400 for a ticket. p.s. Just to be wholly transparent, while SEOmoz does not benefit financially from these events, we do have a long-term partnership with Distilled. I really do feel that this was the best day of content at a conference I've attended, including ones I've organized. Suppose I'll just have to step up my game :-) Do you like this post? Yes No

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President Obama and the First Family Visit Latin America

Your Daily Snapshot for Monday, March 21,  2011   President Obama and the First Family Visit Latin America In Case You Missed It Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog. Better Benefits, Better Health for Small Businesses The Department of Health and Human Services is launching a Better Benefits, Better Health initiative to recognize the one-year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act. President Obama’s Nowruz Message President Obama sends an important message to those celebrating the holiday of Nowruz. Remarks by the President on Libya: "Today We are Part of a Broad Coalition. We are Answering the Calls of a Threatened People. And We are Acting in the Interests of the United States and the World" President Obama provides an update on the response to the situation in Libya from Brasilia, Brazil. Today's Schedule All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT). 8:15 AM: The First Family departs Rio de Janeiro, Brazil en route Santiago, Chile 12:20 PM: The First Family arrives in Santiago, Chile 12:30 PM: The Vice President Speaks on Winning the Future through Education 12:45 PM: The Vice President delivers remarks about Race to the Top achievement 12:50 PM: The President and The First Lady participate in an arrival ceremony 1:00 PM: The President and President Sebastian Piñera of Chile take an official photo 1:05 PM: The President holds a bilateral meeting with President Piñera 1:25 PM: The President holds an expanded bilateral meeting with President Piñera 2:05 PM: The President and President Piñera hold a joint press conference 3:20 PM: The President delivers a speech 4:00 PM: The Vice President attends an event for the Democratic National Committee 4:30 PM: The President and the First Lady attend a U.S. Embassy meet and greet 7:15 PM: The President and the First Lady arrive at La Moneda Palace 7:25 PM: The President and the First Lady attend an official dinner hosted by President Piñera  Indicates events that will be live streamed on White House.com/Live. Get Updates Sign Up for the Daily Snapshot  Stay Connected     Facebook Twitter YouTube Flickr iTunes         This email was sent to e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com Manage Subscriptions for e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com Sign Up for Updates from the White House Unsubscribe e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com | Privacy Policy Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111

Seth's Blog : Reject the tyranny of being picked: pick yourself

Reject the tyranny of being picked: pick yourself

Amanda Hocking is making a million dollars a year publishing her own work to the Kindle. No publisher.

Rebecca Black has reached more than 15,000,000 listeners, like it or not, without a record label.

Are we better off without gatekeepers? Well, it was gatekeepers that brought us the unforgettable lyrics of Terry Jacks in 1974, and it's gatekeepers that are spending a fortune bringing out pop songs and books that don't sell.

I'm not sure that this is even the right question. Whether or not we're better off, the fact is that the gatekeepers--the pickers--are reeling, losing power and fading away. What are you going to do about it?

It's a cultural instinct to wait to get picked. To seek out the permission and authority that comes from a publisher or talk show host or even a blogger saying, "I pick you." Once you reject that impulse and realize that no one is going to select you--that Prince Charming has chosen another house--then you can actually get to work.

If you're hoping that the HR people you sent your resume to are about to pick you, it's going to be a long wait. Once you understand that there are problems just waiting to be solved, once you realize that you have all the tools and all the permission you need, then opportunities to contribute abound.

No one is going to pick you. Pick yourself.

 

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