Oral Sex May Cause More Throat Cancer Than Smoking in Men, Researchers Say -
Actually, that last bullet makes me want to point out the following from the article:
Pamela Eisele, a spokeswoman for Merck, said the company decided not to move ahead with a big oral cancer study “due to competing research and business priorities.” GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK) has “no plans” to study the company’s competing vaccine Cervarix outside of cervical cancer, Jennifer Armstrong, a company spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
So, uh… just die.
Bank of America to charge debit card use fee -
Remember how consumers were going to be protected?
Bank of America has a great defense for many of these fees. Our GDP reports include consumer spending numbers for things that aren’t actually paid for, like the value of free checking accounts. If the US government says such accounts are worth more than people actually pay, why shouldn’t banks charge more?
But seriously, time to join your local credit union.
US Debt Maturity Profile, AKA When do we have to pay for all this?
I’ll preface the body of this post with a reminder that the US debt downgrade by S&P didn’t come until after the collection of this data, and that our interest rates have fallen in the aftermath of that downgrade. This is important, because if you took that event in isolation, it would appear as if the US debt market started to take a turn for the worse, but rapidly recovered when the S&P downgrade instantly restored everyone’s faith in the credit of the US government. Of course this would fit with the absurdity that is reality: it wasn’t too long ago that S&P maintained a AAA rating on a particular set of bonds until after they were defaulted on. S&P: quality contrarian indicator?
For July, the near-term roll risk hasn’t increased substantially. The longer maturities, particularly 6 and 8 years, have seen increased issuance. This is because the 7-year issuance has increased in the recent past and the 10 year increased a bit over a year ago only to have the rate of issuance maintained. As an aside, if we didn’t have the benefit of previous charts, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between this scenario and one where some non-QE Fed operations were used to significantly alter the maturity profile (double-aside: QE didn’t alter the profile because the debt owned by the Fed is kept on this chart).
Our average interest rate improved on a year-over-year basis, but showed some substantial weakness on a month-to-month basis. We know that this has so far proven to be a temporary blip.
(July treasury data here)
“Having only two parties makes sense, I guess, because if you believe that school districts should be able to fire grossly negligent kindergarten teachers, then of course you also believe that militias should be able to stock up on semiautomatic weapons at the nearest strip mall.” —
Only semi-automatic?
BNY Mellon to Cut 1,500 Jobs, 3% of Workforce -
This goes with the headlines today saying “Banks lead the way.”