Obama eyes tax increases, Medicare changes President says of Bush-era tax cuts and '07 recession: 'We lost our way' Forcefully rejecting Republican budget-cutting plans, President Barack Obama on Wednesday proposed lowering the nation's future deficits by $4 trillion over a dozen years and vowed he would not allow benefit cuts for the poor and the elderly to pay for tax breaks for the rich.
"That's not right and it's not going to happen as long as I'm president," Obama declared.
While the president recommended trimming health care costs in Medicare and Medicaid, he also called for cuts in defense, an overhaul of the tax system to eliminate many loopholes enjoyed by individuals and corporations, and an end to Bush-era tax cuts for wealthier Americans.
Why Obama was forced to give today's deficit speech If President Obama is in political trouble, just wait a minute. He'll give a speech. He thinks speech-making is his best skill and clearly prefers campaigning over presidenting at a desk.
Oh, look! Obama's giving another speech this afternoon.
It's at George Washington University, the administration's new favorite homefield speech-giving place where Obama had Hillary Clinton talk about foreign policy a few weeks ago.
Obama has looked distracted in recent weeks. He launched a war in Libya while taking his family around South America. For more than a week Obama had Clinton do the public explaining and take the "Say What, a Third War?" heat for the guy who beat her in the 2008 Democratic primaries by arguing against such irrelevant foreign conflicts.
Nine days after the first Tomahawks blew something up in Tripoli, a besieged.... ...Obama finally talked about how it was suddenly in America's interest to end the 42-year reign of a notorious bad guy. Obama said he was worried that Kadafi would kill innocent civilians, although worse threats to civilians go on every day in countless lands without U.S. military intervention.
This includes Syria, where scores have died to government bullets in recent weeks and Obama only sent out his press secretary Jay Carney to strike fear into the heart of President Bashar al-Assad by issuing two stern warnings.
Last week when the United States government faced an historic shutdown, Capt. Quixote was off in Philadelphia taking on windmills before speaking at an Al Sharpton gala in New York.
When Democratic Sen. Harry Reid and Republican House Speaker John Boehner worked out a last-minute budget deal, Obama himself made the late-night announcement to try to take ownership.
The next day he made a brief but weird visit to the Lincoln Memorial to explain to some startled tourists who hadn't asked that the place would have been closed down but for his budget brokering.
Here's Obama 's problem: Once again, he's lost control of the capitol's political narrative.
The bully pulpit is a powerful presidential tool -- if the chief executive is talking of relevant things. But Obama keeps sidetracking himself into all these areas of society that he so wants to fix, even though there are worse problems elsewhere.
For a long time Obama talked of little but healthcare and financial reforms, while polls showed Americans wanted jobs. He got his healthcare bill, but dozens of Democrats got unemployed from Congress.
When Americans wanted an explanation for a war over Libya's sand, Obama was urging Brazil to drill off its shores and toasting every presidente within sight.
As Americans realized the Democrat majorities had not written a budget for the current fiscal year when in control throughout 2010, Obama was calling for more college educations and denouncing schoolyard bullies. Now, bullies used to be handled by detention or, if necessary, big brothers. But Obama sees a federal government role there at home and in Benghazi.
Whenever the president acknowledges the budget deficit and the $14+ trillion national debt, he says yes, yes, of course, we have to cut waste. He then proceeds to provide a long list of things we need to "invest" more in like education, bridges, green energy and protecting "the most vulnerable" in our society.
Obama doesn't realize how many millions of Americans consider themselves vulnerable today, even with jobs and a home for now. In Philadelphia when one man dared to ask about the rising price of gas , the president suggested he trade-in for a new car. This from the green president who took a 17-vehicle motorcade of limos and SUVs to admire clean cars last month. Not even one symbolic electric job.
The result of such disconnection is that last week there was no-nada-zip talk about his investing. The parade had moved on without its presidential drum major.
Every word of Washington's political discussion was about cuts in the budget, exactly and only what Republicans wanted to debate. In a town where all-powerful presidents have set the political agenda, the speaker from Ohio, who gets mocked for his emotions and tan, was driving the discussions with well-mannered aplomb.
Hence, again the perceived need for another Obama speech today. He'll try to recapture control by adjusting the subject: Yes, yes the deficit is bad, though not as bad as you-know-which party makes it out to be. We do need to trim it with some cuts over time. But what we really need is more money to get stuff done.
You know, those rich people with the money to create new jobs? Let's take some more from them in taxes and Social Security assessments. Not from you! From them. Who's gonna oppose somebody else paying more taxes?
Obama's recent speeches have been lo-cal on substance, heavy on swell-sounding calls for someone to do something -- such as increase domestic oil production. The media reports. The people listen. They nod. And very few point out that, wait a minute, the guy talking is the one who can make that happen. So, why isn't he doing instead of talking all the time?
Obama now hopes to redirect the debate off budget cutting onto what he thinks is safer political ground for him, end tax breaks for the wealthy few. Even though, starting tomorrow, he'll be hitting up that same crowd of Richie Riches for the $1 billion he wants to buy a second term for four more years of this.
Vertex Receives Good News on Hepatitis C Treatment From no treatment at all, to treatments that do not work well, new therapies are reaching the market, probably this month or next, moving hepatitis C virus (HCV) victims from the dark zone of desperation into the light of amazing anticipation – probably of a cure. We don’t know if the opening statement is one of those run-on sentences, from which you might have lost your breath trying to read it to your spouse, but we know with certainty that the news coming from Vertex’s (VRTX) drug is breathtaking. The road has been long, very long, yet, this is always the case when new molecules are designed to become drugs for life-threatening diseases that have yet to find treatments. The fact is that it is a real miracle just finding a road towards conquering a disabling virus that disrupts the functioning of one of the major vital organs. HCV could cause fibrosis (cirrhosis) of the liver, which could, sometimes, necessitate liver transplant or cause cancer.
Delving into treatments having direct action on hepatitis C virus, which did not exist before, we observed dozens of drugs that both biotech and pharmaceutical companies have advanced into clinical trials. The majority of the drugs are either protease inhibitors or polymerase inhibitors with a few drugs acting on different pathways. So, from no effective drugs, there are now many on the horizon. This is good news for the desperate patients and for the biotech industry. It demonstrates how far biotechnology can go towards bringing drugs capable of solving problems of intractable diseases that had yet to find treatments. Some of the potential future HCV drugs demonstrate improvements over the first generation protease inhibitors that are due to hit the market, which is what normally happens after the launch of the first breakthrough drugs.
That said; let us see where we are now in the treatment of HCV. Out of the approximately twenty new products in trials, only four have reached Phase III; all four of the drugs are protease inhibitors. Among them, two have successfully completed the final phases after being administered to thousands of patients in the advanced Phase trials. These lucky drugs are telaprevir from Vertex (VRTX) and bacepravir (Victrella) from Merck (MRK). They are expected to reach the market in a few weeks.
This is great news that deserve celebration, rather than digging for the negatives in order to discourage investing in VRTX. For years, the company has been target for negative campaigns of all sorts, from spraying skepticism towards telaprevir’s efficacy to exaggerating the drug’s adverse effects. These claims wouldn’t work now, as everybody knows that the drug will be approved. Attempts to use competition as a threat to telaprevir would not work either as the competing drugs are still many years behind approval and Vertex itself has three more improved drugs for HCV.
Moreover, telaprevir is not all Vertex’ good news about successful value-generating accomplishments. Positive results have also come from clinical trials on VX-770 oral drug, targeting a defective protein that causes cystic fibrosis in children with mutation in the CFTR gene. The results demonstrated undeniably striking improvement in children’s lung function, in addition to significant improvements in weight gain and reduction in sweat chloride, which, again, confirms improvement. Pediatric pulmonologists hailed VX-770 results and professors in academic institutions and hospitals have already begun to lecture pediatricians on the advantages of Vertex’ new drug.
Investing: Vertex has a lot to offer. Plenty of reasons motivate us to trust this firm on our money. We will soon see telaprevir making a substantial penetration of a very large market with or without the countries that critics claim have decided not to reimburse for the drug. A filing for approval of VX-770 is expected to follow this year. A third drug, VX-765 has demonstrated promising results on resistant epilepsy - a big problem for neurologists and a life-threatening torturing condition for patients. We expect the firm to generate billions of dollars from selling these drugs. As for the competition, it does not worry us. The firm has its own long-term strategy. For each disease it tackles, Vertex has programs that guarantee the availability of improved new generation drugs in its pipeline These backups include three additional improved HCV drugs and two additional cystic fibrosis drugs. We trust this firm for these reasons and for other reasons that relate to its professionalism, technological capability, accuracy and prudence. http://seekingalpha.com/article/263361-vertex-receives-good-news-on-hepatitis-c-treatment
Alcoa, Yahoo, Citi Lead Options Today VIX under 17 as MGM Resorts rallies Stock market averages are holding modest gains late-Wednesday. Today’s economic news was mostly uninspiring after data showed Retail Sales increasing by .4% in March and .1% less than expected. Similarly, Business Inventories rose .5% in February and .3% less-than-expected. Meanwhile, JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) rallied early on better-than-expected earnings, but gave up the gains and is trading down .6%. However, the Dow Jones Industrial Average seemed to get a bit of lift in afternoon trading after the Fed’s Beige Book was released. The report from the twelve Federal Reserve Districts showed generally improving economic conditions. Overall market action is somewhat sluggish today, however, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 22 points in the final hour. The tech-heavy NASDAQ gained 20. The CBOE Volatility Index (CBOE: VIX) gave up .59 and is probing multi-week lows at 16.50. Overall options volume is running about the normal levels, with 7.9 million calls and 6.2 million puts traded so far.
Bullish Flow
The largest equity options trades through midday Wednesday are in Alcoa (NYSE: AA), which lost 6% on earnings news yesterday. AA is down another 9 cents to $16.61 and one investor sold the AA Apr — May 18 Put Spread at 18 cents, 13,000 times. This looks like a roll out of an additional month ahead of the April expiration. Since the contract is now $1.39 in-the-money, the investor is possibly closing out the position to avoid assignment on the Apr puts. Earlier in the day, an AA Apr – July Put Spread was sold at 29 cents, 8000 times, and more recently, an AA April — May 17 Put Spread was sold at 43 cents, 8400 times. Consequently, 79,000 puts and 21,000 calls traded in the aluminum maker, but the flow isn’t bearish since it seems to involve a lot of rolling of short puts from April to later months.
Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) adds 23 cents to $16.59 in morning trading and it looks like the YHOO Jul 15 — 19 Call Spread is bought at $1.62, 3970 times on the International Securities Exchange. 5,800 now traded. While open interest is sufficient to cover, ISEE data indicate that half are opening buyers. The bullish trading comes ahead of earnings, April 19. Rival Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) reports after the closing bell tomorrow.
Find more option analysis and trading ideas at Options Trading Strategies.
Bearish Flow
Big prints in Citigroup (NYSE: C), which is down 7 cents to $4.49. One investor sold the C Sep 4.5 — 5 Call Spread to buy Sep 4 puts, collecting 5 cents, 45,000 times. It might close positions opened in mid-March when the same three-way traded multiple times at even money. Citi is due to report earnings the morning of April 18.
Implied Volatility Mover
MGM Resorts (NYSE: MGM) is rallying and options are actively traded after the company announced plans for an IPO of a Macau Joint Venture. MGM will own 51% of MGM China Holdings after its offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Shares are up $1 to $13.62 on the news and options volume is three times the average daily. 87,000 calls and 26,000 puts traded in the name. MGM April 14 Calls, which are now 33 cents out-of-the-money and expire later this week, are the most actives with 21,935 traded. April 13 puts and calls are the next most actives. The top trade is a 10,000-contract block of MGM Jan 12.5 Calls at $2.84 and possibly a sold-to-close order after today’s 8.3% rally in the stock price. Earnings will soon come into play as well, expected around May 5. Implied volatility in MGM options is up about 8% to 44.
Options Flow
Bullish flow detected in Delcath Systems (NASDAQ: DCTH), with 7330 calls trading, or four times its recent average daily call volume.
Bearish activity detected in Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), with 2006 puts trading, or four times its recent average daily put volume.
Bullish flow detected in Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: ESLR), with 2587 calls trading, or 21 times its recent average daily call volume.
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