Home prices are going through the roof, forcing people to turn to exotic loans and unorthodox financing. These people have no room for error. |
I think Alan and really played a unique role here. He certainly expanded the power of the Fed, in the sense that he came to be the all purpose authority on economic matters -- he was commenting on trade policy, tax policy. |
I think their intention is to get people who are loyal and that does raise problems. It's clear that they're looking at this as a sales position. |
I wouldn't necessarily predict this would be a trigger, but I wouldn't rule it out either. It wouldn't surprise me if you see money leaving the secondary mortgage market, leading housing prices to fall. |
I've always thought you'll have the movement in price before you'll see it on quantity side, ... As long as the price remains high, if you're a builder, you want to get the houses up in order to cash in. |
If home prices level off, that can knock down growth by 1 or 2 percentage points, from 3.5 percent to 1.5 percent. |
If Medicare could negotiate directly with drug companies it could save the federal and state governments hundred of billions of dollars and cut insurance premiums. |
In principle, as long as drug companies can cover their production costs and earn a normal profit on their sales, they would profit by selling their drugs to Medicare rather than being excluded from this huge market. |
In terms of people's lives, let's say someone had a reasonably good job in the tourism industry, they're not going to wait around a year and half or two years for their job to come back. What's there when it (the Gulf economy) comes back might be qualitatively different than what it was before. |
is kind of (the oil companies') good luck. They didn't do anything to earn it. And we're sitting here with a $150 billion bill from Katrina. |
It could be a very big hit. I'd say there's a 10 to 15 percent chance of negative growth if we see a spike in interest rates, or a really big jump in energy prices. |
It does pull a lot of money out of people's pockets. Even if it doesn't go back up much, it translates to a 50-to-60-cents-a-gallon gas tax. But for the borrowing that people were willing to do, it probably would have led to recession. |
It's clearly very strong across the board. There's no evidence of any downturn at this point. |
It's just prudent to have a chemical safety program, ... We don't want to have a sterile leaning environment, we want kids to have a rich learning environment while keeping them safe, that's the same issue every school faces. |
Let's imagine rates go to 7 percent, I think that would take the air out of the bubble pretty quickly, |