At a recent meeting with House Democrats, President Obama shot down the members’ hopes that he might step up his rhetoric against the Republicans. He’s concerned how the markets would react to his statements. From Huffington Post: Obama also told the assembled Democrats not to count on more fiery rhetoric from the Oval Office. “He [...]

The Dow is swinging wildly–down as much as 980 points within the last hour–largely due to insecurity about the situation in Greece and shaky retail sales. And according to Brad DeLong, who is generally pretty tight with the White House, Obama will come out in opposition to Audit the Fed this afternoon. At a time [...]

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that health insurance stocks are up dramatically today after Joe Lieberman’s threat to filibuster health care reform. Lieberman has a new-found strong opposition to the Medicare buy-in proposal–a massive flip-flop from his earlier support. Wells Fargo Securities analyst Matthew Perry said Lieberman’s comments are good news for managed-care stocks [...]

The HuffingtonPost has a fascinating look at the Goldman Sachs analysis of the effect of health care reform on the private insurances companies. Their basic conclusion is that any reform, even under the weaker Baucus bill, would be bad for the insurance companies. Of course, they concluded that the Baucus bill would be dramatically less [...]