Top Finance Blog

No, not Bud Abbott, but Abbott Laboratories, who just lost a $1.67 billion dollar jury-awarded judgment against Johnson & Johnson for patent infringement. Humira, Abbott’s pharmaceutical that blocks tumor necrosis factor, related to arthritis, is the culprit, as the jury found that Abbott had stolen part of a study J&J did in 1994 to apply to its drug.

At this point, things get hazy, because of a couple of reasons. One, I didn’t know research could be patented. Two, I didn’t know human antibodies could be patented. Three, I didn’t know that there were some things drug companies could keep from other drug companies longer than a few years; what’s the deal with generic drugs then?

What’s odd is that I don’t have much problem with the judgment of $1.67 billion, which does seem high. We don’t know just how much money drug companies make when they market these things, and it was mentioned that J&J’s competing product, Remicade (sounds like something we’d drink in the summer, doesn’t it?) made $1.03 billion in the first quarter of this year.

However, it’s figures like these that teach us just why pharmaceutical prices are high, and why they’ll continue to stay high. Research takes time and is expensive, and these companies have to try to get their money back as much as possible. We don’t often hear of the testing that’s done on something that they end up determining they just can’t release to the public, but we know there are way more failures than successes.

Still, the judgment caused a minor tremor, and nothing else in the pharmaceutical world. That also tells us a lot. Who reading this blog would be able to sleep after getting hit with a judgment like this?

As you know, I’ve written a lot of posts lately on the health care issue. On this blog, I’ve asked people what kind of health care plan they’d like; didn’t get any responses to that one. I talked about how the present health care plan out there could close hospitals. I talked about my fear of President Obama saying he’d consider taxing health care benefits to pay for his plan, and I also talked about prescription drug coverage problems.

All this time, I though that the public would kind of be scared at the numbers being thrown around; we were talking about $600 billion in cuts to fund a health care program that might cost over $1.5 trillion dollars. All this while taking money away from Medicare and Medicaid and worries about Social Security potentially running out of funds.

It seems I may not be on the same side of this topic as the majority; seems that way, I’ll say. In a survey that came out last week, the Times/CBS poll found 85% of respondents wanted major healthcare reforms and most would be willing to pay higher taxes to ensure everyone had health insurance. And 72% percent of those questioned said they backed a government-administered insurance plan similar to Medicare for those under 65 that would compete for customers with the private sector.

You could have knocked me over with a feather on this one. With the issue of jobs lost, the housing markets in disarray, unemployment still climbing, and people holding onto their money rather than going out and spending like crazy, I certainly didn’t expect numbers like this. I guess the one statistic that wasn’t in this report, but was in another report at the beginning of the month, was even more important. That statistic was that 62% of all bankruptcies came about because of medical bills.

Now, let me state my case for what seems to be kind of a flip-flop. I’ve always said that I believed our country should have healthcare coverage for all. We almost do; it’s called Medicaid. The problem with Medicaid is that not everyone falls into the levels to be included in the plan, and that still leaves a lot of people uninsured. More children are being covered because of special state plans, but not adults.

I never saw this country voting to let the government take over health care. When Hillary Clinton came up with her recommendation back in the 90’s, I knew she was right; I also knew she didn’t have a snowball’s chance of having anyone approve it. Even now, with a number like 85%, I don’t think it has much of a chance to pass, unless Minnesota finally gets itself together and puts Franken into the Senator’s seat he earned. That would get the Democrats to the magic 60, which could potentially put it over, since the House is already covered.

The entire dynamic of this country could potentially change with one vote pretty soon here. I guess the revolution that brought Barack Obama into the presidency is finding ways of overcoming other adverse issues that I personally thought were unattainable. Maybe I was wrong on part of this; we’ll see.

Actually, yes we do, and that’s almost too bad.

It’s an interesting thing to talk about, whether and why we need credit cards. I came upon an article on a site called The Grio (I don’t know) titled Credit Is The New Crack, where a writer named Dr. Boyce Watkins compared credit card companies to drug dealers and credit to drugs because they make you feel good.

Many of us have had our credit cards altered recently, whether we’ve been good payers of our bills or not, and it’s not pretty. Legislation coming from the federal government to protect our rights is still a long time away, so we feel as though we’re being picked on, and to a degree we are. At the same time, the credit card companies are hurting, and they’re just passing that hurt along to us.

Now, why do we need credit cards? There’s actually two reasons, one that has nothing specifically to do with us, and one that doesn’t.

The one that specifically has nothing to do with us is that without credit cards, there’s a lot of stuff that wouldn’t get bought, which would kill commerce and, by extension, capitalism. Yeah, a lot of people talk about wishing capitalism would go away, but what would we be left with? Communism and socialism as financial programs don’t work, and the concept of free market economy, at least how I see it, isn’t any different than what we have now. So, without credit cards, or more specifically credit, like as we know it would pretty much collapse.

Now, how does it specifically affect us? Have you tried to rent a car without having a credit card? How about holding a hotel room? Purchasing an airline ticket? The truth is that we’ve been set up so that if we don’t have a credit card, we’re pretty much a non-entity, or at the very least someone worthy of our distrust. Credit cards are used to prove we are who we say we are; it’s gotten to that point. We don’t need to have as many of them as we do, but we certainly have to have at least one in our possession.

There’s still this weird debate about whether or not we should cut up our credit cards, even as the companies are raising our rates. One economist on CNN said we should just bite the bullet, accept the rate, and try to move to another card. Who here has gotten a letter from a credit card company in awhile?

I’m not sure how it’s all playing out, but I do know this. My Capital One credit card jacked up its rate to an astronomical 22.7%, even with my not missing any payments. I’m cutting that bad boy up, canceling it, paying off the balance, and moving on. If it affects my credit score,… well, I’ll just have to deal with it. I’m hoping one of my other internet finance friends is correct in saying credit scores are on their way out.

Milestone day, and it’s time to talk a little bit about the statistics of Top Finance Blog.

I started this blog on December 7th, after purchasing it from my buddy Justin, who had too many things going on and decided it was better to sell than let it go to pieces. He’s still a contributor here when he gets time, but be sure to visit him on one of his other blogs, Emarketing Newsletter.

Since that time, I have entertained 18 different topics, and one has overwhelmingly clobbered the rest. Those topic areas are:

If you’re wondering about that 1/2 point, I had two topics for one of my posts, hence each one gets half a point. I can see how talking about the financial health of the country would be a big topic for me, as it’s probably the second biggest story of the year, behind Barack Obama taking the oath of office.

Next, my top posts for this time period. It’s interesting how the top two has far outstripped the next three on the list as far as visitors go, including one that was more personal than anything else, but let’s see what those five were:

Of course, you can’t talk about a blog without talking about the comments. Understanding what this blog is about, I know why there aren’t the high number of comments I get on one of my other blogs, so I’m happy with what I’ve received to date. This ends up being my top 7 because of the numbers:

What’s interesting about the last two is that none of them are the same; I’m not sure what to think about that.

Anyway, I’m not giving the total number of visitors during this period because when I changed my theme, I didn’t get any information for 12 days from Google Analytics. This means that all of the other numbers are somewhat skewed also, but hey, this isn’t going to affect the world economy, so the numbers are what they are. I will say that I had one peak day in February where I had 66 visitors; I wouldn’t be mad at consistent numbers like that.

The final report is just for commerce sake. This blog only made 72 cents in the first 100 posts. I haven’t made a sale on any of the affiliate programs on the side, which means the money I’ve made has come through Adsense. Not a biggie overall, but it’s something interesting because the belief has always been that niche anything would eventually start making nice money, and that hasn’t happened with this blog. Maybe one day; wouldn’t that be an interesting report.

So, there we go. This is number 101, and there will be plenty more coming as we go along. By the way, though it has nothing to do with finances, I’d like to announce a webinar I’m giving on June 30th titled Social Media, SEO & Your Business In 90 Minutes, starting at 11AM and running until 12:30PM. You can find out more by clicking on the above link. I’m nothing is not multi-functional. I hope you can attend, as the cost is only $37, but even if you can’t, help spread the word.

And I hope you stop by here as often as you can, as I’ll continue trying to intrigue you with my thoughts and beliefs of what’s going on with our financial world.

By all indications, the Syracuse area economy is actually holding up fairly well in these recessionary times. A quarterly report from The Brookings Institution called the MetroTimes ranked Syracuse among the 40 strongest metro areas in the nation. The Syracuse area includes Onondaga, Oswego, and Madison counties.

The housing market was a main reason for the region’s ranking. The Syracuse area has the fewest number of foreclosures, and is actually the only metropolitan city in the state that’s showing a positive housing start figure, sitting around 54% at the end of April. Unemployment in the Syracuse area also dropped .4% in the first quarter of the year, while the rest of the country went up fairly drastically. The figure is starting to go up in the second quarter, and at 8% it’s much higher than the 5.2% it was sitting at last year, but by comparison it’s a great number.

This begs the question; why is Syracuse doing so well as compared to other cities. There aren’t a lot of reasons, but those reasons will skew figures.

One of the reasons is that the bulk of job losses in the area actually occurred many years ago, when many manufacturers left the state because of high taxes. So, when this recession hit, most of the possible jobs that could have been lost were already gone.

Two, the city of Syracuse itself hasn’t had much home building in decades. Most of the building has taken place in the suburbs, which are showing drastic growth against the pattern of the city of Syracuse losing residents. The city of Clay, which didn’t use to be classified as a city, is one of the fastest growing communities in the state. Clay and Cicero are leading the way in new homes, as more and more people are less reluctant to move a little further away from the city because of easy access to a highway to get back into the city.

Three, overall housing prices in the Syracuse area have always been lower than all the other metropolitan areas in the state, so they really didn’t have all that much of a margin to fall if there had been a big decline in the housing market, which didn’t happen anyway since there were almost no floating mortgage rates in the area, if any. Most people who lost their homes couldn’t pay the mortgage for other reasons.

In other words, it’s not that the Syracuse area showed a heck of a lot of growth; it just showed a heck of a lot less hurt. Still, it’s not such a bad model for other metropolitan cities to look at as they hope to recover from this recession.