NEW YORK — Money market funds, an increasingly popular place to park cash, will need to raise fees or close to new money to remain profitable as yields hover at near-zero, according to industry managers. The funds, which manage $3,800bn and have seen big cash inflows, are reeling from frozen credit markets, subprime exposure and a crisis of confidence triggered by one fund ‘breaking the buck,’ or returning investors less than they paid in. The US Federal Reserve last week cut its target interest rate to between zero and 0.25 per cent, from one per cent. Jim McDonald, who runs taxable money market funds for T Rowe Price, said: ‘You can’t make money in this situation. If short-term interest rates stay where they are, it’s virtually impossible to run a government [bond] fund and make any money. You can close the fund, that’s one option.’ Vanguard last week closed two of its money market funds to institutional investors, while Credit Suisse said it would quit managing money market funds in the US and liquidate $8bn in assets across its three funds. David Glocke, a portfolio manager at Vanguard, said: ‘It just doesn’t make any sense […]
LOS ANGELES — For years studies have shown that most people can still be healthy, even when just slightly overweight. That was good news for many Americans – nearly 190 million are considered either ‘moderately overweight’ or ‘obese.’ But new findings tonight show that when it comes to raising your risk of heart failure, every extra pound counts. CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker reports. He was surprised to hear today’s report that just a few extra pounds can weigh heavily on the heart and dramatically boost his risk of heart failure. ‘If you’re 10 lbs. overweight, I wouldn’t worry too much about it,’ he said. But you should, Whitaker reports. The findings of this major national study – analyzing two decades of data tracking the health of 21,000 middle-aged American men, all of them doctors – are a sobering jolt for all men. ‘Not obese, but just being overweight increases the risk of heart failure by 49 percent,’ said Dr. Satish Kenchaiah, a researcher for the study. For example: take an average man of 5’10.’ As the scale goes up, so does his risk of heart disease – even if he’s only modestly overweight, between […]
Future increases in wind strength along the California coast may have far-reaching effects, including more intense upwelling of cold water along the coast early in the season and increased fire danger in Southern California, according to researchers at the Climate Change and Impacts Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Earth scientist Mark Snyder will present the findings in a poster titled ‘Future Changes in Surface Winds in the Western U.S. due to Climate Change’ at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco on Friday, December 19. Snyder’s group used a regional climate model to study how the climate along the U.S. West Coast might change in the future as a result of global warming driven by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. The results suggest that a general increase in wind speeds along the coast is likely to accompany regional changes in climate. ‘What we think is going on is that land temperatures are increasing at a faster rate than the ocean temperatures, and this thermal gradient between the land and the ocean is driving increased winds,’ Snyder said. The researchers conducted multiple runs of their regional model to […]
WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday vigorously defended the White House’s use of broad executive powers during the last eight years, saying he believed that historians would ultimately look favorably on the Bush administration’s efforts to keep the nation safe. Mr. Cheney said the Bush White House had been justified in expanding executive authority across a broad range of policy, including the war in Iraq, treatment of terrorism suspects and the domestic wiretapping program. And he said the president ‘doesn’t have to check with anybody – not Congress, not the courts – before launching a nuclear attack to defend the nation ‘because of the nature of the world we live in since the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001. The vice president also sharply criticized Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., offering a pointed response when asked about Mr. Biden’s plans to operate differently from him as vice president and about Mr. Biden’s remark during the Oct. 2 vice-presidential debate with Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska that Mr. Cheney had been ‘the most dangerous vice president we’ve had in American history. ‘If he wants to diminish the office of vice president, that’s obviously his call, […]
Replicating one of the most controversial behavioral experiments in history, a Santa Clara University psychologist has found that people will follow orders from an authority figure to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks. More than two-thirds of volunteers in the research study had to be stopped from administering 150-volt shocks of electricity, despite hearing a person’s cries of pain, concluded Professor Jerry M. Burger in a study published in the January issue of the journal American Psychologist. ‘In a dramatic way, it illustrates that under certain circumstances people will act in very surprising and disturbing ways,’ Burger said. The study, using paid volunteers from the South Bay, is similar to the famous 1974 ‘obedience study’ by the late Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. In the wake of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial, Milgram was troubled by the willingness of people to obey authorities - even if it conflicted with their own conscience. Burger’s findings are published in a special section of the journal reflecting on Milgram’s work 24 years after his death on Dec. 20, 1984. The haunting images of average people administering shocks have kept memories of Milgram’s research alive for decades, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
