AROUND THE WEB

1. Is Prescription Law To Blame?
Has a law designed to speed drug approvals resulted in excessive safety issues?

A new study finds that after thePrescription Drug User Fee Act was passed in 1992 – in which drug makers agreed to pay fees to help fund the FDA and the agency agreed to accelerate approvals – the number of safety warnings and product withdrawals was higher than before the law was passed.

http://blogs.wsj.com/pharmalot/2014/08/05/have-faster-fda-drug-approvals-caused-more-safety-problems/

2. Newmont Fights Royalty Costs

The head of Newmont Mining (NYSE:NEM), Australia’s No.1 gold producer, will meet West Australian Premier Colin Barnett on Tuesday in an effort to persuade him of avoiding extra imposts on the gold industry.

CEO Gary Goldberg warned last week that a royalty hike would jeopardize the profitability of Australia's two largest gold mines: the Superpit in Kalgoorlie-Boulder and Boddington. And he believes gold miners are to blame.
http://www.mining.com/newmont-steps-up-pressure-against-w-australias-royalty-hike-70443/

3. Don't Trust Your Neighbors

One neighbor cuts off the gas, another halts petrol deliveries and Mother Nature cooks up an unusually dry season. It all means Kyrgyzstan faces a potentially catastrophic energy crisis this winter, if the impoverished and unstable Central Asian country cannot reach deals with two recalcitrant neighbors.

The predicament began with the sale of Kyrgyzstan’s gas transport monopoly, KyrgyzGaz, to Russian energy giant Gazprom in April. “We don’t need KyrgyzGas, we need gas,” President Almazbek Atambayev said at the time, promising that Russia would guarantee a cheap and constant supply. Soon after the deal was completed, however, Uzbekistan stopped gas deliveries, saying it had no contract to supply Gazprom. The two sides, with Kyrgyzstan in the middle, have not been able to reach an agreement.
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Kyrgyzstan-Faces-Catastrophic-Energy-Crisis.html

4. Key Term Here Is For Now

As the old saying goes, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard. So in this week’s Oilgram News column New Frontiers, Tamsin Carlisle does just that, skipping through the Middle East to summarize the hot battles, and the cold ones, impacting oil across the region.http://blogs.platts.com/2014/08/11/oil-middle-east/

5. Minimum Wage Go Figure
Few issues are as controversial and divisive as the minimum wage. Even business legend Warren Buffett has said that despite 50 years of thought, he’s not sure whether he supports an increase or not.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/minnesota-restaurant-adds-minimum-wage-surcharge-155252174.html

6. We Like The Other Side Of This Trade
The newspaper said one of the biggest changes the fund is considering is potentially eliminating investments in indexes for commodities, including energy, food and metals.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/11/us-calpers-
 
7. Greatest Risk
We increasingly see carry being confused with expected return. Carry is the difference between the annual yield of a security and money market interest rates. For example, Wall Street acts as if a 2% dividend yield on equities, or a 5% junk bond yield is enough to make these securities appropriate even for investors with short horizons, not factoring in any compensation for risk or likely capital losses. This is the same thinking that contributed to the housing bubble and subsequent collapse. Banks, hedge funds, and other financial players borrowed massively to accumulate subprime mortgage-backed securities, attempting to “leverage the spread” between the higher yielding and increasingly risky mortgage debt and the lower yield that they paid to depositors and other funding sources.
 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-10/hussman-greatest-risk-investors-face-here