Just how much powerful has Barack Obama become? Well he is of course Commander in Chief of the nation considered to be the leader of the free world, which in itself conveys a tremendous amount of power. But the question is, does he have more power than other Presidents have had in the past? In constitutional terms the answer is no, there are restraints in place that limit the power of any man (our perhaps in the future woman) elected to the highest office in the land. Barack Obama still has to woo the members of the Senate and Congress to implement his changes.
But if one examines the power of personality it may be a different story. The respected Nobel panel awarded the President the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 not really based upon what he has achieved whilst in office, after all Obama has yet to complete his first year in the White House, but rather on the potential of what he could achieve in the future. No previous President can claim that.
This month Forbes Magazine not too surprisingly put Obama at number one in their annual list of the world’s most powerful people (with the President of the People’s Republic of China, Hu Jintao coming in second.) Not too surprising but did George W Bush ever gain such accolades? Not really.
Much also has to be said for Barack Obama’s power over the media. He was the first politician to truly embrace the Internet as a tool to sway voters hearts and minds and during his 2008 campaign he did so brilliantly. The White house now has a blog which Alexa.com rates as the 3,200th most visited website in the entire world. Who said politics was boring? (Although Barack Obama and his blogging team do have a ways to go to catch up ways to go before they catch up to Perez Hilton, who celebrity blog ranks an amazing 498th in the world)
Not everything of course has gone Obama’s way this year. He had to fight perhaps far harder than he had ever imagined over health care reform and the fight is still not quite over yet. He has faced growing opposition from grass roots right wing groups like “The Tea Party” whose frustration against the Obama regime seems to have galvanized them enough to prepare to stand candidates against traditional Republicans in a number of elections next year.
Even the growing strength of political organization like the Tea Party are seen by some as a testament to the power that Barack Obama does hold over the American people and indeed the world. The question for future years though is perhaps is Obama a powerful politician, or a powerful celebrity?
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Does the Falling Dollar actually Strengthen the Gold and Oil Markets?
This year has not been a good one for the value of the US dollar, with its value free falling. But that fact has in fact increased the value of commodities such as gold, and oil.
On Monday November 9th 2009 the Dow Jones Index reached its highest level in well over a year, thanks in great part to the surge in value of energy and materials stocks. The dollar on the other hand fell to its lowest level in fifteen months, according to the ICE Futures US dollar index.
This disparity in activity makes it hard for the investor to truly gage how fast the market is recovering. Usually investors use the value of the dollar as a guide when making their purchase or sell decisions. Outside the US investors are seeing the dollar as a weak currency and are taking advantage of that fact, using it for a purpose known as “carry trade” to allow them finance their non US purchases.
Historically commodity prices tend to go up as the dollar weakens. On the same day as the Dow Jones rose to its new high gold was valued at $1,100 an ounce and crude oil was priced at $79.43 a barrel, a $2 rise that will no doubt soon be reflected once more at the gas pump.
So is the market truly recovering? To the amateur it is hard to see that it is if the dollar remains so weak against other countries. But financial analysts believe it is, and that this drop in the value of the dollar is a natural part of the overall recovery process.
Still though there are factors that still may send the Dow Jones back down again soon. US unemployment still stands at its highest levels in years and investors are nervously waiting for the quarterly reports that will indicate how much consumers are spending in the all important run up to the holidays. The fear is that that figure will be fairly low as uncertainty about the economy may cause many a consumer to trim their holiday shopping budget.
All of this aside those who deal in commodities are profiting from all of the markets up and downs, demonstrating once again that the purchase of such commodities can be a financially sound investment, even in difficult economic times.
On Monday November 9th 2009 the Dow Jones Index reached its highest level in well over a year, thanks in great part to the surge in value of energy and materials stocks. The dollar on the other hand fell to its lowest level in fifteen months, according to the ICE Futures US dollar index.
This disparity in activity makes it hard for the investor to truly gage how fast the market is recovering. Usually investors use the value of the dollar as a guide when making their purchase or sell decisions. Outside the US investors are seeing the dollar as a weak currency and are taking advantage of that fact, using it for a purpose known as “carry trade” to allow them finance their non US purchases.
Historically commodity prices tend to go up as the dollar weakens. On the same day as the Dow Jones rose to its new high gold was valued at $1,100 an ounce and crude oil was priced at $79.43 a barrel, a $2 rise that will no doubt soon be reflected once more at the gas pump.
So is the market truly recovering? To the amateur it is hard to see that it is if the dollar remains so weak against other countries. But financial analysts believe it is, and that this drop in the value of the dollar is a natural part of the overall recovery process.
Still though there are factors that still may send the Dow Jones back down again soon. US unemployment still stands at its highest levels in years and investors are nervously waiting for the quarterly reports that will indicate how much consumers are spending in the all important run up to the holidays. The fear is that that figure will be fairly low as uncertainty about the economy may cause many a consumer to trim their holiday shopping budget.
All of this aside those who deal in commodities are profiting from all of the markets up and downs, demonstrating once again that the purchase of such commodities can be a financially sound investment, even in difficult economic times.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Lack of Health Insurance to American Children, Why A New Report Says its Serious?
Amidst the heated debate on Capitol Hill and indeed all across America about healthcare reform, a new report has just been published that indicates that a lack of health insurance may have led to the deaths of 17,000 US children across the span of two decades.
The work was spear headed by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and is one of the largest projects ever undertaken to investigate the impact of health insurance coverage on the nation’s most vulnerable citizens; sick children.
Taking data from over twenty three million hospital records that came from thirty seven different states and spanned a time period between 1988 and 2005 the researchers compared the risk of death for uninsured children with that of those whose parents had managed to secure coverage for them. With other factors such as age being equal the researchers were able to conclude that the children in the study who did not have health insurance were a full sixty percent more likely to die in hospital than their insured counterparts.
In the study a total of 104,520 patients died from amongst the 22.2 million hospitalized children who had health insurance compared to the 9, 468 uninsured children who died out of the 1.2 million included in the data. To try to estimate how many of these deaths might have been prevented by having health insurance the researchers projected the expected number of deaths based on medical condition and then applied this number to the uninsured cases. They found that in the uninsured population there were 3,535 more deaths than the statistics would have led them to expect.
The medical condition from which the patients suffered was found to make little difference, whatever ailed them the uninsured children were still more likely to never leave the hospital alive. The study only took hospitalized children into account, meaning that deaths after hospital discharge or amongst those who never made it to a hospital at all could push the numbers even higher.
According to the lead investigator on the study Fizan Abdullah, M.D., Ph.D, who is a pediatric surgeon at Hopkins Children’s, the findings are clear "If you are a child without insurance, if you're seriously ill and end up in the hospital, you are 60 percent more likely to die than the sick child in the next room who has insurance," he states simply.
The Hopkins researchers do caution that because their work only examined hospital records after death had occurred they cannot establish direct cause and effect between a lack of health insurance and a child’s risk of dying. However because of the sheer volume of the medical reports they had access to and the researchers’ ability to adjust for factors that may have otherwise clouded their results they all still feel that their work has uncovered a powerful link between the risk of a child dying while in hospital and a lack of adequate health insurance.
The work was spear headed by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and is one of the largest projects ever undertaken to investigate the impact of health insurance coverage on the nation’s most vulnerable citizens; sick children.
Taking data from over twenty three million hospital records that came from thirty seven different states and spanned a time period between 1988 and 2005 the researchers compared the risk of death for uninsured children with that of those whose parents had managed to secure coverage for them. With other factors such as age being equal the researchers were able to conclude that the children in the study who did not have health insurance were a full sixty percent more likely to die in hospital than their insured counterparts.
In the study a total of 104,520 patients died from amongst the 22.2 million hospitalized children who had health insurance compared to the 9, 468 uninsured children who died out of the 1.2 million included in the data. To try to estimate how many of these deaths might have been prevented by having health insurance the researchers projected the expected number of deaths based on medical condition and then applied this number to the uninsured cases. They found that in the uninsured population there were 3,535 more deaths than the statistics would have led them to expect.
The medical condition from which the patients suffered was found to make little difference, whatever ailed them the uninsured children were still more likely to never leave the hospital alive. The study only took hospitalized children into account, meaning that deaths after hospital discharge or amongst those who never made it to a hospital at all could push the numbers even higher.
According to the lead investigator on the study Fizan Abdullah, M.D., Ph.D, who is a pediatric surgeon at Hopkins Children’s, the findings are clear "If you are a child without insurance, if you're seriously ill and end up in the hospital, you are 60 percent more likely to die than the sick child in the next room who has insurance," he states simply.
The Hopkins researchers do caution that because their work only examined hospital records after death had occurred they cannot establish direct cause and effect between a lack of health insurance and a child’s risk of dying. However because of the sheer volume of the medical reports they had access to and the researchers’ ability to adjust for factors that may have otherwise clouded their results they all still feel that their work has uncovered a powerful link between the risk of a child dying while in hospital and a lack of adequate health insurance.
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