Stop the false narrative from protecting a financial sector that produces nothing as it enriches itself with faux products. It was a bailout. Big Pharma is playing a PR game with insulin. Don’t go for it.
It is a bailout
It was necessary, but it was a bailout.
I had another topic I wanted to work on for today. But I am concerned that the attempted quasi-redemption of banking, both traditional banking and investment banking, in the media is in full vogue. And that is the reason we get into the soil-wash-rinse-repeat cycle with the fraud sector; I mean the financial sector.
During the 2016 primaries, Senator Bernie Sanders said that Wall Street’s business model is fraud. I do not believe Bernie went far enough with that statement. He should have said that our entire financial sector is predicated on legalized fraud. In other words, most of what is done in the financial sector are legal. But being legal does not mean ethical, moral, or beneficial to society. When one understands the definition of a parasite, it is difficult not to see that the financial sector is flushed with a large contingent of parasites and parasitic behaviors.
The problem is we continue to coddle them and make excuses for them. That is the biggest moral hazard in our country. Too often, we are quick to deny help to those who this sector bleeds dry with the narrative that helping the poor, creating necessary, humane services, and the fair redistribution of unearned gains would somehow create a moral hazard. Many saying this are members of the financial sector where moral hazard is, in fact, continually in play. Projection only works if we allow it to work.
The media highlighted the voices of many who put ridiculous possibilities for the reasons for the failure of Silicon Value Bank. They allowed the WOKE argument, the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) argument, the inflation argument, the interest rates argument, and many others to create a bait-and-switch paradigm that takes one eye off of the issue. The financial sector creates instruments not to do good or produce a product or service beneficial to society but parasitic instruments to enrich those with capital. If a product or something good comes out of it, then it is a PR moment to capitalize on as the scam continues.
Let’s get something straight. We, the American people, bailed out a lot of rich investors who had deposits in Silicon Valley Bank. The FDIC’s funds, by law, insured $250,000 per account. President Biden used his power to extend that to deposits of any size. While investors in the bank stock proper will lose their investment, there are instruments that will allow the recovery of much of that. But make no mistake, account over $250,000 receive a bailout. When they claim that the FDIC is paying for the accounts and, as such, taxpayers are not on the hook, that may be seemingly true but factually false. The banks pass all those fees right back to the taxpayers with higher fees and lower interest on their deposits.
While I understand that President Biden HAD to bail these banks out. Instead of stressing that it is not a bailout or would not affect taxpayers, he should have talked about regulating the financial sector so they would stop the soil-wash-rinse-repeat cycle. They beg the government to make them whole when they expectedly screw up and pay politicians to keep the government off of their backs when they are profiting and accumulating their ill-gotten unearned gains.
Here is a note from a Fidelity Investment blog post one should digest.
Several factors led to the precipitous collapse of SVB. Most of SVB’s clients include tech and venture capital companies, in addition to executives for these firms. In an effort to attract clients, SVB offered relatively higher rates on deposits compared with many larger rivals. To help fund these higher rates, SVB bought longer-term, higher-yielding bonds when it was cash rich. But that was before the Fed began aggressively hiking rates and the venture capital market experienced some turbulence. The value of most of those bonds SVB purchased has declined substantially (bond values generally decrease as interest rates increase), resulting in big investment losses.
It is clear many of the accounts with millions were there for investment purposes.
Is Big pharma getting scared?
A few weeks ago, Eli Lilly dramatically cut its price for insulin. Now Novo Nordisk is doing something similar. Are the Big Pharma companies getting scared? Of course, they are. Common Dreams reported the following.
Crediting advocacy groups with pressuring two out of the three pharmaceutical companies that supply insulin to patients with diabetes in the United States to drastically lower their prices, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday called on the last of the trio, Sanofi, to do the same while arguing price caps should be mandatory—not a choice.
Novo Nordisk on Tuesday announced that it will cut prices by up to 75% for some of its insulin products starting next year, less than two weeks after one of its rival companies, Eli Lilly, said it plans to slash prices for its most widely used insulin products by 70%.
A vial of one of Novo’s products, NovoLog, will drop from more than $289 to just over $72, and the insulin product FlexPen will cost $139, down from more than $500, starting January 1, 2024.
The price changes come after the price of insulin for patients has more than tripled in recent decades, with deadly consequences for some of the eight million Americans who rely on synthetic insulin to convert food into energy. A study based on the 2021 National Health Interview Survey last November found that 1.3 million people in the U.S. rationed their insulin supply in 2021 due to the drug’s prohibitive cost.
Sanders (I-Vt.) noted that “grassroots pressure” forced Eli Lilly and Novo this month to announce major price cuts, but said that as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee he “will soon hold a hearing on the need to guarantee insulin at an affordable price to everyone who needs it,” suggesting that voluntary price cuts by companies are not sufficient.
Public pressure by groups including Patients for Affordable Drugs and Lower Drug Prices Now has resulted in some recent insulin price reforms, including a provision that took effect in January capping insulin copayments at $35 per month for Medicare recipients.
This is not enough. We must stop these predatory companies from using our illnesses as opportunities to extort us. I do not say this lightly. Most research for drugs and many other things is funded with our tax dollars at universities and grants to companies. When a product is realized, shareholders and executives profit from the inflated prices of these products, and the taxpayers, the initial investors, get zero. This is not publicized as it should. Does one understand why I use the word parasite with many of these companies and sectors?
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