Amedisys (AMED) has received a request from the US Department of Justice for more information regarding its planned $3.29B merger with Amedisys.
Thursday, August 10, 2023
Money-Market Fund Assets Hit New Record High; Banks' Usage Of Emergency Fed Funds Jumps
US Money Market funds saw a fourth straight week of inflows ($14 billion this past week) to a new record high of $5.53 trillion...
Source: Bloomberg
Retail money-market funds saw inflows for the 16th straight week (and institutional funds also saw a 3rd straight week of inflows)...
Source: Bloomberg
The decoupling between money-market fund inflows and bank deposits continues...
Source: Bloomberg
The Fed's balance sheet rose last week (ending a 9 week treak of shrinkage), rising $1.5 billion on the week...
Source: Bloomberg
As far as QT is concerned, The Fed's securities holdings rose by $346mm last week - the first increase in 3 months
Source: Bloomberg
Usage of The Fed's emergency bank bailout facility rose by $1.2BN to a new record high at $107BN...
Source: Bloomberg
The breakdown from The Fed's H.4.1 table...
Total securities held rose by $300MM (increase in TIPS holdings)
Discount Window increase $13MM to $1.911BN
BTFP new record $106.9BN, up $1.2BN
Other credit extensions (FDIC loans) down $3.6BN to $145.4BN
Finally, US equity markets continue to diverge significantly from bank reserves at The Fed...
Source: Bloomberg
We leave you with one thought - in 7 months and counting, America's 'smaller' banks will need to find that $100-billion plus from somewhere as that is when the BTFP bailout program ends (theoretically). Will regional bank balance sheets be stabilized by then?
Or will the current bloodbath in bonds be the catalyst for another round of pain?
'Revised Presentation of Obesity May Reduce Internalized Bias'
Presenting obesity as a chronic medical condition, rather than as a failure to eat less and move more, may improve self-esteem among patients with obesity and enhance their relationships with their doctors, a new study suggests.
In an online study, patients with obesity reported significantly less internalized weight bias and significantly enhanced perceptions of positive communication with their medical providers after watching a video of a doctor who framed obesity as a treatable medical condition, compared with a video of a doctor who emphasized willpower.
"Recent research has identified the dominant role that biology (both genetics as well as homeostatic, hedonic, and executive brain systems) and environment, rather than willpower, play in the development of obesity and the resistance to weight loss," wrote study authors Sara English, a medical student, and Michael Vallis, MD, associate professor of family medicine, both at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. "Yet the false narrative that ideal or goal weight can be achieved by eating less and moving more using willpower continues to dominate the public narrative."
The findings were published July 30 in Clinical Obesity.
Medical Complexity
The public discussion generally places all responsibility for the health outcomes of obesity on the patient. As a result, patients with obesity face bias and stigma from the public and the healthcare system, wrote the authors.
This stigmatization contributes to increased mortality and morbidity by promoting maladaptive eating behaviors and stress. It also causes mistrust of healthcare professionals, which, in turn, leads to worse health outcomes and increased healthcare costs.
The 2020 Canadian clinical practice guidelines for obesity management in adults emphasize that obesity is complex and that nonbehavioral factors strongly influence it. They recommend that treatment focus on improving patient-centered health outcomes and address the root causes of obesity, instead of focusing on weight loss alone.
In the present study, English and Vallis evaluated how presenting obesity as a treatable medical condition affected participants’ internalized weight bias and their perceived relationship with their healthcare provider. They asked 61 patients with obesity (average age, 49 years; average BMI, 41) to watch two videos, the first showing a doctor endorsing the traditional "eat less, move more approach," and the second showing a doctor describing obesity as a chronic, treatable medical condition.
Nearly half (49.5%) of participants reported that their healthcare provider rarely or never discusses weight loss, and almost two thirds of participants (64%) reported feeling stigmatized by their healthcare provider because of their weight at least some of the time.
After having watched each video, participants were asked to imagine that they were being treated by the corresponding doctor and to complete two measures: the Weight Bias Internalization Scale (WBIS), which measures the degree to which a respondent believes the negative stereotypes about obese people, and the Patient-Health Care Provider Communication Scale (PHCPCS), which assesses the quality of patient-healthcare provider communication.
Virtually all participants preferred the care provider in the video with the revised presentation of obesity. Only one preferred the traditional video. The video with the revised presentation was associated with significant reductions in internalized weight bias. Participants' WBIS total score decreased from 4.49 to 3.36 (P < .001). The revised narrative video also had a positive effect on patients' perception of their healthcare providers. The PHCPCS total score increased from 2.65 to 4.20 (P < .001).
A Chronic Disease
Commenting on the study for Medscape Medical News, Yoni Freedhoff, MD, associate professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, said, "If you’re asking me if it is a good idea to treat obesity like a chronic disease, the answer would be yes, we absolutely should. It is a chronic disease, and it shouldn’t have a treatment paradigm different from the other chronic diseases." Freedhoff did not participate in the study.
Dr Yoni Freedhoff
"We certainly don’t blame patients for having other chronic conditions," Freedhoff added. "We don’t have a narrative that, in order for them to qualify for medication or other treatment options, they have to audition for them by failing lifestyle approaches first. And yet, I’d say at least 85% of chronic noncommunicable diseases have lifestyle factors, but obesity is the only one where we consider that there is a necessity for these lifestyle changes, as if there have been studies demonstrating durable and reproducible outcomes for lifestyle in obesity. There have not."
Telling patients and doctors that obesity is a chronic disease driven by biology, not a failure of willpower, is going to reduce stigma, "which is what this study was able to demonstrate to some degree," Freedhoff said.
"What is more stigmatizing? Being told that if you just try hard enough, you’ll succeed, and if you don’t succeed, the corollary, of course, is that you did not try hard enough? Versus, you’ve got a medical condition where you’ve got biological drivers beyond your locus of control, affecting behaviors that, in turn, contribute to your adiposity? I’m pretty sure the second statement will have far less impact on a person’s internalized weight bias than what we’ve unfortunately been doing up until now with the focus on willpower," Freedhoff said.
No funding for the study was reported. English and Vallis reported no relevant financial relationships. Freedhoff reported that he receives clinical grants from NovoNordisk.
Clin Obes. Published July 30, 2023. Full text.
Akebia Q2 filings to be delayed
Akebia announces late filing of its second quarter earnings and Form 10-Q
Akebia reaffirms 2023 net product revenue guidance of $175 - $180 million
Akebia believes its cash resources as of June 30, 2023 will be sufficient to fund its current operating plan through at least the next twelve months
Akebia expects to resubmit NDA for vadadustat as a treatment for anemia due to CKD in adult patients on dialysis in Q3 2023
Cano Health sinks on raising going concern doubts
Cano Health (CANO.N) said on Thursday there is substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern within one year, sending shares down about 48% after the bell.
The health insurer, which went public in 2021 after merging with Sternlicht-backed SPAC, also said it is pursuing a process to sell itself and is continuing efforts to divest its non-core assets and business lines.
Under its restructuring plan, the company expects to lower costs by reducing 17% of its current workforce, about 700 employees, in the third quarter of 2023.
The company's current liquidity as of Aug. 9, 2023 was about $101 million, consisting of cash and cash equivalents, which it said is not sufficient to cover operating, investing and financing uses for the next 12 months.
Its second-quarter net loss widened to $270.75 million from $14.6 million a year earlier, due to reasons such as increased medical costs from a spurt in demand for non-urgent surgeries that were delayed during the pandemic.
The company's medical cost ratio — or spending on claims as a percentage of premiums — rose to 103.5% in the quarter, compared with 82.6% a year earlier.
Cano has been looking for a new CEO after its former chief Marlow Hernandez stepped down in June.
Cano shareholders, including Cooperstone, Gold & Sternlicht, had issued an open letter in April highlighting an urgent need for leadership changes.
The company's revenue for the quarter ended June 30 was $766.75 million, below analysts' average estimate of $828.44 million, according to Refinitiv data.
US-Iran Reach Prisoner Swap Deal, Tehran To Gain Access To $6BN In Oil Revenue
The United States and Iran have reached a rare prisoner swap deal which will reportedly lead to the freeing of five Iranian-American dual citizens, and in exchange Tehran has been guaranteed access to an estimated $6 billion in its own blocked oil revenue. The US is also expected to release an unspecified number of jailed Iranians.
The New York Times is describing that it is the culmination of two years of behind-the-scenes diplomatic negotiations. The American have yet to be released, but are said to have been moved from Iran's notorious Evin Prison, and placed into house arrest as a first step
"The move by Iran of the American hostages from Evin Prison to house arrest is an important development," a lawyer for Siamak Namazi, one of the Americans released, said.
Most of the detained were arrested and imprisoned on the usual Iranian allegations of spying and espionage, though no evidence of these alleged crimes have been made public.
So far the US-Iranian citizens Emad Sharqi, Murad Tahbaz, and Siamak Namazi are believed part of the transfer, while the two additional names weren't immediately made public.
They are currently said to be under guard at hotel in the Iranian capital.
One can't help but wonder at the timing of this decision. With wholesale gasoline and crude prices soaring, the American public is about to be hit by another pocket-book-crushing surge in pump prices. President Biden has emptied the SPR and the Saudis are no longer America's friend (in fact the opposite). So why not throw some cash to Iran and allow them to open up their spigots...
Crude prices have been falling since the Iran deal rumors began...
Iran's state-run Tasnim is reporting that the prisoner exchange is expected to happen after the fund transfer, of what were previously sanctioned and frozen oil revenue accounts.
The One Paragraph That Reveals All
by Bill Rice via The Brownstone Institute,
The mountain of evidence proving beyond a reasonable doubt officials in the Biden White House bullied Facebook (and other social media) executives to perform Orwellian censorship has now reached Mt. Everest elevations.
Yesterday, I spent several hours reading media reports and Twitter comments after Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) published the third installment of the “Facebook Files.”
Forget the Hunter and Joe Biden influence-peddling operations; if the revelations in these files don’t qualify as “impeachable offenses” nothing will.
I hope people will read articles published by the Washington Stand, Fox News and this Twitter-thread summary to learn more details regarding this scandal and egregious violation of the US Constitution.
Instead of rehashing the evidence in these articles, here I simply parse one brief “note” composed by an unnamed Facebook executive who attended censorship meetings with White House officials. (These notes were subpoenaed by Rep. Jordan’s committee.)
This paragraph might be all readers need to grasp the scale of this operation and to learn how eager Facebook executives were to do the bidding of Big Brother (the government of the United States of America.)
The One Paragraph that Tells Us Everything …
Facebook employee (name redacted for some reason) – July 16, 2021:
“And we attack virality aspect through feed demotions. We remove content that can lead to imminent physical harm. For content that doesn’t meet that threshold, we instituted borderline demotions. For example, someone sharing negative side effect posts. Similarly, posts questioning whether you get a vaccine under a mandate, whether it’s government overreach. We demote those. That’s not false information but it leads to a vaccine negative environment. When it comes to looking at COVID misinformation, it’s a different approach. What we normally do is just remove or leave to fact checkers. Here, we introduced a middle ground.”
What follows is my sentence-by-sentence parsing of information one can glean from this one stunning paragraph:
“…we (Facebook) attack virality aspect through feed demotions.”
My comment: Here we have Stanford University’s “Virality Project” in operation. The goal is to prevent certain information from “going viral,” to prevent Facebook’s contrarian users from reaching (and thus influencing) more than a handful of the platform’s one billion users.
For the record, the information Facebook ensured did NOT go viral turned out to be truthful information, information that could have saved millions of lives or prevented millions of people from suffering medical (or economic) harm.
As it turns out, almost every post that was blocked or demoted contained information which, if widely disseminated, could have perhaps debunked all the false narratives the government was committed to spreading.
I’ve written this 50 times, but let’s make it 51: The government and its many narrative-protecting “partners” are the actual spreaders of toxic and dangerous misinformation/disinformation.
A Giant Protection Racket …
The entire censorship operation was an effort to protect the organizations that were spreading false and misleading information.
The entire operation was/is a massive and coordinated disinformation project conceived and executed by at least 50 organizations that comprise the Censorship Industrial Complex – the most important players in this Complex being the US government and social media companies that have billions of followers.
As the first sentence in this paragraph reveals, Facebook admits (brags?) that it accomplished this objective via “feed demotions.”
Trust me. I have first-hand knowledge of every censorship tool referenced in this paragraph … as I was one of the critical-thinking skeptics Facebook and our government worked tirelessly to make sure had no real influence on my fellow citizens.
That is, none of my criticisms of any Covid responses ever went viral. In fact, these posts kept getting my account banned, suspended, or deboosted. Also, my potential “influence” in democratic debates is still being blocked by Facebook today.
(Aside: Many readers question why I remain on Facebook given how repulsive this company’s activities are. In today’s Reader Comments, I list some of the reasons I’ve decided to keep my account active. For example, I know FB is still censoring or deboosting my Covid posts only because, technically, I’m, still a FB user … to better keep an eye on what FB is doing and how it’s doing this … I need to be on FB.)
“… We remove content that can lead to imminent physical harm …”
My comment: Note here that Facebook (or the government) decided on its own what speech (“content”) “can” lead to “imminent physical harm.”
All conclusions – expressed as statements of fact – are actually highly subjective and all tacitly accept that government sources and social media companies get to be the final arbiters of what is or isn’t “misinformation” or “disinformation.”
Again, everything the company said “can” lead to imminent physical harm … would not have led to imminent physical harm.
FWIW, semantically, the word “can” implies that “cannot” or “does not” are also possibilities.
The first three words of the sentence simply say, “We remove content.” Again, the company is admitting what it did. This is as brazen as censorship gets.
As the social media company is still removing content today, I have concluded Facebook is not afraid of Rep. Jim Jordan or this Committee.
(As one Twitter wag noted, what’s the Committee going to do about any of this? Send a “strongly-worded letter” to Facebook?)
“For content that doesn’t meet that threshold, we instituted borderline demotions.”
My comment: So if Facebook decided it couldn’t remove certain content, the company can at least “institute borderline demotions.” So the two possibilities are “total removal of speech” or “borderline demotions.” Got it.
For emphasis, Door Three: “Let people say what they want to say” or “don’t muzzle the speech of your users” … was not an option.
“… For example, someone sharing negative side effect posts.”
My comment: In America and on Facebook – per the non-stop coercion and threats of Biden White House officials – someone literally could not “share” with all their Facebook followers that they experienced a “negative side effect” from a “vaccine.”
These Facebook users would simply be “sharing” a truth as they perceive it … but they couldn’t do this – per Facebook and the Biden government.
Which is our government. A government created by the US Constitution, whose First Amendment (allegedly) protects “free speech” and says the government can never bully citizens or companies into saying only what the government demands.
Let that sink in.
In a later note, one of the government’s key censorship henchmen (Rob Flaherty) actually says it’s his “dream” that Facebook would “play ball” with Big Brother (a dream that came true.)
My dream is that more Americans would wake up and understand that our “right” to free speech is being eviscerated by a coordinated and massive conspiracy of criminals and lying virtue-signalers.
“… Similarly, posts questioning whether you get a vaccine under a mandate, whether it’s government overreach.”
My comment: Here we learn that Facebook users also couldn’t fully share the opinion that “vaccine mandates were government overreach.”
Apparently our government has not “overreached” when it tells citizens and companies that they can’t share certain opinions.
Whether people realize this or not, statements like this mean we might as well be living in North Korea or 1978 East Germany. Basically, one cannot accuse our own democratically-elected government of “overreaching” – per government decree!
“We demote those.”
My comment: Well, of course you do. Big Brother was watching you and you were watching every one of your billion customers … No unauthorized speech was going to “go viral” under your watch.
Facebook could (accurately) claim this company was bullied and threatened by the government, but its executives can’t claim they were overly troubled by this. Or that they forcefully pushed back against this bullying. What they did was roll over like a puppy.
When one of the largest and most influential companies in the world – one that has tens of millions of intelligent users who could have used this speech platform to push-back against “government over-reach” – lacks the guts to do this … this should tell us all something about:
A) How captured all Big Corporations are and …
B) That not ONE of these companies has any brave or principled true “leaders” who are willing to publicly call out a tyrannical government.
“That’s not false information but it leads to vaccine negative environment.”
My comment: So, per official Facebook posting policy, the social media company knew this wasn’t false information – which means it was very likely/possibly “true information. Still, Facebook replies it had a great or valid reason to censor true speech … because said speech “leads to vaccine negative environment.”
Here we reach the censorship bottom-line …
Nobody in the world (at least on Facebook) is allowed to to say anything that might create a “negative vaccine environment.”
Even if said vaccine has killed many people (which these non-vaccines probably have by now), no Facebook user can say anything “negative” about such a vaccine.
And vaccine deaths and adverse events were not and are not “hypothetical.” They were real and began occurring the first day the shots were administered.
Jews, gypsies, and political dissidents were being killed, harmed or falsely imprisoned from the day the first Nazi concentration camp opened. But – per government policy (endorsed by every important organization in Germany) – nobody in Germany could say this was happening.
Does anyone get this analogy? If I tried to make this analogy on Facebook, I’d be banned.
Language in this same paragraph highlights the great concern of censors about preventing potential “imminent physical harm.” Facebook users who were trying to report to their fellow citizens that this harm was not only “imminent” – it was happening right now – couldn’t say this.
“When it comes to looking at COVID misinformation, it’s a different approach.”
My comment: I’m a writer and try to choose my words carefully. This sentence should have at least said, “When it comes to looking at alleged COVID misinformation …”
Facebook just accepts that everything “contrarian” users such as myself tried to post about the vaccines was definitely “misinformation” … because the government said it was. And Facebook believed the CDC over Bill Rice, Jr., plenty of authentic scientists and medical professionals and millions of other people who were trying to cry out, “This is NOT the truth! Do NOT trust these alleged experts!”
The Back-up Plan …
“What we normally do is just remove (such content) or leave it to fact checkers.”
My comment: Note that by this time in the pandemic, removing such content was “normal” operating procedure for Facebook. By early in the vaccine rollout, Facebook had already gotten very good at “removing content.”
Still, as emerging documents reveal, Facebook and other social media companies still weren’t removing nearly enough (true) content to satisfy the Censorship Pit Bulls working for Joe Biden and the more than 50 organizations that make up the Censorship Industrial Complex.
Thank you, Redacted Employee, for also mentioning the vital role played by the designated “fact-checkers” of the Censorship Industrial Complex. What Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube might not have censored, these companies “left it to” the “fact-checkers” to shut down or “flag.”
The “fact-checkers” were like outfielders backing up infielders in case a ground ball got under the second baseman’s glove.
I hope more Americans are now beginning to sense the massive team effort involved in making sure unauthorized speech either didn’t get posted or was demoted so such true speech didn’t reach hardly anyone.
And the last sentence …
“Here, we introduced a middle ground.”
My comment: “Middle ground?!” This is the compromise Facebook came up with so its executives, employees and army of 15,000-plus “content moderators” could sleep comfortably at night? Are they spinning their massive censorship operation to mean they fought back a little?
If this is the “middle-ground” solution, one wonders what the more extreme solution was or is.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/one-paragraph-reveals-all
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