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Getting Hold of Escalating Drug Overdoses in the US
Marisa Taylor writes: A state government crackdown in 2010 on Florida’s notorious “pill mills” — which had been dispensing some of the country’s highest volumes of prescription painkillers, often without medical exams — saved more than a thousand lives in the three-year period that followed, according to researchers’ estimates released Monday.
The researchers said their findings imply that restricting doctors and clinics that have been overprescribing addictive oxycodone drugs like OxyContin not only helps prevent painkiller overdose deaths, but may reduce heroin overdose fatalities as well.
There wasn’t as big of a substitution to heroin that we might have feared among the people who were getting access to these medications at pill mills after Florida changed its laws.
Kennedy-Hendricks and her team sought to find out whether tougher laws regulating doctors and clinics that had freely dispensed oxycodone to customers who paid them in cash would cut down on overdose deaths from prescription painkillers — or whether addicts might just switch over to heroin and continue to overdose, a pattern that law enforcement and public health officials have observed.
Scientists chose to look at Florida, which starting in 2003 saw an explosion of so-called pill mills, defined as clinics or doctors writing numerous prescriptions for opioids beyond the scope of standard medical practice. They often dispensed the pills on-site, rather than requiring a pharmacy visit, and sometimes didn’t even perform exams.
Florida passed a law in 2010 limiting doctors to prescribing 72-hour oxycodone supplies and barred any advertising of such medications. In 2011, the state also toughened criminal penalties for the doctors and clinics involved in illegal painkiller subscriptions and banned dispensing the drugs on-site.
Looking at the rates at which overdose deaths had been increasing in Florida, and comparing them with continuing increases in North Carolina, the researchers determined that 1,029 overdose deaths were prevented in Florida from the start of the legal crackdown until the end of 2012.
While North Carolina’s opioid overdose death rates still rose — increasing fourfold from early 2011 to late 2012 — Florida’s slowed. Between March 2010 and December 2010, for example, the death rate was 7.4 percent lower than it would have been without Florida’s new laws, the researchers said. They calculated that the rate was 20 percent lower in 2011 and 34.5 percent lower in 2012 than it would have been without the crackdown.
And while heroin overdose death rates grew in both states at the beginning of 2011, North Carolina’s continued to increase by an average of 18 percent per month, the scientists said. Florida’s increased more slowly, by 8 percent per month during the first half of the year. By the end of 2012 heroin overdose deaths were increasing by 10 percent per month in North Carolina, but only by 6 percent per month in Florida.
The researchers did see an initial “substitution” effect in which Florida prescription opioid addicts switched over to heroin in 2010 as the stricter laws made prescription drugs tougher to come by, but that substitution appeared to taper off as time passed.
Incremental Interest Rate Hikes?
Steve Matthews writes: Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Dennis Lockhart said the central bank’s commitment to a “gradual” tightening suggests interest rates could be raised at every other meeting of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee, though the actual pace will depend on incoming economic data.
The Fed said it expected the pace of future tightening to be gradual. Lockhart voted in favor of the statement that announced the quarter percentage point increase in the target range for its benchmark federal funds rate to 0.25 percent to 0.5 percent.
Policy makers separately forecast an appropriate rate of 1.375 percent for the rate at the end of 2016, implying four quarter-point increases in the target range next year, based on the median projection from 17 officials.
The ”important point” is the pace will depend on “how the economy performs,” Lockhart said. “It will be gradually, but data dependent.”
‘Solid’ Economy
The rate hike reflects a ”solid” outlook for the economy, with inflation likely to move toward the Fed’s 2 percent goal after the temporary drags from lower oil prices and a stronger dollar end, Lockhart said.
Last week’s move ended a seven-year era of ultra-easy Fed monetary policy after officials reduced rates to nearly zero in December 2008 to help the economy recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Manufacturing could benefit as global conditions improve, he said, adding that growth in China has stabilized and Europe seems to be picking up.
Entrepreneur Alert: Biometrics as ID
The use of biometrics to confirm identity is on the rise.
The Atlanta Fed reports: The use of physical characteristics to identify people – biometrics – is older than flying machines. Seeking a way to identify repeat criminal offenders so as to mete out harsher punishments, a police inspector in England in the 1880s devised a system of measuring criminals’ arms, heads, and other features. Then crime fighters began fingerprinting suspects a couple of decades later.
Today, a smart phone can have a fingerprint reader to prove you’re you when you make a payment over the phone. Consumers can now choose from more than a dozen “mobile wallets,” essentially payment mechanisms built into mobile phones. Numerous big technology and financial firms have rolled out payment apps that use biometrics. And many information security experts contend,that it is time to retire passwords as an authentication tool.
A boom in mobile payments and biometrics, long promised by industry boosters, could be dawning. That was among the themes that emerged from the Risk Forum’s November forum, “Banking on Biometrics: Bye-Bye Passwords?” The one-day forum explored the present and potential of biometrics as a verification tool for payments and banking.
Verifying a person’s identity generally encompasses some combination of three elements:
- Something you have (a payment card, for example)
- Something you know (a PIN or password)
- And something you are (your fingerprint, iris, and so on)
So far the first two have served the U.S. payments system reasonably well, Lott pointed out. Some of the technological advances are fascinating. Many sensors now include “liveness” detection. For instance, many facial recognition sensors require that you blink to be sure your face picture is real and not a three-dimensional mask, and advanced fingerprint readers detect blood flow.
Meanwhile, consumers have become more receptive to biometrics, Jain said. That growing level of acceptance seems to be evident in the marketplace. USAA, the first financial services firm to offer fingerprint, voice, and facial recognition for mobile banking apps, has garnered more than a million users for its biometric system.
And smart phone payment systems appear to be catching on. Jain said Apple Pay is supported by more than 300 banks, while Android Pay is accepted at more than a million stores.
“Biometrics are changing the way we conduct everyday transactions,” Jain said, “and now the focus is on payments.”
Nothing, including biometrics, promises 100 percent security. One of the keys to solid authentication, several conference speakers noted, is to figure ways to block imposters even if they have compromised biometrics, which sometimes can be done with photos or even 3-D masks on less-sophisticated systems.
The real key to biometrics becoming ubiquitous is straightforward: they must offer real security and be easy to use.
Why Russia Keep Pumping Oil
Russian oil keeps pumping in Siberia, despite crash in oil prices.
Stephen Bierman writes: In the fight for market share among the world’s oil producers this year, Russia wasn’t supposed to be a contender.
But the world’s No. 3 producer has been pumping at the fastest pace since the collapse of the Soviet Union, adding to the flood on an already-swamped market and helping push prices to the lowest levels since 2009.
Russia’s unexpected oil bounty this year is the result not of a new Kremlin campaign but of dozens of modest productivity improvements across the sprawling sector. Even pressured by plunging prices, as well as U.S. and European Union sanctions that cut access to much foreign financing and technology, Russian companies have managed to squeeze more crude out of some of the country’s oldest fields. They have also brought new projects on line, offsetting steady declines in its core producing region of West Siberia.
With a rise of 0.5 percent in the first nine months of 2015, Russia hasn’t boosted production as much as its larger rivals, the U.S. (up 1.3 percent) and Saudi Arabia (up 5.8 percent), according to Citigroup Inc. But having ignored OPEC’s calls earlier this year to join efforts to support prices by pumping less, Russia is keeping up with the cartel.
Bashneft, with some of the oldest reserves in Russia, has been the biggest single contributor to increased crude output this year, thanks largely to low-cost efforts to squeeze more oil out of regions that have been in production for decades. The results have helped make Bashneft’s shares among the best performers on Russia’s stock market in the last 12 months.
The other big boosts to Russian production this year have come from a few mid-sized new fields like those of Severenergia in the Arctic Yamal region. Co-owners Novatek OJSC and Gazpromneft PJSC invested in the $9.2 billion project back when oil prices were high. With most of the capital already committed, operating costs now are relatively low and output of gas condensate, a light and especially valuable form of crude, is up five-fold this year.
One side effect of falling oil prices — the 52 percent plunge in the ruble over the last two years — has helped Russian oil producers, chopping their costs in dollar terms since between 80 and 90 percent of their spending comes in rubles.
Relatively high taxes on oil have actually sheltered the industry from much of the impact of the drop in prices. Bashneft and other Russian companies working fields in the Volga River basin — some of the first to be discovered in Russia early in the last century — are benefiting from Soviet inefficiency.
Custom-designed pumps — made locally and thus not affected by sanctions — help draw oil out of narrow holes, he added. Every month, the company ranks potential drilling and other projects by the minimum oil price needed to make them profitable. Only the above-water ones make the grade, a kind of flexibility and discipline typically associated with western companies.
Across the industry, companies have boosted production drilling to increase output. While the country’s biggest west Siberian fields are showing declines, smaller new projects have more than offset them this year.
Gainers include Irkutsk Oil Co. in Siberia and Exxon Mobil Corp.-led Sakhalin-1 in the Sea of Okhotsk.
In the Arctic, Novatek started production at the Yarudeyskoye oil field this month. The field will “rapidly reach” planned output of about 70,000 barrels a day, the company said early this month.
Though only about 0.7 percent of total Russian oil output, that gain is likely to be enough to keep the record pace going, said Alexander Nazarov, an oil and gas analyst at Gazprombank.
Can Barbosa Turn Brazil Around?
Raymond Colitt and Anne Edgerton write: Nelson Barbosa could, of course, turn out to be the man who fixes Brazil’s finances, tames soaring inflation and revives the sinking economy, but investors sure aren’t betting on it.
He replaces Levy, the market’s golden boy, with his University of Chicago-training, asset-manager experience and reputation as a fierce budget cutter. Barbosa, while generally respected by analysts for his technocratic skills, isn’t seen as being quite as tight-fisted on spending, a perception he only reinforced when suggesting that he was amenable to granting subsidies to some industries.
What’s more, the crisis that Barbosa will step into when he’s officially sworn in is markedly more severe than it was a year ago. The economy is now shrinking at a 7 percent annual pace; the budget deficit has swelled to the widest in at least two decades; the country’s investment-grade rating is gone; Congress is bogged down in impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff; and the greatest corruption scandal the country has ever known is showing little sign of abating. If Levy couldn’t stem the crisis when it was more manageable before, what reason is there to believe Barbosa will now?
Levy struggled almost from the outset, though, to reverse the widening budget gap. With legislators focused on the corruption scandal — which began at state-run oil giant Petrobras and has landed many executives and politicians in jail — little attention was paid to his pleas to cut spending. His relentless push in Congress to curtail labor and pension benefits earned him scorn from many members of the ruling Workers’ Party, which traditionally championed a robust social safety net.
Even some business leaders started to express concern that Levy’s struggles to shore up fiscal accounts were blinding him to the need to stimulate growth. As the country’s finances worsened and the economy slipped deeper into recession, markets sank month after month. The currency is down 33 percent against the dollar this year. Prices on the government’s 10-year bonds have dropped to 82 cents on the dollar from 99 cents when Levy took office back in January. The yield has climbed to almost 7 percent.
Brazil hasn’t posted a primary budget surplus since April
The task of negotiating with Congress now falls to Barbosa, a 46-year-old economist who studied at the New School for Social Research in New York and started his career as a civil servant at the central bank in the mid-1990s.
The strength of the minister’s ties may get tested quickly. Barbosa has said he’d try to push through plans to simplify taxes and cap pension spending. He said in an interview with Estadao newspaper over the weekend he would win approval by May of a tax on banking transactions. Those are proposals that Levy never managed to get Congress to back.
As Cuba Opens, Can Baseball Drafts Be Far Behind?
Opening Cuba. When US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzer arrived in Cuba, she invited her hosts to watch her team, the Chicago Cubs, in post season. Fidel Castro was reportedly a very good baseball pitcher. If he and George W. Bush had been able to sit down and arrange for Cuban baseball stars to play for American teams, Cuba might have opened for US business more than a decade ago.
Teams meeting in Washington “have made important advances in negotiating a memorandum of understanding on establishing regular flights between Cuba and the United States, and shortly they will be ready to announce a preliminary agreement on this issue”, Josefina Vidal, head of North American affairs for Cuba’s foreign ministry, told reporters in Havana. So is the expanded public Internet access that Cubans now enjoy, something the Cuban government agreed to as part of the deal struck between President Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro a year ago. This deal is the result of months of negotiations between the two countries and paves the way for US airlines to eventually sell flights to Cuba directly from their websites for greater tourism which is still barred by USA law. It said a stronger USA civil aviation relationship with Cuba is a “critical component” of Obama’s effort to normalize relations between the two countries, which have already reopened embassies in Havana and Washington.
Some members of Congress marked the first anniversary of Obama’s opening to Cuba by hailing the impact of the “small steps” that Cubans and American have taken toward each other. American has operated charter service to Cuba since 1991, flying from Miami, Tampa and Los Angeles to the Cuban cities of Camaguey, Cienfuegos, Havana, Holguin and Santa Clara. Diplomatic exchanges between the USA and Cuba came to a screeching halt in 1961 when Washington announced that it would be breaking off its ties with Havana. “This is as much a political document as it is a transportation document”, he said.
Tony Castro, the youngest son of former Cuban president Fidel Castro, says baseball is helping Cuba and the United States to reunite. “We look forward to offering service between our global gateways and Cuba as soon as we have approval to do so”, airline spokesman Charles Hobart said in an email. This oversight is now managed by licensed People-to-People tour operators who use charter companies for their air travel to Cuba. “The atmosphere of relaxation makes it easier for Cuba to diversify its economic relations beyond just Venezuela”, its main ally and trade partner, said Jorge Duany, an expert at the Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute. Other U.S. airlines – American Airlines Group Inc, Delta Air Lines Inc and United Continental Holdings Inc – have expressed interest in scheduling flights to Cuba. Since Obama eased restrictions on travel, USA visits to Cuba have climbed more than 70 percent, with 138,000 arrivals in the first 11 months of 2015.
China: Cultural Norms Tug at New Rules?
Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng write: Nobel laureate economist Douglass North applied economic theory to history to gain insight into institutional and social change. His theoretical framework could prove invaluable to China’s leaders as they navigate the next phase of institutional change.
North identified three lessons that policymakers should draw from his research.
First, what determines economic performance is the mix of “formal rules, informal norms, and enforcement characteristics.” Second, polities have a major impact on economic performance, because they “define and enforce the economic rules.” And, finally, adaptive efficiency (how the rules are changed), not allocative efficiency (the most effective rules right now), is the key to long-term growth. China’s Institutional Change
Growth Industry US Health Care
Healthcare occupations and industries are expected to have the fastest employment growth and to add the most jobs between 2014 and 2024, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. With the increase in the proportion of the population in older age groups, more people in the labor force will be entering prime retirement age. As a result, the labor force participation rate is projected to decrease and labor force growth to slow.
Is Putin’s Optimism About Economy Well-founded?
Putin declare economic crisis over in Russia. Putin said Russia has passed the worst of its economic crisis after it was hit by the slump in oil prices that forced the government to lower forecasts and revise its strategy.
The “peak of the economic crisis has passed” amid signs of stabilization in business activity in the second quarter.. Russia set out its plans at the beginning of 2014 based on oil at $100 a barrel, though crude prices fell by half and everything had to be recalculated, while a price of $50 per barrel for 2016 is “very optimistic,” he said.
The government sees gross domestic product growing by 0.7 percent next year and it won’t rush to alter the budget. Putin gave his support to the central bank, saying interest rate cuts can’t be forced and must be based on economic reality. The threat facing Russia is inflation, while other countries are dealing with the challenge of deflation, he said.
Although the country is at risk of its longest recession in two decades, his public approval recently touched a record high amid airstrikes in Syria against Islamic State and other militants, even as sanctions imposed on Russia over the Ukraine crisis still weigh on the economy. Ukraine announced they will default on Russian bonds.
