Comment, analysis and other offerings from Thursday’s FT,
Cost control not coverage is the key to health reform
Mort Zuckerman, chairman and editor in chief of US News & World Report, writes: virtually every expert agrees that the root of our runaway health inflation is the fee-for-service system. Every visit, test and exam is money in the bank for a doctor, hospital and test centre, so there is an incentive to do more of them.
America cannot resolve global imbalances on its own
Fred Bergsten and Arvind Subramanian, director and senior fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, write: In the short run, US recovery from the recession requires that the fiscal and monetary stimulus programmes be effective. In turn, that calls for domestic and foreign investors to absorb smoothly and trustingly the voluminous amounts of IOUs being offered by the US government.
Editorial comment: Swedish safeguards
The greatest worry is not Swedish lenders but Baltic borrowers, whose economies have shrunk by double digits in the last year. The two are of course related: capital flows fed bubbles. But what felled the borrowers was the larger financial crisis not of their making.
Lex on natural gas
Operators of liquefied natural gas terminals such as Sempra Energy expect a global glut to result in further shipments into the saturated US market.
Insight: Solving the valuation problem
Richard Field, managing director of TYI, LLC, a boutique structured finance consulting firm, writes: since the start of the credit crisis, global regulators have known the answer: the markets aren’t working because of the inability of participants to credibly value opaque structured finance securities. It is time to solve this valuation problem.
Lombard: Only concerted action will keep companies in tune
The Financial Services Authority’s clarification of its attitude to concert parties (neatly timed to coincide with the Proms) removes one excuse for institutional investors not to get together to tackle bad governance.
Interactive feature: Europe’s economic weather forecast
The continent’s economic weather has been decidedly mixed, with rays of sunshine struggling to emerge from behind the clouds.
