New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Stocks fell Friday morning on reports that several euro-region countries may face credit downgrades by Standard & Poor’s and of JP Morgan’s less than impressive earnings.

Just after 10 a.m. on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average slumped 107 points, the Standard & Poor’s 500 fell 10 points and the NASDAQ dropped 17 points.

Weighing on stocks in the U.S. was an earnings report from bellwether JP Morgan that showed earnings inline with expectations, but revenues that fell short.

Also dragging stocks lower was a release that revealed the U.S. trade deficit widened more than forecast in November as Americans exports declined and companies stepped up imports of crude oil and automobiles.

Downgrades in the credit ratings of a number of European governments as early as Friday could come from Standard & Poor’s. The rumors sent overseas stocks down.

European markets across the board were lower in afternoon trading and Asian stocks ended mixed.

In commodities, oil dropped 72 cents to $98.25 a barrel and gold lost $6 to $1,640.40 a troy ounce.

U.S. stock markets will be closed Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Day.

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Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (IRIN) – Naba Wangré, manager of the child labor project at the Burkina Faso Red Cross, sends bluntly worded text messages to government officials, employers, traditional leaders, teachers, business owners and housewives several times a year, trying to reduce the widespread exploitation of domestic workers by raising awareness of their rights.

“Employers: domestics have the same rights as your children. Stop under-paying them; stop subjecting them to mistreatment, sexual violence, and long hours”, said a recent SMS from Wangré, who uses lists of phone numbers provided by the local network.

Domestic workers – mostly children – have told Sister Edith a nun who runs a local NGO “Maman à L’Ecoute” (Listen to mother) in the capital, Ouagadougou, that they earn from 3,000 to 6,000 CFA (US$6-$12) per month, sometimes work up to 18 hours per day, and often experience exploitation and abuse.

No assessment of the sector has been done since a 2006 study by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, but officials estimate that thousands of children around the country are employed as domestic workers. They are often sent from rural areas where there are few work opportunities to Ouagadougou and the second-largest city, Bobo-Dioulosso.

The 2008 Labor Code makes it legal to engage in “light work” from the age of 15, but many children are put to work at much younger ages according to the Ministry of Labor. In 2009 there were only 39 labor inspectors to address violations countrywide, so their impact is limited.

A child-trafficking law was passed in 2008 to curb the practice of sending a child to a destination for the purpose of work within Burkina Faso and across the border to its six neighboring countries – Mali, Niger, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire – but it has been hard to enforce.

With little legislation to control working conditions in the sector, Wangré said making employers more responsible was essential to changing their behavior.

Direct, personal

Sending text messages via cell phones is one of the most effective ways of passing information to a mass audience, said Ken Banks, founder of FrontlineSMS, which tries to help non-profit organizations deploy mobile technology.

An SMS message is direct and personal, and about 90 percent are read within 15 minutes of arriving, he told IRIN. Nevertheless, Banks said an SMS campaign should supplement other media channels, rather than replace them.

Project Masiluleke in South Africa was one of the most successful examples of behavior change as a result of an SMS campaign, in which text messages with HIV awareness and testing information organization were sent out, resulting in a spike in voluntary testing.

The Burkina Red Cross SMS campaign reinforces the information broadcast on radio by the Ministry of Labor to raise awareness of abuse in the six regions where most of the domestic workers come from: South-west, Cascades, Haut-Basins, Boucle du Mouhoun, Centre West and Centre East. Wangré said abuse and maltreatment of domestics could be reported on Red Cross telephone hotlines.

Behavior change must be backed up by legislation, said Stella Somé, head of child labor at the Ministry of Labour. The government is trying to set minimum wages and working conditions in line with the International Labor Organization (ILO) and hopes to have draft legislation in place by 2012.

Domestic workers also need to be empowered to earn higher wages, said Sister Edith. Maman à l’Ecoute has trained hundreds of girls as cleaners and housekeepers, allowing them to demand wages of up to 25,000 CFA (US$50) per month. Some also learn to read and write and do sewing. The Burkina Red Cross will launch its own training scheme soon.

bo/aj/he

– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

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United States (ProPublica) – by Minhee Cho

ProPublica had the immense honor of winning the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its series, “The Wall Street Money Machine.” The lead reporters, Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, take a moment to explain the series, how it all started and their reaction after reeling in ProPublica’s second Pulitzer, which was also the first ever awarded to a body of work that didn’t appear in print.

Read their series: The Wall Street Money Machine and the letter addressing the award from our editor-in-chief. You can also subscribe to all of ProPublica’s podcasts on iTunes.

TRANSCRIPT

Mike Webb: Hi, I’m Mike Webb, and welcome to the ProPublica Podcast. Each year, the Pulitzer Prize is awarded for outstanding achievement in the fields of literature, musical composition, and journalism. On Monday, April 18th, the Pulitzers announced this year’s winners, and ProPublica was once again honored to be among them. Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein won the award in the category of National Reporting for their outstanding Wall Street Money Machine series, which examined how some Wall Street bankers and hedge funds sought to enrich themselves at the expense of their clients and sometimes even their own firms through sketchy transactions that delayed and ultimately worsened the financial crisis.

On today’s podcast, we brought the two reporters in to discuss their stories, its impact, and what it’s like to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Congratulations and welcome, guys.

Jake Bernstein: Thanks. Jesse Eisinger: Thanks for having us.

Mike: All right, so listen, why don’t we recap the original three stories that you did. Jesse, why don’t you tell us how the Magnetar Trade story came together?

Jesse: Sure. So we were approached by the guys from Planet Money, Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg, in the summer of 2009. And they said. “We’ve done this great piece of radio journalism for This American Life called ‘The Giant Pool of Money,’ but we want a follow‑on piece. We want to know what happened afterwards.” And there had been an enormous amount of journalistic attention shed on the events of September 2008, when the global financial system collapsed, or was on the verge of collapsing. But there had been very little attention paid to the run‑up in late 2006 and early 2007. And we thought that was a great place to start looking for stories. And so we set out.

Jake: Alex and Adam had sort of done this soup‑to‑nuts version of the financial crisis, where they had looked at everything from housing to structured finance, and they had sort of seen the craziness of the boom. But they had felt, while they were doing their reporting, that there was another side of the story that they weren’t getting, which was that people knew that there was problems, knew that there were serious asymmetries that there were issues going on, bankers, people on Wall Street, and that they took advantage of that. And that in taking advantage of it, they may have made the crisis worse.

But they didn’t know exactly where that had happened and who was responsible, and so they sort of tasked us with trying to find that out.

Jesse: Yeah. This sort of basic, essential sort of journalistic question, “What did they know and when did they know it?”

Mike: And what was it that you found?

Jesse: We started looking at this world of CDOs, these bundles of mortgage securities called “collateralized debt obligations.” That was the nexus of the financial crisis. That seemed like a very natural place to look. And what we found was initially a lot of people in the CDO world telling us about a hedge fund out of Chicago that very few people had heard of called Magnetar.

Mike: Why Magnetar? Were they really that big of a player? They were the ones?

Jake: They were pretty big. But it was, we would talk to people, CDO managers and bankers and all kinds of people, and we’d just keep on hearing the same thing. “You really need to look at these guys.” These guys were responsible for a lot of deals, and they sort of epitomized this sense in ’06 and ’07 of folks who were really just sort of inflating the bubble bigger and bigger and bigger, even though they knew it probably wasn’t sustainable.

And what we found out after doing our reporting was that Magnetar was responsible for more than $40 billion worth of CDOs, which is a pretty big figure any way you slice it.

Jesse: Yeah, it was a huge figure. And they were by far the dominant player in going to Wall Street and asking Wall Street to make deals for them. And they would invest in the deal to make it happen, but really what they were doing was betting against the deal in a much greater proportion than they were actually investing in it. And so they had much more to gain from the collapse of the deals than their investment in the deals.

Mike: OK, and then the second story about how the banks allowed this to happen, or how the banks played a role in this.

Jake: Well, for our second story what we really wanted was to quantify this in some way. And so we managed to do some work with this wonderful data firm called Thetica, and they really crunched the numbers for us and allowed us to see sort of what was going in the CDO business. Because we increasingly were hearing that there weren’t that many investors in ’06 and ’07, that people were actually ‑ investors, real investors, real money investors ‑ were leaving the market. Because they kind of saw what was happening. And for other reasons as well.

But the volume of deals kept on growing, and really skyrocketing. So we wanted to know: who’s buying this stuff? So through our analysis of the data we began to see that, in fact, the biggest buyer for one key part of the CDO was just other CDOs.

And it was this huge sort of self‑dealing daisy chain, if you will. So that’s really what the second story was about.

Jesse: Right. And what was happening with those purchases was they were essentially being orchestrated by the banks themselves. The banks actually controlled, dictated, the purchase of parts of CDOs by other CDOs. And the banks were using that to veil, mask their own purchases of the CDOs. So essentially what they were doing was buying their own garbage, which had a wonderful effect of increasing the bonus pools for the bankers themselves that were creating these deals, but eventually led to the destruction of Merrill‑Lynch, the near‑failure of Merrill‑Lynch, the collapse of CitiGroup, UBS.

Eventually the Wall Street collapse, mainly because of CDOs, especially because they were regurgitating this kind of stuff and eating themselves.

Jake: And of course at the end of the day it was taxpayers who were on the hook for this.

Mike: Right. Now what was the broad scope of the third story.

Jake: The third story is we sort of dove deep into Merrill‑Lynch, which was the biggest producer of CDOs during this period, and really tried to figure out something that was kind of a question mark that we had. Merrill‑Lynch kind of did itself in by taking so much of their own product. They were eating their own cooking. And yet why would a bank, which is really concerned about profit and traders who are concerned about making profit because they want bonuses off of that profit, why would they take stuff that was losing money, that no one else wanted?

And so we dug deep into that and we found something that internally in Merrill was called the “subsidy.” And the way the subsidy worked was that the CDO group was not allowed within the bank to keep the stuff they couldn’t sell; they had to get rid of it.

And so what they were doing was they were essentially selling it to another division within the bank, another group of traders who were marking it at close to book value, at close to par. And then the CDO group was sharing its bonuses with that group as an incentive for them to take it.

Which was called the “subsidy,” and which explained how a bank like this could do this kind of thing.

Mike: OK, and last week the Senate issued a report that sort of talked about ‑ that I know mentioned some of your work ‑ and talked about some of the necessary reforms.

Jesse: Yeah. The Levin committee ‑‑ what is it called? It’s the…

Jake: The Permanent Sub‑Committee on Investigations.

Jesse: Yeah, the Permanent Sub‑Committee on Investigations, a well‑known bipartisan committee, came out with an enormous report on the CDO business. Largely on the CDO business, on the sort of financial collapse. And they cited ProPublica’s work numerous times.

Mike: Your work.

Jesse: Our work, which was very flattering. And I think that the central premise of our work, that CDOs were buying CDOs and propagating this machine, keeping this machine going to the benefit of individual bankers. That was a running theme in the report. And then the other running theme was that bankers knew the business was slowing down and took advantage of it. Goldman‑Sachs was the main focus of their report, Goldman and Deutsche Bank. So they’ve got an enormous amount of detail on that. We had focused on other banks: Merrill, Citi, primarily, and the Magnetar trade. But they were thematically very similar.

Jake: The Levin committee found this thread of a lack of transparency and just incredible greed and self‑interest on the part of Wall Street. And that was the same thing that we had found, so they sort of cited our work, particularly about Magnetar, to sort of demonstrate what was going on and what they were seeing with a bunch of other banks and players.

Jesse: And the essence was that there was a conflict of interest, where the banks were serving their interests or the interests of one customer, and not disclosing the genesis of these deals to other customers. So they weren’t saying, “We’re betting against this.” Or, “The hedge fund that helped create this is betting against it, it’s not betting for it.”

Mike: Right. And that was a key point in your story.

Jesse: In the Magnetar story, yeah.

Mike: Right. What other reforms came about because of your work? Or what other impact have you seen it have?

Jake: The jury’s still out, because they’re kind of writing the rules. But the Magnetar story was cited on the Senate floor by Senator Chris Dodd during the debate over what eventually became the Dodd‑Frank financial reform. So that’s sort of still in the process. The SEC has been doing some work around the stuff that we’ve written about. They’ve issued Wells Notices to some of the people who are involved in the Magnetar deals. A Wells Notice is a notice that you’re under investigation and that they might be bringing charges against you.

One of the deals that we focused on was a JP Morgan deal called Squared, and that’s the deal that they’ve looked at. They’ve also looked at some other deals that are under investigation that we wrote about first. That’s one sort of movement.

But there really hasn’t been as many prosecutions and as many consequences for what was the largest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And it surprised a lot of people.

Mike: And you wrote about that in a recent column.

Jesse: Yeah. I think that everybody from the outside is utterly shocked that there haven’t been more people charged, going to jail. From the mortgage originators like Countrywide or New Century to Washington Mutual to the investment banks, Bear Sterns, Lehman. I think that you could make very good cases that some of these banks mislead their shareholders at the least; that were misleading in testimony to the Senate. And that they lied about their books.

Mike: So your work will play a role in some of the lawsuits that end up being filed.

Jesse: I think that, yeah, we’ve already been cited in civil lawsuits. So I think that that’s one place where this is going to play out. And as Jake said, the other place this is going to play out is the SEC. But I think that to a large extent the perpetrators of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression are going scott‑free.

Mike: I want to find out how you guys responded to winning the actual award. How did you hear about it first and what was your reaction?

Jesse: We won something?

Jake: It was quite special. We all gathered around the computer here in the office, the entire staff, waiting for the three o’clock hour to strike and the committee to put up who were the winners. And then we saw our names and knew that in fact it was real. And it’s obviously one of the great honors and pleasures that a journalist can have in their career, so it’s pretty terrific.

Jesse: And I think that we can say with straight faces that we we’re not in it for prizes, but when you win one, it’s quite wonderful.

Mike: People have pointed out that business journalism doesn’t generally do well with the Pulitzers.

Jake: We were very surprised that we would get an award like this, simply because our story’s very difficult. It’s a very complicated story. It really requires some work on the part of the reader, because they have to go with us and really try to understand these things. And it was a hard story to put together. So it’s just very gratifying. And the other thing is, it appears that our series is the first series that was published online before it was in newspapers that’s won a Pulitzer. I think we’ll see a lot more of those in the years to come, but to be the first one is pretty cool.

Jesse: And we were cited especially for bringing this to a level for the lay reader. And I think we took a lot of pride in that. Our editors really worked with us. They worked and worked and worked with us, Steve Engelberg and Eric Umansky, to make our points comprehensible, jargon‑free, accessible to the average reader. And the This American Life guys helped us structure the narrative in a way that was accessible to people and drew them in and drew them along in the story. And so we’re grateful for that. And I think that was one of the great accomplishments of this story, this kind of collaboration and partnership that allowed the storytelling to really come through.

Jake: Yeah, certainly. That was our biggest challenge, is we really wanted this to be something that a general audience could appreciate. And we put a tremendous amount of work in it and we’re very pleased.

Mike: All right, guys. Congratulations. We’re really thrilled for both of you.

Jesse: Thank you.

Jake: Thank you.

Mike: That was Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger. You can see all of the elements in their series at ProPublica.org/wallstreet. And now for our Officials Say the Darndest Things Tumblr Quote of the Week. “I always thought I was gonna have like really cool phones and stuff. We can’t get our phones to work. C’mon guys, I’m the President of the United States! Where’s the fancy buttons and stuff and the big screen that comes up? It doesn’t happen.”

Who said it? Well, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that 100 percent of our listeners identified the remark as coming from President Barack Obama, as he was overheard speaking to campaign donors about White House technology and other issues.

OK, that does it for this week’s show. Thanks to Minhee Cho for producing this podcast and to our former producer Brent Gardner-Smith, for his valuable input this week as well. For ProPublica, I’m Mike Webb. We’ll see you next time.

Transcription by CastingWords

– Provided by ProPublica.org

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United States (ProPublica) – by Marian Wang

A provision within the financial reform bill that would regulate debit card transaction fees could be postponed by a year or two following fierce objections from banks. Specifically, banks large and small are objecting to a Fed proposal to limit what are known as interchange fees — the fees they collect from merchants every time a customer uses a bank-issued debit card to make a purchase.

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress last week drafted legislation to postpone writing new debit interchange rules for one to two years. According to Dodd-Frank, the rules were supposed to be finalized by April 21 and to go into effect by July 21.

Consumer groups have decried the delay, saying it would postpone much-needed reform to a system that is “uncompetitive, non-transparent and harmful to consumers” . At the same time, these groups voiced concerns that if interchange reform passes, banks will levy other charges on consumers — something many banks have warned they may do.

Given the controversy, we’re taking a closer look at how interchange works and what’s at stake for banks, for businesses and for consumers.

How interchange works

Many consumers are only vaguely aware of the existence of the interchange fees — or “swipe fees” — but they’re still paying for them because the costs are ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of higher retail prices. The fees often cause retailers to offer discounts for cash or set minimums for credit and debit purchases.

Aside from the argument that paying with plastic is convenient for both consumers and merchants, the justification for interchange fees is partly that banks assume some risk in these transactions, particularly with credit purchases. But because debit transactions are simpler — a matter of moving money from one account to another — some have argued that debit interchange fees are unjustifiably high.

The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill takes aim at only these debit interchange fees. It tasked the Federal Reserve with adopting standards to determine whether interchange fees are “reasonable and proportional” to the cost of processing the transaction.

What the Fed came up with was a plan to cap debit interchange fees at 12 cents per transaction — a proposal that banks appear to uniformly hate. They currently get about 1 to 2 percent of each debit transaction, which averages out to about 44 cents.

The exact numbers are squishy here and are negotiated between merchants and payment networks like Visa and Mastercard, but generally fees for credit cards are higher than for debit cards — and they get even higher if the cards have fancy reward programs. (The card networks also collect their own “network fees”from merchants, which they keep, but as the New York Times has noted, those fees are smaller, and they’re not particularly controversial.)

Some have pointed out that this means merchants—and customers, in the form of higher prices—essentially subsidize the purchases and perks of card-users. According to an analysis released last year by the Boston Federal Reserve, such subsidies average more than $1000 for card-using households each year.

It’s also worth noting that debit card payments with PIN numbers are less costly for merchants than debit card payments with signatures. The larger fees are why some banks have tried to encourage customers to use signature debit instead of entering their PINs, even though PIN transactions are more secure and cost businesses less.

The debit transaction themselves, as the Washington Post has pointed out, only cost a few pennies each to conduct if you don’t count the infrastructure costs. (As it happens, the Fed isn’t counting infrastructure costs in calculating the fee cap. Costs like network connectivity or overhead costs, “cannot be attributed to any particular transaction, given that they could not be avoided if any particular transaction did not occur,” Federal Reserve Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin testified last month.)

As Reuters columnist Antony Currie points out in his handy FAQ, Visa Europe has capped its debit card interchange fees at 0.2 percent of each transaction, and U.S. interchange rates currently average about six times that.

Billions at stake for banks, which in turn warn of impact on consumers

In their lobbying pitches to regulators, banks and merchants have both argued their positions by citing the effect of the proposed rule on consumers.

“The concerns that we have raised revolve around how this is going to impact basic free checking accounts, particularly for low-income Americans,” a spokesman for the American Bankers Association recently told the St. Petersburg Times.

The banks’ professed concern for the low-income is interesting: As financial blogger Mike Konczal has pointed out, there really is no such thing as “free” checking. There’s just “a monthly fee that is waived if you do certain things” and meet certain requirements, like a direct deposit or minimum balance—which low-income people are the least likely to be able to meet, anyway.

The big banks—whose cards account for 80 percent of debit transactions—stand to lose billions in revenue each year. (The amount has been pegged at anywhere from $12 billion to $20 billion.) The New York Times points out that debit transactions are forecasted to overtake cash purchases by 2012.

Many banks say they will forced to cut rewards programs or eliminate services such as free checking. Some, like JPMorgan Chase, are even considering putting a cap on the size of debit purchases.

Despite an exemption, community banks say they’re concerned too

Big banks aren’t the only ones complaining. Even though the Fed’s proposal exempts banks with less than $10 billion in assets from the interchange cap and Visa has said it will implement a two-tier system to protect small banks, community banks have argued that the exemption won’t work because merchants will discriminate and refuse to accept their cards, forcing them to lower their fees in order to remain competitive with the big banks.

“This rule will unquestionably lead to more consumer fees, fewer product choices and greater consumer confusion regarding card acceptance,” the trade group Independent Community Bankers of America has stated.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has said “it is possible” that the exemption won’t work, but Sen. Richard Durbin—who proposed the community bank exemption in the Dodd-Frank law—has said Bernanke is wrong. He pointed to “very strong” rules by card companies that bar merchants from refusing cards within their networks.

Some advocates of interchange fee reform, including Durbin, suspect the bigger banks are manipulating the community banks and credit unions to raise their objections. Durbin called it “one of the most active lobbying efforts I’ve ever seen.”

“The fact is credit unions and smaller banks are just more effective spokesmen on this issue right now,” Politico quoted an anonymous executive at a large bank as saying.

Retailers argue current system gives banks and card networks too much power

The National Retail Federation, a trade group for retailers, has argued that the current payment system is not competitive, and that Visa and Mastercard—the two major networks in the debit world—have too much power to control and inflate fees.

And while banks have argued that competition between Visa and Mastercard is strong and enables merchants to apply pressure to drive down fees, a piece in the New York Times from January suggests the competition actually goes the other way: Payment networks compete to keep the banks happy with higher fees. From the Times:

As debit cards became the preferred plastic in American wallets, Visa has turned its attention to PIN debit too and increased its market share even more. And it has succeeded — not by lowering the fees that merchants pay, but often by pushing them up, making its bank customers happier.

In an effort to catch up, MasterCard and other rivals eventually raised fees on debit cards too, sometimes higher than Visa, to try to woo bank customers back.

Even the federal government—which some have argued should be able to negotiate rock-bottom interchange fees because the risk the banks front for the feds is next to nothing—has had trouble controlling the millions it pays in fees deducted from debit and credit transactions.

“Some federal entities have attempted to negotiate with the card networks to lower interchange rates applicable to their transactions, but with limited success,” read a 2010 Government Accountability Office report. An earlier GAO report found that non-government merchants also had little success.

Merchants promise they’ll pass savings onto consumers

Small business owners and major retailers have argued that the Fed plan to cap interchange fees is a pro-consumer move, according to Bloomberg, which reported that about 170 small business owners recently flew into D.C. to relay that message.

Several retailers supporting the cap have promised to share their savings. Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

Retailers maintain that most of their fee-cut windfall would be shared with customers. Home Depot, among those lobbying most aggressively for the cuts, said: “Any relief as it pertains to these fees will give the Home Depot the ability to reduce our cost of doing business…Such benefits are likely to include lower prices and investment in the business to better serve customers.”

There’s nothing in the proposed rule or in Dodd-Frank, however, to ensure that savings are passed on.

A 2009 government report found that even if interchange fees were to be capped, “the ability of merchants to pass on their savings from lower interchange fees would depend heavily on the respective merchants’ size and market share.”

The fight continues as lawmakers consider a time-out

In addition to heavy lobbying on Capitol Hill, banks have taken their pleas directly to consumers by setting a website called Don’t Make Us Pay. It warns consumers that “Congress and the Federal Reserve want to force YOU to pay more to use your debit card.”

“NO MORE REWARDS,” “MORE RESTRICTIONS,” “HIGHER FEES,” “END OF FREE CHECKING,” the website warns. “TELL CONGRESS NO!” (Hat tip to Slate for flagging the site.)

The group behind the website is the Electronic Payments Coalition, whose members include the major banks, bank trade groups, and both Visa and Mastercard. Politico reported that the coalition has also been running television ads and placing ads in D.C. subway cars.

The Hill reported that merchant groups have also taken out ads to promote interchange fees, though between banks and merchants, NPR notes that banks have the edge in the fight based on financial heft:

Commercial banks, credit unions, and Visa and MasterCard — who run the biggest debit card networks — spent a combined $75 million lobbying on all issues in Washington last year, nearly double the retail industry’s $40 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks such spending.

Financial firms’ campaign contributions during the 2009-2010 cycle also were twice those of merchants, according to NPR.

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ATP Oil & Gas Corp. won approval to resume drilling a well in the Gulf of Mexico that was halted by last year’s ban on some deep-water exploration – the third such permit since the deadly oil well blowout that prompted the moratorium.

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Sebastian, FL, United States (KaiserHealth) – The average adult fills about a dozen prescriptions and refills every year; after age 65, they fill more than 30 prescriptions annually.

For many people, their local pharmacist may be as familiar as their doctor — and often a lot easier to get time with. Some pharmacists are building on that position, expanding their role from drug dispenser to drug educator and chronic disease coach.

By doing so, they may fill a void created by the shortage of primary-care physicians while boosting their business.

Janis McGannon has heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. A few months ago she accepted an offer from a nurse at the Bay Street Pharmacy near her home in Sebastian, Fla., to join a new “healthy heart” program at the pharmacy.

More From This Series Insuring Your Health

At a meeting of the program’s participants, Theresa Tolle, a pharmacist and the owner of Bay Street, gave a talk to about a dozen customers about cholesterol: what it is, how it works and how it can be managed. After everyone was weighed and measured, they received a goody bag that included a pedometer to encourage them to walk 10,000 steps a day.

The next month, the topic was blood pressure. In addition to having their pressures checked and discussing the medications they were taking, participants learned about using light weights and stretchy bands for exercise.

In between monthly meetings, McGannon, 74, logs onto a website to record what she’s eating and how much she’s walking. Tolle and the nurse e-mail her regularly to check on her diet or offer tips to keep her on track. Medicare doesn’t cover the $20 monthly fee for the program, but McGannon thinks it’s worth it.

“Most of us need to be reminded to do these things, and I’m reminded every day,” she says. “It’s right there on the computer.”

Pharmacists are perfectly positioned to help address the drug “adherence” problem: Research shows that only about half of people take their medications as prescribed. They may fill a prescription but not take the drugs as instructed, for example, or they may discontinue a course of treatment before it’s completed; often, people such as McGannon — who take multiple pills for multiple chronic conditions — simply forget. Lack of drug “adherence,” costs $290 billion in medical costs annually, according to a study by NEHI, a health research organization.

Bay Street is one of 50 independent pharmacies offering the heart program nationwide. It and a diabetes management program launched two years ago — available at more than 400 independent pharmacies — were developed by Augusta, Ga., pharmacist David Pope, who is working in partnership with drug wholesaler Cardinal Health. “We’re providing a communication tool to allow pharmacists to step into a coaching role,” says Pope.

In recent years, both independent and chain pharmacies have come under pressure from mail-order pharmacy services, in part because some insurers require that their members get their drugs through the mail. (In 2009, mail-order prescriptions made up 6.6 percent of all retail prescriptions, according to the national association of chain drug stores.) Drug chains and mass-market retailers such as Walmart have fought back with some success, offering $4 generic prescriptions, for example, and 90-day supplies. As for independent pharmacists, “it makes so much sense … to offer services beyond just filling prescriptions,” says Steve Lawrence, a senior vice president with Cardinal.

In the past year, Walgreens has rolled out a diabetes education program that provides customers in 10 cities with one-on-one sessions about the drugs they’re taking, how to use a blood glucose meter and other issues. The program is provided through insurers or employers; more than 1,000 people have participated so far, says Colin Watts, chief innovation officer for Walgreens.

In January, CVS Caremark kicked off a program that identifies insured diabetes patients who aren’t getting the drugs they need. The company contacts these patients and invites them to talk with a pharmacist by phone or in person at the store. The company plans similar programs for heart disease, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

Primary-care physicians are generally supportive of such efforts as long as the pharmacists coordinate care with doctors.

“Answering questions about prescription drugs is important,” says Roland Goertz, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. “But with the time pressures physicians are under, they can only accomplish so much.”

For many patients, pharmacists are the easiest to access and the most trusted medical professional they know. In a Gallup survey released in December, pharmacists ranked third among professions for honesty and ethics. That put them behind nurses (No. 1) but ahead of doctors (No. 5).

When pharmacists reach out to patients, patients may find themselves turning to them for advice and information more frequently.

That’s what’s happened in Janis McGannon’s case. Now that she knows Thesesa Tolle and the nurse at Bay State, she calls them or stops by when she has a question about her medication.

“Theresa’s very willing to sit down with you and talk about how to take [a drug] and how it will affect you,” says McGannon.

That’s not always the case with doctors, she says: “Sometimes they just gloss over things. They just say, ‘You’ll be fine. Call my office if you have problems.’”

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(Be sure to read this short note because this article gives you access to a proven Forex program that ‘flip flops’ the approach most people take &shows you how select groups of traders can get in on the huge volatility in the Forex markets RIGHT NOW that’s being created by the problems in the other global markets).

Here’s what’s up…

In the past week, over 30,000 traders got exclusive access to 35+ trader Bill Poulos’s complimentary 3-part “Flexible Forex” 2.0 training videos.

-these videos revealed his recent Forex discovery that shows you how to manage risk first when placing a trade, & THEN look for a profit as quickly as possible (and as many times a day as possible) all according to YOUR schedule.

So if you have ANY interest in discovering how to finally become an INDEPENDENT MASTER trader in the Forex markets, where you always know what to do, no matter what happens… keep reading & GET READY…

==> http://www.flexiblefx.com/y/?i=1057655&u=2&l=f92

A TURNING POINT IN FOREX TRADING?

Bill was planning on re-releasing his step-by-step course in January to kick off the new year, but due to extreme interest from the Forex trading community, he put all his other projects on hold in order to release it this week.

Based on the early feedback he’s been receiving from those lucky enough to see a preview copy, it looks like this may be a turning point in Forex trading.

Why?

Because Bill does everything in his power to give you the “keys to the kingdom” where you understand EXACTLY what to do when you go to place a trade. There’s never any second guessing or wondering.

CAUTION: This is NOT for “systems junkies”, or individuals who like to let others make their trading decisions.

But it IS for traders who like to have FULL CONTROL of their destiny in the markets.

IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU

Bill designed this new method with YOU & YOUR schedule in mind. It’s all about giving you the flexibility you need in your busy day to trade in as little as 20 minutes or even all day long if that’s what you have time for.

-but he’s only planning on releasing 955 courses in the next week that show you how to find trade setups quickly, protect your position with a sort of “risk shield”, & then look for profit as fast as possible so you can move on to the next trade.

So if you want to…

…then check out the open letter Bill wrote for you that describes all the details:

==> http://www.flexiblefx.com/y/?i=1057655&u=2&l=f92

I hope you’re as excited as I am about this.

I’ve seen this developer’s trading courses disappear in a matter of days in the past, & it’s a near certainty it will happen again… so IF YOU VALUE YOUR TIME, I really urge you to check out his letter here, & then ask yourself how what he has to say stacks up against how YOU currently trade:

==> http://www.flexiblefx.com/y/?i=1057655&u=2&l=f92

On top of everything else, when you join Bill this week as his student, he’s going to give you 8 weeks of COMPLIMENTARY semi-private COACHING to make sure you “get it”. I’ve never seen anyone do that before, and I’m not sure if we’ll ever see it again, so be sure to check it out NOW.

Rob Trader – Forex Expert
http://tradingtoollist.co.cc/

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/day-trading-articles/flipflop-your-forex-method-to-get-an-edge-1556210.html