Simon Maierhofer has written the article Bank of America: ‘Oops, We Cheated Accidentally’.

I’ll try to capture some key points of what he wrote by quoting some paragraphs in his article.

Unfortunately for BofA, the process of borrowing does not remove the obviously toxic assets from their balance sheets. Those so called unintended mishaps occurred for six quarters from from 2007 to 2009. The classification error involved more than $10 billion in repos.

Of course BofA did not volunteer that information. It was a required response to a courteous letter the SEC sent to 19 large financial institutions inquiring about their repo practices. Can you imagine what kind of information they’d get if the SEC dug even deeper.
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Keep in mind that the combined assets of the four biggest banks are roughly about $7.5 trillion. Assuming those banks overvalue their assets by just 25%, a $1.8 trillion problem is yet waiting to the hit the fan.
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Bear markets are the best auditors. Falling prices reveal the ugly truth of such practices as the BofA story above.

The article Facts Belie GOP Fear-Mongering About Coming Medicare Cuts is written by Rep. Jim McDermott D-Wash., the only psychiatrist among the 16 medical doctors serving in Congress.

Apparently the facts also show that the Republicans are the ones who have done what they accuse the Democrats of having done.  It is amazing that the Republicans know exactly what frightening things to accuse the Democrats of doing,  They only have to go through the list of things that Republicans have done or thought of doing to come up with something,

In 1997, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Balanced Budget Act (which I voted against) that created something called the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate, also referred to as SGR. The SGR is an enormously complicated formula that determines how much Medicare will pay a physician for the different services they provide seniors during a doctor’s visit.

Ultimately, the formula has been a disastrous failure and has forced doctors who accept Medicare patients to face ever-increasing pay cuts. Can you imagine if your boss told you that you might soon face a pay cut of as much as 20 percent and to expect more cuts to come down the pike?

To prevent this from happening, Congress has had no choice but to override those cuts in time increments from 1 year down to 30 days. And Republicans have been little help in recognizing the need to correct this very serious problem: just two years ago, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy had to make a surprise appearance on the Senate floor amid his battle with brain cancer to cast the deciding vote to override a pay cut of over 10 percent. His vote was needed because Republicans apparently had no qualms about significantly reducing the pay of the doctors who serve our nation’s senior citizens.

If Republicans are so fearful of cutting Medicare, why did they come up with the above legislation in 1997?