The recent news that Caterpillar is taking a $100million dollar charge and AT&T is taking a $1billion charge because of changes in health care does not pertain to the current health care bill, as I understand it. This has to do with the Drug Insurance plan passed under George Bush.<\/p>\n
Under that plan, subsidies and tax advantages were introduced to prevent companies like Caterpillar and AT&T from dropping their drug coverage. Those subsidies and tax write-offs are expiring, hence the accounting charges.<\/p>\n
The accounting charges are just changes in the way companies have to account for future liabilities. There is no cash involved in the write-downs.<\/p>\n
These are one time charges that the stock market regularly ignores in evaluating a company’s worth.<\/p>\n
$1 billion sure sounds like a lot of money, but it turns out to be only a small part (0.6%) of AT&T’s market capitalization of $155.34billion.<\/p>\n
That would lower AT&Ts stock price by $0.17 of its current $26.30 price if the stock market decided not to ignore one time charges like this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The recent news that Caterpillar is taking a $100million dollar charge and AT&T is taking a $1billion charge because of changes in health care does not pertain to the current health care bill, as I understand it. This has to do with the Drug Insurance plan passed under George Bush. Under that plan, subsidies and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3664","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3664"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3665,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3664\/revisions\/3665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}