I took a look @ DAL chart, interesting, notice all the volume now? Something's up. Lots of gaps overhead. I don't know the DAL story too well Chart.
Hedge Funds have been shorting and naked shorting DAL to the ground. It is a very crowded trade and was reported by CNBC Friday. My only question is how do you short stocks under $5?
I think you have something wrong here. Check this out thoroughly (which I haven't btw). I think they call it HB 4 down there and I can't see that it applies to this case - just looking real fast. Geo.
What a riduculous statement. The most valuable institutions in our society (large companies, government, legal profession, media etc) have always been controlled by only the most wealthiest families and groups. Companies spend billions each year to grease the wheels of "democracy" via lobbists and favors to get their way. In fact the media is so valuable of a tool that in most countries it has always been controlled the government (e..g communist - china - and other corrupt countries - which is most of them). The ONLY thing stopping corporations making more money is the government and its rules/laws. Each day most of what we see/hear on media is designed to make us give up more of our money and the ability to think for ourselves. We are constantly sold the airbrushed image of "perfection". Every public place is blanketed with these ads. And we must give up 40-60 hours of out time each week to strive for that "perfection", health, environment, be damned....
THE VIOXX VERDICT Merck's health uncertain Potential liability, lack of new drugs cast pall on outlook From Tribune news services Published August 20, 2005 The news of Merck & Co.'s defeat in the first wrongful-death lawsuit involving its painkiller Vioxx sent its shares sinking Friday, erasing nearly $5.2 billion of the company's market value. Merck stock tumbled $2.35, or nearly 8 percent, to $28.06, on the New York Stock Exchange. Trading volume was 38 million shares, compared with an average daily volume of 7.6 million. Analysts expressed concerns about Merck's potential liability, which could exceed the record $21 billion Wyeth expects to pay from suits over the diet-drug combination commonly known as fen-phen. Although Merck plans an appeal, the uncertainty from thousands of other cases pending around the nation will be a drag on share price, said analyst Jon LeCroy at Natexis Bleichroeder Inc. "The bulk of the cases won't hit courts for many years," LeCroy said. "It clearly creates pressure on the stock for as long as this goes on, which could be 10 years." Similar scenarios have played out with other companies that were deluged by lawsuits, he said, such as those involving tobacco, asbestos and breast implants. Analyst Albert L. Rauch at A.G. Edwards & Sons noted that Merck loses patent protection for its top-selling drugs, anti-cholesterol medication Zocor in 2006 and osteoporosis treatment Fosamax in 2008. "They have a limited number of products to replace them," Rauch said. "We are really expecting limited growth for Merck for the rest of the decade." Additional guilty verdicts could force Merck, based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., to fund settlements by cutting its dividend, which now pays better than 5 percent and is a major reason why investors hold the stock, said Rauch. Such a cut would cause a drop in the stock price, he said. Merck's stock has dropped 34 percent since the weeks before it withdrew Vioxx on Sept. 30. It yanked the popular pain reliever from the market after a study found it doubled patients' risks of heart attacks and strokes after 18 months. The loss is especially damaging because Merck initially had been expected to win the case involving a Texas man who died in 2001 of arrhythmia, or an irregular heartbeat, because no studies have linked Vioxx to arrhythmia. The next two cases Merck faces appear somewhat stronger, according to experts. Next month, Merck faces a trial in Atlantic City brought by Michael Humeston, a former postal worker, who had a heart attack in 2001. Humeston's lawyer, Chris Seeger, said Humeston still has lingering effects from the heart attack. Vioxx has been directly linked to heart attacks. In November, the first of 1,800 federal cases will be heard in New Orleans. It revolves around Richard Irvin, a Florida man who was taking Vioxx for a month before his 2001 death from a blood clot in his heart. Scientists have speculated that Vioxx causes cardiovascular problems because it blocks a substance that keeps blood from clotting. "If they can't win the weak ones, what does that say about the strong ones?" asked Anthony Sebok, a professor at Brooklyn Law School. Analyst Jason Napodano at Zacks Investment Research said now anyone taking Vioxx with any type of a cardiovascular problem will feel emboldened to file a lawsuit. More than 4,000 cases have been filed, some presumably stronger than the Texas case. Merck has set aside $675 million to fight them. "A Merck loss means that the number of cases against them increases tenfold," predicted Napodano. The case provided other plaintiff lawyers with a blueprint for how to prove Merck behaved irresponsibly in promoting Vioxx, said Benjamin Zipursky, a professor at Fordham University School of Law. "A Merck loss means the jury believes the plaintiff story about the company's wrongful conduct," said Zipursky. "That carries into the future." But defense lawyers cautioned against reading too much into a single verdict, particularly one from Texas, which is viewed as a "plaintiff-friendly" venue. "You can't draw conclusions about what is going to happen in litigation overall from any one individual case," said John Lavelle, head of the product liability practice of Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll in Philadelphia. But if this verdict marks the beginning of a losing streak, Merck may back away from its pledge to try each case individually and not settle any, experts said. But they said a rash of verdicts would be necessary before the company changes its strategy. "Merck says there will be no surrender," said Sebok, "but you have to wonder if that will be true." Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0508200091aug20,1,1705914.story?coll=chi-business-hed
Itâs ridiculous to you because you believe that Big Government, and a legal system hostile to corporations is better for society than corporations producing innovation in goods and services that improve society as a whole.
Based on the way the press is handling this, regardless of a couple of misstatements in this and other articles, down hard, dead cat bounce as the bd's defend, and down again. Here's the NYTIMES: I'm posting it editied , because you have to be registered...... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- August 21, 2005 For Merck, Vioxx Paper Trail Won't Go Away By ALEX BERENSON HOUSTON, Aug. 20 - Bad facts. Plaintiffs' lawyers love that term. Merck may grow to hate it. On Friday, a Texas jury found Merck liable for the death of Robert C. Ernst, who died in May 2001 after taking Vioxx, a painkiller made by the company. After two days of deliberations, the jury said that Carol Ernst, Mr. Ernst's widow, should be awarded $253.5 million. In interviews after the six-week trial, jurors said they had concluded from the testimony and documents presented by Mrs. Ernst's lawyers that Merck was long aware of Vioxx's potential heart risks but hid those risks from patients. To the jurors, the evidence added up to a mass of damaging bad facts that overwhelmed the company's defense. Over the next few days, lawyers, Wall Street analysts and Merck's own executives will try to explain the company's devastating defeat and to predict what the Texas case means for the thousands of additional Vioxx suits that Merck will face. The answer could determine whether Merck will survive as a strong, independent company or will be crippled for years or even decades. And the answer may not be what Merck or its investors hope to hear. The Texas case was the first Vioxx lawsuit to reach trial, but 4,200 other suits have already been filed, and many are approaching juries. A second state trial is scheduled to begin in New Jersey in September, and the first federal suit is set for New Orleans in November. Merck has said that it plans to take every suit to court rather than offer settlements. "Friday's verdict in Texas was a disappointment to all of us at Merck because we know we acted responsibly," Merck's general counsel, Kenneth C. Frazier, said in a statement on Saturday. "We believe we have meritorious defenses, and we intend to vigorously defend individual Vioxx cases one by one." Should trials continue to go against it, Merck faces a basically unlimited pool of plaintiffs. Over five years, about 20 million people worldwide took Vioxx before Merck stopped selling the drug in September 2004, after a clinical trial found irrefutable evidence that Vioxx had heart risks compared with a placebo. As Merck examines its defeat in Texas, it may be tempted to blame its problems on the ineptitude of its lawyers, who committed basic mistakes like failing to prepare witnesses and badgering Mrs. Ernst, a sympathetic widow, for 90 minutes on cross-examination. Merck may tell itself that the part of Texas where the case was heard is favorable to plaintiffs and that the trial might have turned out differently elsewhere. It might even say that W. Mark Lanier, the Houston lawyer who represented Mrs. Ernst, is so skilled that he won a case that most other plaintiffs' lawyers would not even imagine bringing. All those responses have an element of truth. Unfortunately for Merck, they hardly begin to explain the enormous verdict, which the jury of seven men and five women in Angleton, Tex., about 40 miles south of Houston, returned on a 10-2 vote. The real explanation may lie in the "bad facts" that Mr. Lanier presented to the jury. Mr. Lanier offered jurors a trove of company documents and e-mail messages that revealed how Merck researched Vioxx's heart risks and presented what it knew to doctors and consumers. The documents showed that scientists at Merck were worried about Vioxx's potential cardiovascular risks as early as 1997, two years before Merck began selling the drug. The documents also revealed that Dr. Edward M. Scolnick, who at the time was Merck's top scientist, said in March 2000 that the largest clinical trial ever conducted of Vioxx confirmed that Vioxx had heart risks, as he had feared. They showed Dr. Scolnick later referring to scientists at the Food and Drug Administration as untrustworthy. And they revealed that Merck had stridently resisted the F.D.A.'s efforts to add warnings to Vioxx's label, and that it eventually complied only in ways that the Texas jury found unacceptably obscure. ("You had to dig three levels to see it," one juror, Lorraine Blas, said of the potential heart problems described in one version of the drug's labeling material.) Mr. Lanier also introduced a marketing videotape that showed Merck sales representatives being trained to view doctors' concerns about Vioxx's heart risks as "obstacles" to be avoided or dismissed. Another marketing document taught representatives to play "Dodgeball" when doctors voiced concerns. In their response to Mr. Lanier, lawyers for Merck told the jurors that the company had extensively studied Vioxx and did not believe that the drug had heart risks before last year's clinical trial. They also said that Merck had marketed Vioxx responsibly to patients and doctors. But the jury in Angleton disagreed. In interviews, several jurors said they had intended the verdict, which included $229 million in punitive damages, not to reward Mrs. Ernst but to punish Merck for its actions. Derrick Chizer, one of the jurors, said that the jury wanted to send Merck and the drug industry a message: "Stop doing the minimum to put your drug on the market." Other jurors made similar comments. Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School and frequent critic of the drug industry, said he was not surprised that the jury responded as vehemently as it did. "Even as a seasoned observer of drug company affairs, I have been surprised at the way Merck handled the emerging evidence about cardiac risk with this drug," Dr. Avorn said. "There was an element of the Watergate tapes that I was reminded of: many people had been critical of Nixon for a long time, but even Nixon's critics did not expect to find the documentation of their worst fears made so clearly evident." Dr. Avorn said the jury's decision to set a large sum for punitive damages was far more significant than the separate amount of $24 million it awarded Mrs. Ernst for her pain and suffering. The punitive damages, Dr. Avorn said, reflect the jury's "overall sense of Merck," he said. In the courtroom immediately after the verdict, a reporter asked Mr. Lanier how he had won the case. "The documents," he replied. "The documents tell the truth." Now the documents may haunt Merck in every Vioxx lawsuit that reaches a jury. And Merck may face even more bad facts in future trials, as the other lawyers suing the company work their way through the trove of 7 million papers that Merck has already produced, said Richard T. Evans, a drug industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors are conducting their own criminal investigation of Merck, and with their broad subpoena power they may find documents that plaintiffs' lawyers have not yet uncovered. To be sure, some one-time factors did cause the Angleton case to be particularly disastrous for Merck. In the future, its lawyers will presumably avoid cross-examining 60-year-old widows for 90 minutes, as Gerry Lowry - one of Merck's lead lawyers in this case - did to Mrs. Ernst. Ms. Lowry, for example, repeatedly questioned her about Mr. Ernst's relationship with his adult children from a previous marriage, whom Mrs. Ernst does not know and who were not a part of the lawsuit. Mr. Bicks, the outside lawyer, said Ms. Lowry's approach was fraught with unnecessary risks. "Conventional trial wisdom is that there is no reason to personally attack a person who has lost a loved one." Merck's witnesses may also be better prepared so they are not embarrassed by being unable to answer basic questions about the clinical trials that they say convinced them of Vioxx's safety, as happened to Dr. Alan S. Nies in the Angleton case. In addition, Texas has relatively liberal rules of evidence, so Merck may be able to keep juries from seeing some of the documents Mr. Lanier used in this trial. In its statement after the case, Merck said it believed that Judge Ben Hardin, who oversaw the Angleton case, had wrongly allowed irrelevant and scientifically flawed testimony. And many judges may not allow juries to see some of Merck's more inflammatory marketing materials. But many provocative documents, such as the e-mail messages in which Merck scientists discussed their early concerns about Vioxx, are clearly relevant to the litigation and will be allowed everywhere. And unless Merck can quickly figure out how to explain those documents to juries, it will soon face an enormous problem. Even Merck, with $22 billion in sales and $6 billion in profits last year, can withstand only so many $250 million verdicts before it is forced to rethink its plan to fight every Vioxx lawsuit. "There are 4,000 of these cases out there," said David Berg, a Houston trial lawyer. "The black hole gets bigger the more and more they get hit." Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Back to Top Screw the politics. That's for Chit Chat.
SHORTS BOLD CASE AGAINST MERCK 1. Massive Multi Billion Dollar Legal Liability 2.31 States have no Punitive Award Limits 3. Overwhelming Evidence of Negligence avail for anyone see online including emails from Merck saying Vioxx causes heart failure before drug was on market 4. There is no SHORT FLOAT in the stock, less than 1% short so no potential of a squeeze for some time to come 5. This case was with 11 Republican jurors and a Republican Judge in a Republican state and gave away a quarter billion (although its coming down)Just imagine once this case gets in liberal hands in a liberal state 6. Analyst Albert L. Rauch at A.G. Edwards & Sons noted that Merck loses patent protection for its top-selling drugs, anti-cholesterol medication Zocor in 2006 and osteoporosis treatment Fosamax in 2008. "They have a limited number of products to replace them," Rauch said. "We are really expecting limited growth for Merck for the rest of the decade." 7. These cases are international in scope, UK and Australian lawyers are getting in on the action and experts say 2000 people have died from Vioxx in UK. Merck will have to fight these suits on an international front, not way to settle all of them at once. 8. The attractive Dividend is at risk of being cut: "Additional guilty verdicts could force Merck, based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., to fund settlements by cutting its dividend, which now pays better than 5 percent and is a major reason why investors hold the stock, said Rauch. Such a cut would cause a drop in the stock price, he said." 9. What fund manager is going to want to hold or buy a time bomb in their portfolio that could explode everytime the market opens when news comes out or a new verdict and award is read? They would be holding a time bomb for more than a decade as it will take more than a decade to fight and litigate more than 10,000 cases around the world. This would be a never ending "potential heart attack" in their portfolio or fund, no point intended. There are simply better opportunties out there than being a daredevil and going long a diseased and infested stock. 10. NYTIMES over the weekend reported the Feds have launched an investigation into Merck, they may uncover something that the lawyers have not been able to do, more smoking guns when they sniff out all the docs. 11. Every state attorney General wanting some political fame will go after Merck now on behalf of the state. 12. Shareholder Lawsuits, the state of Oregon, Mutual Funds, Hedge Funds, penions, and private investors have already launched shareholder lawsuits against Merck stating that Merck violated securities laws in the way it handled VIOXX 13. The technical picture of the stock is ugly, the downtrend is resuming and entact, if the 52 week low is taken out this week at 25.60, there is no support for this stock. The $5 billion market cap slide on Friday was done on large volume giving firm credibility to the downward move. 14. Getting long this stock is like investing in a business that is going to get robbed every month for the next 10 years and will not be able to get their money back.
Just curious how society is better these days? In my city the air is so bad, most summer days we are under a smog alert, we have no room left to put our trash, the world is on the brink of WW3 or a never ending war in the middle east, much of corporate america is outsourcing to china and india (Dell, Walmart etc). Do you really think that corporations are friggen charities that only want to make our lives better? Are you that naive? All that bad air means any kids I have have a good chance of having Asthma (will require a drug to treat) and all that stress and having to work 40-50 hours a week will make me want to take a prozac, and I will be so tired @ end of day ony a viagra will do the trick...and all the fast food I'll need a Lipitor and all this typing will make me require arthritis drugs...might as well give the kids some ritalin...I'm too lazy to properly parent them. OR..I could eat healthy and get a bit of exercise each day!! Well at any rate, I have not taken any kind of drug (not even an asprin) since 1999 and I do not plan to unless something major happens.