The Market And Energy Page, T+298 -- November 15, 2017

Until I read The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex: Jonathan Eig, c. 2014, I had no idea how important Puerto Rico is/was to the US pharmaceutical industry. I doubt 99.999% of Americans have any idea how big a role Puerto Rico has played and is playing in Big Pharma. Now this story, reported in most newspapers, but I first saw it in The Bismarck Tribune, of all places: the current medical crisis: a shortage of IV bags. 

I could link to any number of sources, but I will link The Washington Post: hospitals scramble to avert saline shortage in wake of Puerto Rico disaster. From the article:
first, an update to the story --

Update: The Food and Drug Administration has given Baxter International permission to import saline and other intravenous solutions from its manufacturing facilities in Australia and Ireland to ease shortages in the United States, according to letters that the company sent its customers on Monday. 

Note: BAX was selling for $33/share on year ago; currently, BAX is selling for $64/share. It pays a paltry dividend of 1%.

Now, back to the original Washington Post story:

The hurricane that wreaked havoc on Puerto Rico last month has disrupted production of widely used IV solutions. Several prominent hospitals across the country are scrambling to find alternative supplies, change the way they administer drugs and devise backup plans to make the fluids themselves.

The products affected are smaller-volume bags of sodium chloride, known as saline, and dextrose. These normally ubiquitous solutions are used to rehydrate patients and to dilute medications from antibiotics to painkillers to cancer drugs. Their manufacturer, Baxter International, has said that “multiple production days” were lost in the wake of Hurricane Maria, and it has set up an allocation system for hospitals based on past purchases.

So much is contained in those two paragraphs:

• does anyone recall W Edwards Deming, the father of "just in time" delivery? His principles work just fine ... until they don't
• as a general rule, take any product bought in the US, and there is a two-week supply
• (a rule of thumb is a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation. It is an easily learned and easily applied procedure for approximately calculating or recalling some value, or for making some determination)
• the company has come up with ways to allocate the bags that are in short supply (can you imagine if the federal government stepped in to manage this crisis?)
• these are not the "big" bags of saline we see in all the television shows, but the little bags that are "piggy-backed" to the larger bags to administer IV medication; my hunch: intensive care nurses will figure this out and solve the problem just fine, thank you; I have huge respect for intensive care nurses 

Much more at the article: it won't be just IV bags in short supply; there are four dozen (48) FDA-approved drugmaking facilies in Puerto Rico; and at least six major US pharmaceutical companies.

myndnow also had a story on this crisis.

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Other Short Notes

Buffett adds more Apple, reduces IBM stake by another third. 

The wealthy did very, very, very well during the two "lost decades": the richest 1% now own half the world's wealth. They added to their pile in the past twelve months. Data points:

• total wealth in the world grew by 6%over the past 12 months
• total wealth in the world now at $280 trillion
• more than half of the new $17 trillion was in the US, which grew $8.5 trillion richer
• the top 1% now own 50.1% of the world's wealth, up from 45.5% in 2001
• Credit Suiss attributed much of this to President Trump -- yes, seriously
• millionaires
• expected to the best in the coming years
• 36 million millionaires in the world; numbers expected to grow to 44 million by 2022 -- only 5 years from now
• US, #1, with 15.3 million people worth $1 million or more
• Japan, #2, 2.7 million milliionaires
• UK, #3, 2.2 million
• China, #5, 1.9 million -- but that will grow to 2.8 million b 2022