Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:

• Greece Cut Four Steps to Junk by Moody's on Economic 'Risks'. Greece’s credit rating was cut four steps to non-investment grade, or junk, by Moody’s Investors Service, which cited the country’s economic “risks.” “It’s a significant downgrade,” said Kevin Flanagan, a Purchase, New York-based fixed-income strategist for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. “It’s not a surprise to people, but the timing and magnitude is what has taken Treasuries off the lows and is providing some support.”
• Bullard Says Europe Woes Shouldn't Delay Fed Increase. Europe’s debt crisis shouldn’t postpone an increase in the Federal Reserve’s benchmark interest rate, a regional Fed president said, differing from at least two of his colleagues. “Unless events in Europe turn out to be much worse, I think that in the near term, the U.S. is probably a beneficiary of the crisis in Europe” because of lower Treasury yields and cheaper commodities, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said at a press briefing in Tokyo today. “I don’t think it should push back” the date for the Fed to begin tightening, he said.
• Senate's Lincoln Considers Compromise on Swaps Desk Provision. Senator Blanche Lincoln is considering compromise language to her derivatives proposal that would phase in over two years a requirement that commercial banks push out their swaps trading desks to subsidiaries. The proposal also would allow the Federal Reserve to provide system-wide emergency assistance to swaps dealers in exigent circumstances, according to a draft of the compromise obtained by Bloomberg News and confirmed by Lincoln’s office today.
• Human Trafficking 'Serious' in U.S., Report Says. The trafficking of men, women and children for labor and commercial sex is a “serious” problem in the U.S., according to the State Department. The department’s 10th annual report grades 175 nations on their efforts to fight this modern form of slavery. The U.S. is listed for the first time, placed among those countries that are doing best to comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the American law against human trade. Still, the report said the U.S. is a source as well as a transit and destination country for people forced into labor, debt bondage and prostitution. The International Labor Organization estimated there were 12.3 million victims of forced labor, sex trafficking, debt bondage and recruitment of child soldiers worldwide in 2009.
• BlueGold Fund Said to Decline Almost 11% in Year Through June 4. BlueGold Capital Management LLP, the energy hedge fund manager overseeing $1.8 billion in assets, fell 10.7 percent in the year through June 4, according to two investors in the fund. A 2.9 percent drop in the first week of June and a 12.5 percent decrease in May erased gains in the first four months of the year, the two people said, declining to be identified because the information isn’t public.

Wall Street Journal:

• Labor Unrest in China Leads to Rethinking. Japanese managers at a Honda Motor Co. lock factory here have tried everything from government mediation to intimidation to end a strike, but can't bridge what one executive called a "communication gap" with restless young workers—a problem confronting many foreign companies that are rethinking their labor practices amid a wave of industrial unrest.

CNBC:

• Gartman 'Appalled' by US Political Reaction to BP Spill.

MarketWatch:

• Credit Spreads Jump as Investors Seek Safety. Credit spreads on high-yield and investment-grade debt hit six-month highs last week as money fled to the safe haven of Treasury bonds -- just as it seemed investors were getting comfortable with riskier debt.

NY Post:

• TV Screen Test. Families may soon get the chance to watch in-theater movies from the comfort of their living room couch -- for between $20 and $30 a flick. That day appears to be approaching as Hollywood warms up to the "home theater" concept of putting movies on video-on-demand cable platforms while they're still playing in the cinema. It's an effort to compensate for declining DVD sales and to thwart companies like Redbox, whose kiosks rent first-run flicks for $1 a night.
• You're Losing Your Plan. ObamaCare's True Face Emerges. Late last week saw the first leaks of the administration's draft regulations for imple menting the ObamaCare law -- and everything is playing out just as the critics warned. The 3,000-odd pages of legislation left most of the really important (and controversial) policy decisions to the regulations that government agencies were told to issue once the bill passed. Now that those regs are starting to take shape, it's clear that the Obama team is using its new power to exert tight control over the payment and delivery of all formerly "private" health insurance. The ObamaCare law references the Secretary of Health and Human Services almost 2,200 times and uses the phrase "the secretary shall" more than 725. Each reference requires HHS to set new rules on medical care, giving control to an existing federal office or one of 160 new agencies that the bill created.

Business Insider:

• BP(BP) Hires Blackstone Group, Goldman Sachs to Defend Itself Against Takeover Attempts.
• Here's Everything You Need to Know About Who's Exposed in Europe.
  

Zero Hedge:

• Baltic Dry Index Rolls Over. The Baltic Dry index, which is the closest proxy for China's bubbleliciousness, has dropped to one month lows, and continues accelerating its drop to the downside.
• Gallup Polling Paints a Much Bleaker Economic Outlook Picture Than UMichigan.
  

Washington Post:

• HGS(HGSI) Awaiting FDA Approval on Lupus Drug Benlysta. After years of developing what could be the first drug in decades to treat systemic lupus, Human Genome Sciences could receive Food and Drug Administration approval for Benlysta in a matter of months. The Rockville-based company submitted its application to the FDA last week, and executives and Wall Street analysts said they anticipate a smooth and speedy review. If that's the case, Benlysta could be given the green light as early as December. Benlysta is one of three drugs in late-stage development that HGS has submitted to the FDA. Its approval would be a boost for the region's biotech sector. HGS is well-positioned after following an FDA testing protocol.
• Retirements by Baby-Boomer Doctors, Nurses Could Strain Overhaul. Since the passage of the health-care law in March, much has been said about the coming swarm of millions of retiring baby boomers and the strain they will put on the nation's health-care system. That's only half the problem. Overlooked in the conversation is a particular group of boomers: doctors and nurses who are itching to call it quits. Health-care economists and other experts say retirements in that group over the next 10 to 15 years will greatly weaken the health-care workforce and leave many Americans who are newly insured under the new legislation without much hope of finding a doctor or nurse. Nearly 40 percent of doctors are 55 or older, according to the Center for Workforce Studies of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Included in that group are doctors whose specialties will be the pillars of providing care in 2014, when the overhaul kicks in; family medicine and general practitioners (37 percent); general surgeons (42 percent); pediatrics (33 percent), and internal medicine and pediatrics (35 percent). About a third of the much larger nursing workforce is 50 or older, and about 55 percent expressed an intention to retire in the next 10 years, according to a Nursing Management Aging Workforce Survey by the Bernard Hodes Group. New registered nurses are flowing from colleges, but not enough to replace the number planning to leave the profession. "Moving into the future, we see a very large shortage of nurses, about 300,000," said Peter Buerhaus, a nurse and health-care economist and a professor at Vanderbilt University. "That number does not account for the demand created by reform. That's a knockout number. It knocks the system down. It stops it." In an article for the Journal of the American Medical Association, Buerhaus and colleagues Douglas Staiger and David Auerbach predicted that there will be at least 100,000 fewer doctors in the workplace than the 1.1 million the federal government projects will be needed in 2020 under the health-care overhaul. Reform will add demand on top of shortages already projected, and as a result the health-care workforce might not be attractive. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 75 percent of nurses said in a survey they think the shortage "presents a major problem for the quality of their work life, the quality of patient care, and the amount of time that nurses can spend with patients." In a survey by New York University's Christine Kovner, 13 percent of newly registered nurses changed principal jobs after a year, and 37 percent said they were ready to change jobs.

Advertising Age:

• Pandora: iPad Will Be a Bigger Ad Platform for Us Than iPhone.
  

Boston Herald:

• Anti-Addiction Drug Gets Boost. It took seven turns at detox centers and more than a few brushes with the law before Jennifer Ulich was able to kick her heroin habit.

Huffington Post:

• Obama's Treasury Dept. Working to Defeat Derivatives Proposal 'Of Utmost Importance' to Reforming Wall Street.

Rasmussen Reports:

• Daily Presidential Tracking Poll. The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 24% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -18 (see trends).
• 58% Favor Repeal of the Health Care Bill. For the second week in a row, 58% of Likely U.S. Voters favor repeal of the national health care plan adopted into law by Congress in late March. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds 36% oppose repeal. These findings include 47% who Strongly Favor repeal and 28% who are Strongly Opposed.

Politico:

• Gulf Fuels New Energy-Bill Push. President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies plan a major new push for a broad global warming bill, fueled in part by public outrage over the BP disaster, according to top aides. Joel Benenson, a pollster for the Democratic National Committee and Obama’s presidential campaign, argues in a new briefing for top Capitol Hill officials that a comprehensive energy bill “could give Democrats a potent weapon to wield against Republicans in the fall.” “The oil spill is intensifying the public’s desire for clean energy investments and increased regulation on corporate polluters,” Benenson writes in the briefing, which he prepared on behalf of the League of Conservation Voters. “In the aftermath of the spill, people firmly believe Congress needs to do more than just make BP pay. Even when pressed with opposition messaging that now is not the time for some ‘job killing energy tax,’ people coalesce around comprehensive clean energy reform. Consequently, support for a comprehensive energy bill is very high.
  

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

• European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso are in favor of European financial aid to ease Spain's debt. Trichet and Barroso are concerned about the difficulties of Spanish banks.