Articles

TASA ID: 1646

Please note: “Police” and “Law Enforcement Officer” are used interchangeably. The following questions are designed to help and enable law enforcement officers to mentally walk in the shoes of every citizen they serve. Thinking like, and feeling for, every community citizen served by law enforcement officers, are the most humanistic and humane ways to protect and serve all. Law Enforcement Officers are invited to take this 121-item survey themselves as an invaluable, progressive forward step toward thinking like the community they are sworn to serve.

TASA ID: 3656

Optimal medical care after a patient has abdominal surgery should involve general surgery.  As an Internal Medicine expert, I was recently asked to review a case involving a bad outcome caused by poor post-operative care after urologic surgery, where care was rendered only by the urology team and medical hospitalist. 

This patient was a 60-year-old woman who’s only prior medical condition was recurrent kidney stones.  Her urologist had performed several outpatient procedures to remove kidney stones from her ureter that required placement and removal of stents.  Due to scarring in her ureter, he then opted to do Robotic ureteral re-implant surgery, which involved removing a piece of her scarred ureter and reconnecting her remaining ureter back into her bladder.

TASA ID: 13992

There has been a lot of press articles on the Archegos blow-up already, but many important questions have still not been asked.

The Factual Background

Archegos Capital Management is a family office, which manages the money of Sung Kook "Bill" Hwang since 2013. Hwang is a "Tiger Cub", a former PM/Analyst from famous Tiger Management. Hwang was managing $500m of his own money, which he earned through his role as a portfolio manager in the previous decade.

Hwang started as a stock Salesman in early 90's at Hyundai Securities. After a legal battle which started in 2009, Hwang and his firm Tiger Asia Management pleaded guilty in 2012 to insider trading & stock manipulation charges. They settled $44m with the SEC and HKD 45m with the HK Securities and Futures Commission.

Archegos is actually the new name of his old company Tiger Asia Management. The firm is based in New York, since Hwang was banned from trading in Hong-Kong in 2014, as well as other Asian markets in which he specialized.

Archegos held large concentrated bets in a few companies, notably ViacomCBS, Discovery, Baidu, Tencent and Vipshop.

Besides his own stock positions (already large), he also held stocks synthetically through swaps at prime brokers.

The primes didn't know of the extent of his other prime relations and how large the positions were. The overall position was not $10bn, but more than $50bn - rumored to reach $100 bn.

The list of affected primes is increasing. Only JP and Deutsche seem to have escaped that wreckage. JP, because they refused to offer services to Archegos, and Deutsche, because they were quick to offload positions.

TASA ID:

According to a report by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), "Nuclear Verdicts" (defined as awards exceeding 10 million dollars) have been on a sharp rise over the last ten plus years. Not only have the number of these verdicts increased, the average award per case has also been skyrocketing. 

There are several hypotheses surrounding the reason behind this dramatic increase. Some have posited that the rise in medical costs necessitates these higher dollar awards, while others claim these increases have happened independent of other financial factors. The ATRI ranked this subject as one of its top research priorities back in 2019. They dove into the issue by looking at hundreds of cases from 2006 to 2019 within the newly created trucking litigation database. They looked at the growth of awards on average, and then did a statistical analysis in which they controlled for the other factors known to influence settlement size.

TASA ID: 18518

Looking back at 2020, there were a lot of unknowns that businesses had to deal with. Those issues impacted both the daily and strategic decision-making of corporate leadership teams and boards. Meanwhile, we also saw massive cost cutting, as well as innovation and increases in productivity (from employees working remotely); with all those adjustments driving profit stability and even growth in many industries. As we move further into 2021, the remote workforce will continue to be a hot topic. It will involve intense debate on all sides as contractors, employers and businesses seek to come back together in a way that is acceptable to everyone, as well as provide a balance between productivity and in-person collaboration. Using a0dvisors and their networks can be, and is, a valuable resource to drive both internal and external strategic relationships and sales channels.