Why we need to socialize losses?

It saves lives.

So say two British and a U.S. scientists in a new study.

There thesis:

• Banking crises induce stress.
• Stress increases the risk of lethal heart infarcts.
• Thus a banking crisis increases the number of heart infarcts.

To verify their thesis the authors compare data on heart infarcts with years of full blown banking crises in various countries around the globe.

They produce this adjusted model:

Log Heart Disease_it = α + β₁BANK_it + β₂GDP_it-1 + β₃INFL_it + β₄URBAN_it + β₅DEP_it + β₆EDUC_it + μ_i + η_t + ε_it

Mangling the data through that formula finds an increase in cardiac arrests in years where countries have a banking crisis.

Therefore, the authors say, it was the right thing to do when the British government nationalized the losses of Northern Rock shareholders. That avoided a national banking crisis which would have led to some additional heart failures.

In other news UK’s health secretary Alan Johnson announced the privatization of the British national health care. He said: "Sorry, we simply ran out of money."