There was a typo earlier but one could see the mistake from the U-6 graph.
Come on folks, 500 people have read this overview by the time I noticed this error. When ya see a mistake, please let us know so we can correct it. Nothing worse than bad numbers floating around the Internets.
in the menus, under twitter is now comment twitter. We're sending out, on a separate feed, the comments from this site. I'd like to integrate twitter more since to me it's very easy to use, but since you write a lot of comments on EP, I thought you'd like to know. Hopefully it will get more readers and I wish more actual discussion!
Let's see, it started with making much (Bink) of the Master Lock story. Then, Eduardo Porter explores how little we should make of how much has been made of the Master Lock story. Then he goes on to explore how much we can make of ... anything at all ... with the help of an unwarranted assumption
"If outsourcing sharpens their edge [edge of 'our most competitive firms'] on world markets, punishing then [sic: 'them', i.e., 'our most competitive firms'] for doing so could destroy American jobs." -- Porter, in NYT, 3 April 2012
Porter also commits other fallacies when he slyly inserts the word "punish" into the argument. Who in their right mind would ever want to punish "our most competitive firms"?
But Porter is a piker compared to Prof. Lawrence, whose grand speculative premise is totally awesome. What was it? Oh yeah, "if every single thing we bought was made in America ... and we closed our doors to imports." Wow! What a concept! Ah, yes, such incredible things can be demonstrated on the strength of a categorically false premise.
If pigs had wings ... anything said by a university professor would be ... meaningful and true!
Thanks to brleed for pointing to 1907 panic and T. Roosevelt!
Debt-to-equity, Basel Agreement(s) and proposal or approach to increasing primary capital -- all interesting and relevant. (Problem is, of course, that good ideas and rational thinking don't get much of a listen -- in MSM or in Congress or anywhere else.)
Boy oh boy. In such a 10 second scan I saw about 7 things wrong with those assumptions. Yet another example where the Harvard label, I shake my head, wondering do they realize how they are tarnishing their brand name? Anywho, 1st assumption just wrong in a 2 second scan, uh, there is something called exports as well as wholesale, raw goods for other businesses.
There is so much economic fiction, propaganda and B.S. out there to really prove how messed up each one is would be a full-time job. Sometimes things are so obviously incorrect, I just have to label it as calculation twist or math spam.
If you noticed on the April Fool's joke, I actually threw up some math spam and spuriousness with insider jokes on mathematical symbols. I had fun, although I don't know if our readers did! ;)
Is there anything about social media that can fix social media? No! Maybe the public, the courts and the bloggosphere. This is the New Guilded Age and these are the new robber barrons.
Anyhow, there much more idiocy a-popping over in the Times patch. This one seems to claim we cannot benefit on the job front from from fixing the trade deficit.
I had to respond. From the 'Econonics' page. You are automatically disqualified from being a NYTimes economist if you are literate in NeoClassical Economics.
Kwak over at Baseline Scenario found something in the NYT which says it all. There is a claim this time there will not be fraud for small investors, referencing crowd sourcing....because.....they can do background checks on Facebook.
Unbelievable. I'm here to tell ya scams and Flim-Flam mans have discovered not just Facebook, but LinkedIn, Twitter and any other place you want. Seriously, scams and absurdities make it to CNBC and during the dot con era, CNN Moneyline was the media outlet of unbelievable tall tales.
Anyone here believe we could have found out about Enron via Facebook in 2000? I think not! How about now, say anyone see posting on MFGlobal using customer funds to make margin calls? No one like that or retweet that?
I am working on some details from March payrolls to see where we stand with crappy jobs as overall job growth. Bear with me, this is hand crank time and additionally, the damn BLS statistics are so noisy, have so much error, to me at least, one cannot take one month's of data at all and say too much. Then, we have our "summer winter" this year which is lookin' good to have thrown off the seasonal adjustments.
Anyway, I will replace this comment with a link to the new post when I get it published.
QE3 is misguided and wrong. World-wide, banks need to increase their Primary Capital under the Basel Agreement(s). Their are a number of choices that range from new issues to the out of the box stuff. My idea is to have central banks buy new issues. This way you get higher equity percentages so banks can lend more with less risk. Central Banks are mercantile entities whose shares are owned by member banks. To the extent they have equity and treasuries, all of them can by member bank stocks.
If you go the QE3 route, you get higher debt-to-equity, which is self-defeating, less systemically stable and increases the general level of paranoia about the banks. When you issue new equity, you have higher equity to debt and more funds to lend. The trade-off is that new issues dilute Primary Earnings per Share. A relatively small price to stay in business.
Of course, you lean on the banks to start making loans of all kinds. The historical model for this is Teddy Roosevelt in the 1907 Panic. TR leaned on Rockefeller, Carnegie, JP Morgan and Mellon to invest and pull America from the Crisis.
The Federal Open Market Committee consists of twelve voting members: the seven members of the Board of Governors and five of the twelve Federal Reserve Bank presidents. The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York serves on a continuous basis; the presidents of the other Reserve Banks serve one-year terms on a rotating basis beginning on January 1 of each year. The rotating seats are filled from the following four groups of Banks, one Bank president from each group: Boston, Philadelphia, and Richmond; Cleveland and Chicago; Atlanta, St. Louis, and Dallas; and Minneapolis, Kansas City, and San Francisco.
But confusing as hell is why there are two still vacant seats on the board of governors is our never ending crappy Senate refusing to confirm nominees. Supposedly two more went up or something.
So, their crazy voting/structure becomes even more confusing with the missing board of governors members. They new nominees were voted out of Senate committee to confirm, but the full Senate chamber has to confirm them and there is more doubt, esp. because Obama nominated a G.W. Bush administration official as one of the new nominees. Shelby placed a hold on previous Obama nominee, Diamond, and they have been playing games with board of governor confirmations since 2006, so it makes tabulating out these votes a really headache. ;)
I confess to the ultimate no-no here at EP. I had my numbers off, and they are very simple numbers!
There are actually only TWO vacancies on the Board of Governors. Those two should have been filled yesterday or earlier, but there are only two or them. Of course, the FOMC and the Board of Governors -- the entire Fed -- is completely apolitical
Also, there are TEN members of the FOMC, including the President of the Reserve Bank of New York (currently William Dudley). The President of the Reserve Bank of New York is always automatically a permanent member of the FOMC and also vice-chair.
Bernanke does run the Fed staff and so he deserves some credit for good research and numbers coming from the staff.
BTW: Jeffrey Lacker, President of the Federal Reserve of Richmond, was the lone dissenting vote at the meeting. It appears that Lacker is an inflation hawk, favoring higher overnight rate. (At least that's what it looks like to me.)
From the minutes:
Mr. Lacker dissented because he did not agree that economic conditions were likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate at least through late 2014. In his view, with inflation close to the Committee's objective of 2 percent, the economy expanding at a moderate pace, and downside risks somewhat diminished, the federal funds rate will most likely need to rise considerably sooner to prevent the emergence of inflationary pressures.
Some voting members rotate out but basically two dissents out of the 10 is not a big deal, 3 seems to shake the ire of Wall Street and make them think something is going in another direction.
That said, we wrote here multiple articles trying to say this claim QE3 was bought to happen, which I believe GS analysts and a host of others were claiming it would, was wrong. I couldn't resist an "I told ya so" on it. It's like they believe this is still world of Greenspan, speaking in cryptic code, but Bernanke & Co. speak more like typical Academics, although still in that dense triple word to say one thing FOMC/Federal Reserve speak. Still to me it was very clear QE3 was not going to happen.
IMHO, the FOMC is split. No consensus. There is no consensus among the four public members, and no consensus among the five members from the Regional Banks. And, in an election year, does anyone really think that FOMC will take some action by a close vote? I doubt that any Regional Bank member would consider casting a decisive vote with the Chairman for anything. And, if the Regional Bank members should or could act together in defiance of the Chair, that would be tantamount to those members taking the blame for whatever disastrous economic events and conditions develop between now and the election. The best strategy is to hope for the best ... and then, with luck, take credit for the relatively benign outcome, based on that you did nothing.
Consider this -- as members of the FOMC surely do -- the authority of the Fed has never, for at least two-thirds of a century, been called into question as it is today ... not that there's anything that the FOMC really can do to improve things.
Why is so little attention given to the situation that there are three vacancies for public members (to be filled by nomination and approval of the Senate). And why is there no investigation in the media, or even in academia, as to the causes of that situation? -- considering the blocking of nominations in the Senate and harassment of eminently suitable nominees (and even potential nominees) by MSM, such that nominees and even potential nominees drop out from the process? The United States Congress should investigate .. itself! MSM should investigate ... itself! Or, as currently in the UK, they could at least investigate each other.
I hope to make this "jobs report" weekend with more analysis coming. But the CES or establishment survey has more accuracy than the CPS survey and that's where those -34k of retail trade jobs is coming from. Since this is March, not a holiday season here, it's not clear yet where these losses came from. I think Sears and Best Buy closed a host of stores and I saw JCPenny was doing layoffs, but I don't know how much of the tally is due to layoffs, retail failures or if its systemic, across the sector yet. If it's just a few retailers bombing out because they cannot adjust, then it's a blip, but if it's across the board, it will imply a potential retail sales slowdown.
Anyone else notice that Ben's speech on unemployment as well as the FOMC got it right on predicting a payrolls jobs curious and unusual event for January and February now that March payrolls have come out?
While we can argue over Fed's actions and slam monetary policy, at least in speeches we are seeing way more accurate and realistic economic metrics, predictions as of late.
Nice change from completely missing the housing bubble!
Bob, the high level nodes in the 4 part IP address show the geographic area.
Why don't you and others just get a simple clue where the attacks are coming from
and just block the bastards? Next, we deal with PNTR trade the same way.
The point of crappy jobs growing is well taken. When the well touted manufacturing rebound started, GE and GM started paying people on the lines $12-$14 per hour. In the 40s to the 60s, production workers could buy hunting and fishing lodges on the lakes with a lunch bucket job. In today's way of looking at things, only college
grads are entitled to a living wage.
Well below what they used to pay. In the mean time, the IT domestic worker has seen his share of the STEM jobs shrink from 90 per cent to 15 percent according to the USDOL stats. I can attest that rates for STEM are 80 percent of what they were in 2000.
They will remind you that you are lucky to have a job, never mind a good one. How many of them would get up at 5:00 and take 3 trains for a job? But that is the kind of thing it takes to hold down any kind of job. The good jobs are some of the crappiest.
There was a typo earlier but one could see the mistake from the U-6 graph.
Come on folks, 500 people have read this overview by the time I noticed this error. When ya see a mistake, please let us know so we can correct it. Nothing worse than bad numbers floating around the Internets.
in the menus, under twitter is now comment twitter. We're sending out, on a separate feed, the comments from this site. I'd like to integrate twitter more since to me it's very easy to use, but since you write a lot of comments on EP, I thought you'd like to know. Hopefully it will get more readers and I wish more actual discussion!
Let's see, it started with making much (Bink) of the Master Lock story. Then, Eduardo Porter explores how little we should make of how much has been made of the Master Lock story. Then he goes on to explore how much we can make of ... anything at all ... with the help of an unwarranted assumption
"If outsourcing sharpens their edge [edge of 'our most competitive firms'] on world markets, punishing then [sic: 'them', i.e., 'our most competitive firms'] for doing so could destroy American jobs." -- Porter, in NYT, 3 April 2012
Porter also commits other fallacies when he slyly inserts the word "punish" into the argument. Who in their right mind would ever want to punish "our most competitive firms"?
But Porter is a piker compared to Prof. Lawrence, whose grand speculative premise is totally awesome. What was it? Oh yeah, "if every single thing we bought was made in America ... and we closed our doors to imports." Wow! What a concept! Ah, yes, such incredible things can be demonstrated on the strength of a categorically false premise.
If pigs had wings ... anything said by a university professor would be ... meaningful and true!
Thanks to brleed for pointing to 1907 panic and T. Roosevelt!
Debt-to-equity, Basel Agreement(s) and proposal or approach to increasing primary capital -- all interesting and relevant. (Problem is, of course, that good ideas and rational thinking don't get much of a listen -- in MSM or in Congress or anywhere else.)
Speak of the devil. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. That's just unbelievable, instagram is an app, a glorified mobile photoshop.
Boy oh boy. In such a 10 second scan I saw about 7 things wrong with those assumptions. Yet another example where the Harvard label, I shake my head, wondering do they realize how they are tarnishing their brand name? Anywho, 1st assumption just wrong in a 2 second scan, uh, there is something called exports as well as wholesale, raw goods for other businesses.
There is so much economic fiction, propaganda and B.S. out there to really prove how messed up each one is would be a full-time job. Sometimes things are so obviously incorrect, I just have to label it as calculation twist or math spam.
If you noticed on the April Fool's joke, I actually threw up some math spam and spuriousness with insider jokes on mathematical symbols. I had fun, although I don't know if our readers did! ;)
Is there anything about social media that can fix social media? No! Maybe the public, the courts and the bloggosphere. This is the New Guilded Age and these are the new robber barrons.
Anyhow, there much more idiocy a-popping over in the Times patch. This one seems to claim we cannot benefit on the job front from from fixing the trade deficit.
I had to respond. From the 'Econonics' page. You are automatically disqualified from being a NYTimes economist if you are literate in NeoClassical Economics.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/dont-expect-many-new-factor...
Kwak over at Baseline Scenario found something in the NYT which says it all. There is a claim this time there will not be fraud for small investors, referencing crowd sourcing....because.....they can do background checks on Facebook.
Unbelievable. I'm here to tell ya scams and Flim-Flam mans have discovered not just Facebook, but LinkedIn, Twitter and any other place you want. Seriously, scams and absurdities make it to CNBC and during the dot con era, CNN Moneyline was the media outlet of unbelievable tall tales.
Anyone here believe we could have found out about Enron via Facebook in 2000? I think not! How about now, say anyone see posting on MFGlobal using customer funds to make margin calls? No one like that or retweet that?
I am working on some details from March payrolls to see where we stand with crappy jobs as overall job growth. Bear with me, this is hand crank time and additionally, the damn BLS statistics are so noisy, have so much error, to me at least, one cannot take one month's of data at all and say too much. Then, we have our "summer winter" this year which is lookin' good to have thrown off the seasonal adjustments.
Anyway, I will replace this comment with a link to the new post when I get it published.
QE3 is misguided and wrong. World-wide, banks need to increase their Primary Capital under the Basel Agreement(s). Their are a number of choices that range from new issues to the out of the box stuff. My idea is to have central banks buy new issues. This way you get higher equity percentages so banks can lend more with less risk. Central Banks are mercantile entities whose shares are owned by member banks. To the extent they have equity and treasuries, all of them can by member bank stocks.
If you go the QE3 route, you get higher debt-to-equity, which is self-defeating, less systemically stable and increases the general level of paranoia about the banks. When you issue new equity, you have higher equity to debt and more funds to lend. The trade-off is that new issues dilute Primary Earnings per Share. A relatively small price to stay in business.
Of course, you lean on the banks to start making loans of all kinds. The historical model for this is Teddy Roosevelt in the 1907 Panic. TR leaned on Rockefeller, Carnegie, JP Morgan and Mellon to invest and pull America from the Crisis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907
There are 12 FOMC members, voting members:
But confusing as hell is why there are two still vacant seats on the board of governors is our never ending crappy Senate refusing to confirm nominees. Supposedly two more went up or something.
So, their crazy voting/structure becomes even more confusing with the missing board of governors members. They new nominees were voted out of Senate committee to confirm, but the full Senate chamber has to confirm them and there is more doubt, esp. because Obama nominated a G.W. Bush administration official as one of the new nominees. Shelby placed a hold on previous Obama nominee, Diamond, and they have been playing games with board of governor confirmations since 2006, so it makes tabulating out these votes a really headache. ;)
I confess to the ultimate no-no here at EP. I had my numbers off, and they are very simple numbers!
There are actually only TWO vacancies on the Board of Governors. Those two should have been filled yesterday or earlier, but there are only two or them. Of course, the FOMC and the Board of Governors -- the entire Fed -- is completely apolitical
Also, there are TEN members of the FOMC, including the President of the Reserve Bank of New York (currently William Dudley). The President of the Reserve Bank of New York is always automatically a permanent member of the FOMC and also vice-chair.
Bernanke does run the Fed staff and so he deserves some credit for good research and numbers coming from the staff.
BTW: Jeffrey Lacker, President of the Federal Reserve of Richmond, was the lone dissenting vote at the meeting. It appears that Lacker is an inflation hawk, favoring higher overnight rate. (At least that's what it looks like to me.)
From the minutes:
Some voting members rotate out but basically two dissents out of the 10 is not a big deal, 3 seems to shake the ire of Wall Street and make them think something is going in another direction.
That said, we wrote here multiple articles trying to say this claim QE3 was bought to happen, which I believe GS analysts and a host of others were claiming it would, was wrong. I couldn't resist an "I told ya so" on it. It's like they believe this is still world of Greenspan, speaking in cryptic code, but Bernanke & Co. speak more like typical Academics, although still in that dense triple word to say one thing FOMC/Federal Reserve speak. Still to me it was very clear QE3 was not going to happen.
IMHO, the FOMC is split. No consensus. There is no consensus among the four public members, and no consensus among the five members from the Regional Banks. And, in an election year, does anyone really think that FOMC will take some action by a close vote? I doubt that any Regional Bank member would consider casting a decisive vote with the Chairman for anything. And, if the Regional Bank members should or could act together in defiance of the Chair, that would be tantamount to those members taking the blame for whatever disastrous economic events and conditions develop between now and the election. The best strategy is to hope for the best ... and then, with luck, take credit for the relatively benign outcome, based on that you did nothing.
Consider this -- as members of the FOMC surely do -- the authority of the Fed has never, for at least two-thirds of a century, been called into question as it is today ... not that there's anything that the FOMC really can do to improve things.
Why is so little attention given to the situation that there are three vacancies for public members (to be filled by nomination and approval of the Senate). And why is there no investigation in the media, or even in academia, as to the causes of that situation? -- considering the blocking of nominations in the Senate and harassment of eminently suitable nominees (and even potential nominees) by MSM, such that nominees and even potential nominees drop out from the process? The United States Congress should investigate .. itself! MSM should investigate ... itself! Or, as currently in the UK, they could at least investigate each other.
I hope to make this "jobs report" weekend with more analysis coming. But the CES or establishment survey has more accuracy than the CPS survey and that's where those -34k of retail trade jobs is coming from. Since this is March, not a holiday season here, it's not clear yet where these losses came from. I think Sears and Best Buy closed a host of stores and I saw JCPenny was doing layoffs, but I don't know how much of the tally is due to layoffs, retail failures or if its systemic, across the sector yet. If it's just a few retailers bombing out because they cannot adjust, then it's a blip, but if it's across the board, it will imply a potential retail sales slowdown.
Retail jobs dropped almost 34,000 ???
That's bad news.
Every Walmart store has a representative from the Peoples Republic of China working in the store. This is how they gave PillowTex got the pillow job.
Anyone else notice that Ben's speech on unemployment as well as the FOMC got it right on predicting a payrolls jobs curious and unusual event for January and February now that March payrolls have come out?
While we can argue over Fed's actions and slam monetary policy, at least in speeches we are seeing way more accurate and realistic economic metrics, predictions as of late.
Nice change from completely missing the housing bubble!
Bob, the high level nodes in the 4 part IP address show the geographic area.
Why don't you and others just get a simple clue where the attacks are coming from
and just block the bastards? Next, we deal with PNTR trade the same way.
The point of crappy jobs growing is well taken. When the well touted manufacturing rebound started, GE and GM started paying people on the lines $12-$14 per hour. In the 40s to the 60s, production workers could buy hunting and fishing lodges on the lakes with a lunch bucket job. In today's way of looking at things, only college
grads are entitled to a living wage.
Well below what they used to pay. In the mean time, the IT domestic worker has seen his share of the STEM jobs shrink from 90 per cent to 15 percent according to the USDOL stats. I can attest that rates for STEM are 80 percent of what they were in 2000.
They will remind you that you are lucky to have a job, never mind a good one. How many of them would get up at 5:00 and take 3 trains for a job? But that is the kind of thing it takes to hold down any kind of job. The good jobs are some of the crappiest.
Pages