Anybody over the age of 50 can clearly see what we termed middle class during our teenage years is clearly a memory in more ways than one. Jimmy Carter said it best when he stated that today's middle class resembles the lower class of the 1970's. Want something interesting to read that explains much of this?....http://politicalgates.blogspot.com/2011/12/citigroup-plutonomy-memos-two...
But the application of CPI to Retail Sales is published by the Census, so place to start to detail is probably them and you can ask why they don't apply the individual CPI for categories to the subcomponents of retail sales first. In other words, CPI has values for all sorts of services and goods, different inflation figures for eggs, veggies, trucks, regular autos, even diesel fuel. So, one could take the corresponding CPI subseries and apply it to the subcategories of retail sales.
The PCE price deflators I believe break down similarly but I haven't studied the handbook enough. (hey, someone PAY ME to do that!) ;)
FRED just takes various data series via ftp and puts it into their database and graphing system, retrieval system. If the data is from the Fed, it is usually identified as such. BTW: Complain to FRED about the new beta. I fear disaster for graphs if you check it out. We need the current system available.
doug short at advisors perspectives does at least one and sometimes more than one post a month on real retail sales, citing the NBER's use of it as an indicator (linked in the first paragraph above); since he's dismissed my challenge to it in the past, i figure i'll write him with a link to this...
As long as one is polite and has a clue, one can ask questions via phone to clarify. I have to agree it doesn't make that much sense to to divide by CPI when auto sales are the biggest chunk of retail sales.
i've mentioned in comments on economic blogs several times that the CPI was inappropriate as a deflator for retail sales, since higher prices for services were the driver in CPI increases, and the responses, when i've got them, have been that's the was the NBER and Fed do it...when the two reports came out on the same day last week, i figured it was time to try my hand at it, especially since i botched my last attempt...
I'd have to go digging around in the handbook of methods, but I believe the price deflator for PCE, where retail sales would be an input, is broken down per category.
You'll have to dig there if you haven't, but it's very common for the Census reports to have just a rough element to them and all sorts of "fun stuff" happens when going over the to BEA for inputs into the national accounts and thus GDP and so on.
Good effort, hey, we live for number crunching on EP!
Yet the people who managed to hang onto their homes and recover simply make the spread of income inequality that much worse and those buying a 1st home or trying to recover from foreclosure don't have a prayer's chance with increasing prices. In other words, most of the press do not tell the whole story on soaring home prices.
I find this interesting and if you want to promote this company as comment spam, probably making 10¢ to write a comment, this is the last one here.
Most databases handle different mime types (image, pdf, text, etc.), noSQL is simply a type of database, if they wanted noSQL, they should have chosen MondoDB, it is already proved to scale and is utilized in high traffic sites, many with numerous transactions, sensitive financial and personal data, security, such as eBay. Or plain talk to Amazon for Amazon obviously has one of the most complex, dynamic systems in the world plus they do pretty gosh darn good at cloud architecture.
It has to be political, it obviously is for there are already proved databases, Erlang as a backend language, etc. which are robust, known to scale and some funky little startup gets the contract, don't think so.
There is no good reason to mix financial data with clinical data in an online system on the web. That's also just putting a big invite system to hackers to steal financial data and also gain access to personal medical records.
Gez, this is just unbelievably stupid and once again shows how Government contracts, bureaucratic, lobbyists with their H-1B, foreign Visa labor equals guaranteed failure.
That's the bottom line, there are plenty of Americans, many who need a job, who could have solved this and had a solid system implemented in probably 1 year.
I have been interested in medical record systems for many years but I never heard of NoSQL. Apparently, MarkLogic is an Enterprise NoSQL system that can manage many different formats like radiology images, pdfs and it can easily sort demographic. I think CMS wanted to integrate population data (clinical) with insurance data (actuarial). They want robust system that can be used for data mining. Some people think there was a “political” reason for choosing MarkLogic but I doubt this is true. Some people are confused by HIPAA rules with regard to mixing different kinds of data. The financial aspect of this is interesting. HIPAA prohibits “marketing,” which means a private company cannot purchase demographic information for data mining. But it allows “fundraising.” This means a health care provider (usually a hospital) can use limited data mining to target potential donors.
Mixing private, protected by HIPAA law sounds nuts and the wrong application. A database that is not designed for real time responses, i.e. internal and on a LAN at best, for a website needing to process financial data in real time sounds nuts.
In other words, more and more it sounds like they didn't bother to hire some American engineers who know what they are doing and put them in charge of the architecture and system design. In any tech/engineering firm, one would have a CTO and a VP Engineering and that is where design decisions would come from, not bureaucrats with lobbyists and no bid contracts.
I suspect MarkLogic’s relationship to Zynx Health was a primary reason it was selected. Zynx Health is a “care plan” development system used by hospitals and other medical facilities. MarkLogic (Zynx Health) has been used for an “evidence-based clinical decision support” system at Cedar Sinai. For example— the DB would help the admitting physician create “care plans” for patients being discharged from the facility. That plan would rely on medical data (“evidence”) collected from the patient during hospitalization. This data could be compared to values (such as DRGs) used for classifying the patient’s diagnoses. The DB would be capable of accessing individual patients’ electronic health records (EHRs) and using it for actuarial purposes to help set premiums in the future. Ultimately clinical data used for supporting clinical decisions and actuarial decisions would be contained in the same DB.
Honestly, in the US, what are we supposed to do? I mean EVERY PERSON has to face these issues. Any disease or an accident could literally bankrupt someone and their family. And we all get old, so there's that inevitable health issue. Add in unforeseen accidents on the road or while making bank for someone else in a factory or warehouse job or mining job while risking life and limb without any medical or other benefits = disaster. (Time for the "any job is better than no job" reply unless of course it kills you or takes a limb). Toss in a spouse's pregnancy, or a sick kid, or cancer, or asthma, diabetes, MS, etc. Anything could bankrupt us. A single trip to the hospital could do it. A year's worth of medication could. There's no answer, none. I wish I didn't have to get old and could avoid all accidents and any risk of a disease. If only . . . But it looks like no healthcare and crappy jobs are here to stay.
the american middle class has been pretty much outsourced via "FREE TRADE" agreements... i have yet to see the benefits spread to anyone except the 1%. Of course you can argue that cheaper goods is the benefit to society, but if you eventually lose the economic power to buy those ever cheaper goods that comes to naught. That line of reasoning also discount America's own history when we produced things in the US and paid living wages.
Something is strongly askew with free trade ideology and I have understand it's acceptance by so called liberal economists like Krugman and Reich, etc...
Paul Craig Roberts, a conservative, seems to be the only one left who see's the damage of FREE TRADE on the middle class.
I got a response from the BEA on data discrepancies, yet I'm going to have to rerun some spreadsheets and do some other calculations to see if I can get to the bottom of the problem. Good news is it doesn't sound like some hidden funky something is going on, although I haven't analyzed yet to nail down the figures. Fun, fun, going to take awhile, but would be nice to see if a good guesstimator on revisions can be done here if I can trace out that problem. To me, this is number plug and chug, drives me crazy when figures are off like this.
what the BEA technical note said was that wholesale and retail inventories other than motor vehicles would decrease by $7.6 billion in September; we now have the Manufacturing and Trade: Inventories report telling us inventories were up by $9.4 billion, and only $3.3 billion of that was motor vehicles...looks like a big miss to me, but as you said, that's without a deflator...but both CPI and PPI showed almost no price increases, so i cant see how that will change much...
no matter to me, i'm just planning to write a short paragraph noting that, without much more detail...people have enough trouble following me already, without me writing about inventories minutiae...
I'm now trying to see if I can get the series, etc. but bottom line, at this point, I have no idea how these other groups are estimating GDP revisions based off of inventories for what I come up with vs. what the BEA claims they used are two very different data series and thus results in changes to private inventories (nominal, haven't even dealt with real on this).
In other words, the Census release is basically ok, it's straight data, from the surveys and the big picture aggregate data is just that.
I'm just not going to throw up some article claiming "GDP will be revised up x.x percentage points based on wholesale inventories", for the numbers just don't match at all here.
The problem is the BEA and what they are doing with the inputs to national accounts and there, I still don't have an answer.
I'm sticking with revision guesstimates where the data matches up. This really bothers me, I feel like shadowstats, what am I looking at and is it even real? More if I can dig it out, which ya know, to really dig into this I might be whipping out the Matlab and doing all sorts of fun stuff, not a 2 hour exercise to be sure.
Anybody over the age of 50 can clearly see what we termed middle class during our teenage years is clearly a memory in more ways than one. Jimmy Carter said it best when he stated that today's middle class resembles the lower class of the 1970's. Want something interesting to read that explains much of this?....http://politicalgates.blogspot.com/2011/12/citigroup-plutonomy-memos-two...
But the application of CPI to Retail Sales is published by the Census, so place to start to detail is probably them and you can ask why they don't apply the individual CPI for categories to the subcomponents of retail sales first. In other words, CPI has values for all sorts of services and goods, different inflation figures for eggs, veggies, trucks, regular autos, even diesel fuel. So, one could take the corresponding CPI subseries and apply it to the subcategories of retail sales.
The PCE price deflators I believe break down similarly but I haven't studied the handbook enough. (hey, someone PAY ME to do that!) ;)
here's the FRED explanation for RRSFS:
This series is constructed as Retail and Food Services Sales (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/RSAFS) deflated using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (1982-84=100) (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CPIAUCSL).
FRED just takes various data series via ftp and puts it into their database and graphing system, retrieval system. If the data is from the Fed, it is usually identified as such. BTW: Complain to FRED about the new beta. I fear disaster for graphs if you check it out. We need the current system available.
i havent seen the census use that real retail sales metric; it's most often cited on economic blogs, using the FRED graph: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/RRSFS
doug short at advisors perspectives does at least one and sometimes more than one post a month on real retail sales, citing the NBER's use of it as an indicator (linked in the first paragraph above); since he's dismissed my challenge to it in the past, i figure i'll write him with a link to this...
As long as one is polite and has a clue, one can ask questions via phone to clarify. I have to agree it doesn't make that much sense to to divide by CPI when auto sales are the biggest chunk of retail sales.
i've mentioned in comments on economic blogs several times that the CPI was inappropriate as a deflator for retail sales, since higher prices for services were the driver in CPI increases, and the responses, when i've got them, have been that's the was the NBER and Fed do it...when the two reports came out on the same day last week, i figured it was time to try my hand at it, especially since i botched my last attempt...
I'd have to go digging around in the handbook of methods, but I believe the price deflator for PCE, where retail sales would be an input, is broken down per category.
You'll have to dig there if you haven't, but it's very common for the Census reports to have just a rough element to them and all sorts of "fun stuff" happens when going over the to BEA for inputs into the national accounts and thus GDP and so on.
Good effort, hey, we live for number crunching on EP!
Yet the people who managed to hang onto their homes and recover simply make the spread of income inequality that much worse and those buying a 1st home or trying to recover from foreclosure don't have a prayer's chance with increasing prices. In other words, most of the press do not tell the whole story on soaring home prices.
I find this interesting and if you want to promote this company as comment spam, probably making 10¢ to write a comment, this is the last one here.
Most databases handle different mime types (image, pdf, text, etc.), noSQL is simply a type of database, if they wanted noSQL, they should have chosen MondoDB, it is already proved to scale and is utilized in high traffic sites, many with numerous transactions, sensitive financial and personal data, security, such as eBay. Or plain talk to Amazon for Amazon obviously has one of the most complex, dynamic systems in the world plus they do pretty gosh darn good at cloud architecture.
It has to be political, it obviously is for there are already proved databases, Erlang as a backend language, etc. which are robust, known to scale and some funky little startup gets the contract, don't think so.
There is no good reason to mix financial data with clinical data in an online system on the web. That's also just putting a big invite system to hackers to steal financial data and also gain access to personal medical records.
Gez, this is just unbelievably stupid and once again shows how Government contracts, bureaucratic, lobbyists with their H-1B, foreign Visa labor equals guaranteed failure.
That's the bottom line, there are plenty of Americans, many who need a job, who could have solved this and had a solid system implemented in probably 1 year.
I have been interested in medical record systems for many years but I never heard of NoSQL. Apparently, MarkLogic is an Enterprise NoSQL system that can manage many different formats like radiology images, pdfs and it can easily sort demographic. I think CMS wanted to integrate population data (clinical) with insurance data (actuarial). They want robust system that can be used for data mining. Some people think there was a “political” reason for choosing MarkLogic but I doubt this is true. Some people are confused by HIPAA rules with regard to mixing different kinds of data. The financial aspect of this is interesting. HIPAA prohibits “marketing,” which means a private company cannot purchase demographic information for data mining. But it allows “fundraising.” This means a health care provider (usually a hospital) can use limited data mining to target potential donors.
Mixing private, protected by HIPAA law sounds nuts and the wrong application. A database that is not designed for real time responses, i.e. internal and on a LAN at best, for a website needing to process financial data in real time sounds nuts.
In other words, more and more it sounds like they didn't bother to hire some American engineers who know what they are doing and put them in charge of the architecture and system design. In any tech/engineering firm, one would have a CTO and a VP Engineering and that is where design decisions would come from, not bureaucrats with lobbyists and no bid contracts.
I suspect MarkLogic’s relationship to Zynx Health was a primary reason it was selected. Zynx Health is a “care plan” development system used by hospitals and other medical facilities. MarkLogic (Zynx Health) has been used for an “evidence-based clinical decision support” system at Cedar Sinai. For example— the DB would help the admitting physician create “care plans” for patients being discharged from the facility. That plan would rely on medical data (“evidence”) collected from the patient during hospitalization. This data could be compared to values (such as DRGs) used for classifying the patient’s diagnoses. The DB would be capable of accessing individual patients’ electronic health records (EHRs) and using it for actuarial purposes to help set premiums in the future. Ultimately clinical data used for supporting clinical decisions and actuarial decisions would be contained in the same DB.
Honestly, in the US, what are we supposed to do? I mean EVERY PERSON has to face these issues. Any disease or an accident could literally bankrupt someone and their family. And we all get old, so there's that inevitable health issue. Add in unforeseen accidents on the road or while making bank for someone else in a factory or warehouse job or mining job while risking life and limb without any medical or other benefits = disaster. (Time for the "any job is better than no job" reply unless of course it kills you or takes a limb). Toss in a spouse's pregnancy, or a sick kid, or cancer, or asthma, diabetes, MS, etc. Anything could bankrupt us. A single trip to the hospital could do it. A year's worth of medication could. There's no answer, none. I wish I didn't have to get old and could avoid all accidents and any risk of a disease. If only . . . But it looks like no healthcare and crappy jobs are here to stay.
They just won't get any power where they could do something about it because corporations won't allow it, Elizabeth Warren being a noted exception.
the american middle class has been pretty much outsourced via "FREE TRADE" agreements... i have yet to see the benefits spread to anyone except the 1%. Of course you can argue that cheaper goods is the benefit to society, but if you eventually lose the economic power to buy those ever cheaper goods that comes to naught. That line of reasoning also discount America's own history when we produced things in the US and paid living wages.
Something is strongly askew with free trade ideology and I have understand it's acceptance by so called liberal economists like Krugman and Reich, etc...
Paul Craig Roberts, a conservative, seems to be the only one left who see's the damage of FREE TRADE on the middle class.
I got a response from the BEA on data discrepancies, yet I'm going to have to rerun some spreadsheets and do some other calculations to see if I can get to the bottom of the problem. Good news is it doesn't sound like some hidden funky something is going on, although I haven't analyzed yet to nail down the figures. Fun, fun, going to take awhile, but would be nice to see if a good guesstimator on revisions can be done here if I can trace out that problem. To me, this is number plug and chug, drives me crazy when figures are off like this.
what the BEA technical note said was that wholesale and retail inventories other than motor vehicles would decrease by $7.6 billion in September; we now have the Manufacturing and Trade: Inventories report telling us inventories were up by $9.4 billion, and only $3.3 billion of that was motor vehicles...looks like a big miss to me, but as you said, that's without a deflator...but both CPI and PPI showed almost no price increases, so i cant see how that will change much...
no matter to me, i'm just planning to write a short paragraph noting that, without much more detail...people have enough trouble following me already, without me writing about inventories minutiae...
With clinton's NAFTA and the WTO people can't find any work.
Death by China (2012)
I'm now trying to see if I can get the series, etc. but bottom line, at this point, I have no idea how these other groups are estimating GDP revisions based off of inventories for what I come up with vs. what the BEA claims they used are two very different data series and thus results in changes to private inventories (nominal, haven't even dealt with real on this).
In other words, the Census release is basically ok, it's straight data, from the surveys and the big picture aggregate data is just that.
I'm just not going to throw up some article claiming "GDP will be revised up x.x percentage points based on wholesale inventories", for the numbers just don't match at all here.
The problem is the BEA and what they are doing with the inputs to national accounts and there, I still don't have an answer.
I'm sticking with revision guesstimates where the data matches up. This really bothers me, I feel like shadowstats, what am I looking at and is it even real? More if I can dig it out, which ya know, to really dig into this I might be whipping out the Matlab and doing all sorts of fun stuff, not a 2 hour exercise to be sure.
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