The Last Market Crash Was Preceded By 11 Months Of Corrections And Complacency, More Complacency And Then Fear

From the October 12, 2007 S&P500 high of 1561.80, the market corrected over a period of 11 months to 1255.07 on September 19, 2008, down 306.73 or 19.6%, just shy of bear territory.

Did we believe it would continue lower? No.

Then over the next 5.5 months the market crashed another 45.6%, 571.69 points, to 683.38 on March 6, 2009 (and fully 28% in less than a month between September 19th and October 10th, 2008).

The total decline was 878.42 points, or 56.2%, and took 16.5 long months to unfold.

After all that did we believe it had bottomed? No, in large part because by Thanksgiving 2008 the carnage seemed to be over, but it wasn't: From 800.03 on November 21 the market went on to lose another 14.6% over the next 3.5 months. At that point it was very hard to believe it was over.

The three dead cat bounces on October 31st at 968.75, January 2nd at 931.80 and February 6th at 868.60 tortured the hopeful all the way down.

Contempt For The Middle Class Was Standard Communist Fare In The 1920s, But Noemie Emery Never Mentions It

Here, in "Obama's polls fall as middle class gets his number":

Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute, whose latest book, The Revolt Against The Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, explains all you wanted to know about Obama, and much else. ... Siegel points to an alternative point of dissension: a contempt for the middle class, for commerce, and thus for most of the American culture, that predated the New Deal by more than a decade, and poisons our waters today. From this angle, the road to perdition (and/or Obama) was paved around 1920, when the best and the brightest, depressed by the Great War and the funk that came after, decided all was not well in the world and the nation, and the great middle class was to blame.

The progressives of the 1920s drank deeply from the well of Marxist disdain for the middle class and drew inspiration from it, for example from the likes of Bela Kun writing in Pravda, May 4, 1918, here, in "Marx and the Middle Classes":

“The internal enemy” of the proletarian Russian Revolution is constituted first and foremost by the lower middle classes. ... [T]hough the representatives of various shades of lower middle-class Socialism are constantly referring to Marx, in reality there is no greater sacrilege than this. ... The lower middle-class is not fit to wield power, and a long government by it is unthinkable. ... [T]he lower middle-class masses are the most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. ... [T]he lower middle class attitude — attachment to the idea of private property, more or less open striving to uphold credit, terror of every fundamental social disturbance — is in practice the greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution.

Given Obama's early and deep appreciation of Marxism through the influence of people like Frank Marshall Davis, the pussy-footing around of people like Noemie Emery has gotten more than a little annoying at this late stage of the game. Obama is nothing more than a Trojan Horse trying to bring this communist vision into the present disguised as helping the middle class when what he really wants to do is wipe it out. He's off to a good start.

The black Florida Republican recently investigated by the Secret Service for suggesting Obama should be arrested, tried and hung as a traitor may be more right than he knows.

Commenters At Libertarian National Center For Policy Analysis Sure Do Hate The Baby Boomers And Their Houses

See the comments to this story at the website of the organization run by frequent Forbes contributor John Goodman.

Libertarian Free-Trader Immigration Amnesty Supporter Stephen Moore Moves To Heritage From The Wall Street Journal

Demented Jim DeMint makes good on his promise to make overtures to the libertarian movement by making Stephen Moore of Club for Growth fame its chief economist.

Story here.

Central England Temperatures In 2013 107th Warmest Going Back . . . 354 Years!

2013 just barely made it into the top third of the warmest years in the last 354. Hey, it beats 118th, the piker.

As reported here:

"Last year was also the 107th warmest on the full CET record, going back to 1659, tying with 1900."

"The longest instrumental temperature record" in existence (here).

Gee, how come 1900 was so similarly warm without all those contributing human factors we have today? NASA claims it was the 7th warmest year since 1850.

Flashback 9/12/12: Obama Lumped-In "Acts Of Terror" In General With The "Brutal Acts" Of The Benghazi Attack

Mitt Romney famously overlooked the phrase "acts of terror" from President Obama's Rose Garden remarks the day after the Benghazi attack during the second presidential debate of 2012: "You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror. It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you're saying?"

It came up again here recently discussing a new documentary about Mitt Romney's campaign:

"How bad was it?" asked one Romney family member in the green room immediately after the debate, but before Romney himself had returned.

"It wasn't good," said another.

"Who briefed him on [Benghazi]?" one of the sons asked. "Someone got it wrong."

Of course, the video of the president's remarks in the Rose Garden shows that the "acts of terror" statement was simply the obligatory cya type of generalization he had to make in a situation like that. The whole tenor of the ensuing weeks' comments from the regime blaming Benghazi on an anti-Muhammad video was set at the outset of the president's Rose Garden remarks when he stated rather abruptly and intrusively without mentioning that video: "We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others." The attempt to shape the event in that way looks increasingly like a diversion in light of the number of CIA on the ground in Benghazi revealed last summer and the military's ignorance of the annex just recently revealed in the Senate's report on the incident. Unfortunately for Mitt Romney, those things came out way too far after the election to do him any good. Something obviously still stinks in Benghazi.

“No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”

(at about 4:18, here)

"Feminists are the main reason why we have broken families, high divorce rate, illegitimacy"

Phyllis Schlafly, quoted here:

Radical feminists, Schlafly said, still think men are the enemy, but the feminists, she contended, are “the main reason why we have broken families, high divorce rate, illegitimacy.”

“I think the feminists have been responsible for destroying the family,” she said. “They are the biggest enemy of the family.”

Is Obama's Interminable Recourse To Racism Charges Marijuana-Induced Paranoia?

Obama recently blamed the sudden drop in his popularity on racism in the country, a surprisingly paranoid response from someone who has won two national elections rather decisively.

Maybe he's still smoking more than cigarettes in the White House (on the night of Benghazi, perhaps?):

Christian Thurstone, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado and the head of the teen rehab center Adolescent STEP: Substance Abuse Treatment Education & Prevention Program, told ABC News recently that 95 percent of patient referrals to the program are for marijuana use.

“Anecdotally, yes, we’re seeing kids in treatment here who have paranoia and seeing things and hearing things that aren’t there,” said Thurstone. “Adolescent exposure to marijuana [raises] risk of permanent psychosis in adulthood.”

For more from this story, go here.

Nat Hentoff Says Obama Wasn't Fully Qualified To Teach Constitutional Law At The University of Chicago

Here, but that's just for starters:

Hentoff called this the worst state the country has ever been in, “Even worse than Woodrow Wilson’s regime, when people could be arrested for speaking German.” Compounding the problem he says, is the digital age, which has allowed the president to engage in unprecedented domestic spying with the apparatus of the National Security Agency. WND asked if Obama really posed such a threat, considering he was a professor of constitutional law. “People forget, he taught a course that he was not fully qualified to teach. But nobody seemed to care,” Hentoff observed.

He also pointed out that Obama was the only editor of the Harvard Law Review to never publish an article, something that went virtually unnoticed when voters considered his qualifications. “See, that was a case of affirmative-action and people feeling, ‘Hey we ought to do something important, symbolically, and here’s a black guy, and he’s articulate, so we’re gonna do this.’”

Hentoff mentioned that former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, the man Time Magazine once called “the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court,” once personally lectured him that “Affirmative-action on a racial basis is a total violation of the 14th Amendment, no doubt about it.” And, referring to Obama’s presidency, the journalist said, “That’s what that kind of affirmative-action did for us.”

He told WND that he firmly believed the president does not care about due process, the separation of powers, the concept of a self-governing republic or many other basic American ideals. And that’s why, he said, “What Obama is doing now is about as un-American as you can get.” Hentoff wanted to make sure no one thought he was engaging in hyperbole. He said it was literally true that Obama is “the most un-American president we’ve ever had.” And just to make sure everybody heard him, he added, “I hope the FBI got all of that.”

Obama thinks he has achievements, which must mean he is suffering a psychosis

From the long story in The New Yorker, here, by image-accommodating biographer David Remnick:

As Obama ticked off a list of first-term achievements—the economic rescue, the forty-four straight months of job growth, a reduction in carbon emissions, a spike in clean-energy technology—he seemed efficient but contained, running at three-quarters speed, like an athlete playing a midseason road game of modest consequence; he was performing just hard enough to leave a decent impression, get paid, and avoid injury.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's see.

Starting with the economic rescue, Obama said at the time in early 2009 that he had more than enough on his plate without having to worry about the financial crisis.

So who fixed that?

Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve. While everyone was fixated on the controversy over TARP and the crony capitalist, fascist character of that bailout in the mere hundreds of billions of dollars as millions of Americans were losing their homes, behind the scenes the Fed was providing multiple trillions of dollars of short-term loans to just about any bank or business in the world which was in trouble, at rock-bottom low interest rates which homeowners could only dream about, right into 2010. They all got fixed while 5.6 million Americans went on to lose their homes through 2013.

And what did Obama do in response to that?

Disgracefully fire Bernanke in public by saying he'd overstayed his time at the Fed, but that came only long after everything looked like it was truly stabilized. And I do mean "looked". The fact of the matter is extraordinary measures remain in place at the Fed because the banks' condition is still not healthy enough to do without them. When those end, the crisis will be truly over, not before. The rescue is still underway, with no end in sight.

Then there's the 44 months of job growth claim. Well, the truth is we are in the 72nd month of the jobs recession as we speak today, the longest jobs recession in the history of the post-war by a long shot. Bush's had been the longest previously, at 47 months. And it is estimated that the current jobs recession will not be over for another 6 months, which means we'll finally have matched the number of payroll jobs which existed at the time the recession began, but only after about 6.5 years have gone by.

But that says nothing about a return to normalcy. Include the shortfall which exists in the numbers because of net population growth over the period and the country will still be in a serious jobs deficit once the jobs recession is over, and for a long time to come without some major driver for jobs appearing on the scene.

Finally, I'm not sure how anyone measures a reduction in carbon emissions when China keeps them billowing into the air at a record rate, burning coal and oil in huge quantities. Obama can point to the closing down of coal power plants in this country if he wants, but all that does is make American electricity more expensive as China's waves of pollution waft ever eastward over the Pacific, polluting our air, water and farmland.

But if anyone's contributing to the reduction in carbon emissions in this country, it's the American worker who isn't working. Travel on the road in this country has been stuck at levels first reached between 2004 and 2005 for five long years because so many people no longer have a job to which to commute. Every month that goes by shows the same statistical result: no progress in miles traveled back to the levels of the 2007 peak. It's an odd thing to be taking credit for.

If it is clear from these facts that Obama is delusional and lives in a separate reality, it is also clear from Remnick's story that Obama has to work hard at crafting it, even about what is probably at the heart of his mental problems in the first place: 

When I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any dispatch and get in front of the issue. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Is it less dangerous? I asked.

Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the middle of a sentence and say, “Scratch that,” or, “I think the grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.”

Why does the smartest president ever have to edit everything, all the time, until it makes sense to him?

Who do you call to have the president committed?

Like Obama, It Turns Out Texas' Abortion Champion Wendy Davis Hasn't Told The Whole Truth

The Dallas Morning News here has some of the details she "blurred":

Davis was 21, not 19, when she was divorced. She lived only a few months in the family mobile home while separated from her husband before moving into an apartment with her daughter.

A single mother working two jobs, she met Jeff Davis, a lawyer 13 years older than her, married him and had a second daughter. He paid for her last two years at Texas Christian University and her time at Harvard Law School, and kept their two daughters while she was in Boston. When they divorced in 2005, he was granted parental custody, and the girls stayed with him. Wendy Davis was directed to pay child support.

In an extensive interview last week, Davis acknowledged some chronological errors and incomplete details in what she and her aides have said about her life. ...

Davis defended the accuracy of her overall account as a young single mother who escaped poverty, earned an education and built a successful legal and political career through hard work and determination. ...

“I had a baby. I got divorced by the time I was 19 years old,” she testified in a recent federal lawsuit over redistricting. “After I got divorced, I lived in a mobile home park in southeast Fort Worth.” ...

Jeff Davis said ... around the time the final payment on their Harvard Law School loan was due. “It was ironic,” he said. “I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left.”

Hey Obama! Your Popularity Is Down Because You're A Liar, Not Because You're Black!

Refinery Capacity Utilization Is Down Almost 7% From The 1998 Peak Through 2012

US Gasoline Consumption Is Down 6.5% Through 2012 From The Peak Year In 2007

Obama Exports 2.5 Times More Gasoline Per Day Than Bush, But Consumers Now Pay 1.5 Times More

Over the span of eight years of George Bush finished gasoline exports from the US averaged just 135,000 barrels per day. But over the first four years of Obama the average soared to nearly 345,000 per day, 2.5 times more.

Under Bush gasoline's average annual price for all formulations was just $2.13/gallon, but under Obama it has soared to $3.16/gallon for the five years 2009 through 2013, 1.5 times higher on average.

So who's the bigger friend of Big Oil, George Bush or Barack Obama?

Tom Coburn Is Mistaken: He Thinks Changing The Actors In Washington Will Change It

It won't.

This is the conceit shared by many Republicans, and by many of their supporters in the country, but it is mistaken.

We have the government we deserve, and it sucks because we do, and it will keep on sucking until we stop sucking as much as we do.

And what do you think are the chances of that changing?

Video here.

Both Shiller p/e and Tobin's q warn stocks are seriously overvalued

As reported by Brett Arends, here:

Smithers found that over the past century the Shiller PE had an R-squared to subsequent returns of 0.52, the “Pseudo-Indicator” one of 0.61, and the q an astounding 0.79.

So if the past is any guide, if you want to get a good estimate of the future returns from today’s stock market you should completely ignore the low yields on cash, certificates of deposit, or bonds. You should pay more attention to the Shiller PE, and you should pay the most attention to the Tobin’s q.

And what do these tell you? “As at the 31st December, 2013,” says Smithers, the “q indicated that U.S. non-financial equities were overvalued by 73% and CAPE indicated an overvaluation of 76% for equities, including financials.”

The First Bank Failure Of 2014 Is DuPage National Bank, West Chicago, Illinois

The first bank failure of 2014 is DuPage National Bank, West Chicago, Illinois, costing the FDIC $1.6 million.

Bill Binney, 32-Year Veteran And Critic Of NSA, Says America Is Now A Police State

Too bad he had to say that here, where they believe 9/11 was an inside job:

The main use of the collection from these [NSA spying] programs [is] for law enforcement. ... [N]one of the NSA data is referred to in courts – cause it has been acquired without a warrant. [Law enforcement agencies] have to do a “Parallel Construction” and not tell the courts or prosecution or defense the original data used to arrest people. This I call: a “planned program[m]ed perjury policy” directed by US law enforcement. ... [T]his also applies to “Foreign Counterparts.” This is a total corruption of the justice system not only in our country but around the world. ... This is a totalitarian process – means we are now in a police state.

Michigan Ranks Third Worst For Employment But Gov. Rick Snyder Wants More Immigrants

Here's our insane governor last night:

"We need to encourage immigration in our state," said Snyder, who has backed national reform efforts. "That's how we made our country great. We need to focus on legal immigration to make sure Michigan is the most welcoming place."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Too bad Michigan isn't a more welcoming place for the unemployed who already live here.

White Hat Hacker Says Security On Healthcare.gov Is Worse Now Than In November

David Kennedy, quoted here by NBC News:

“The reason we’re concluding that this is so shockingly bad is that the issues across the site are so varied. You don’t even have to hack into the system to see big issues – which means there are [major problems] underneath. Nothing’s really changed since our November 19 testimony. In fact, it’s worse. Some issues still include critical or high-risk findings to personal information."

Corelogic Foreclosure Rate In November 2013 Still 119% Above Normal Pre-Crisis Rate

As reported here on January 9th:

There were 46,000 completed foreclosures in the United States in November 2013, down from 64,000 in November 2012, a year-over-year decrease of 29 percent. On a month-over-month basis, completed foreclosures decreased 8.3 percent, from 50,000 in October 2013. ... Completed foreclosures are an indication of the total number of homes actually lost to foreclosure. As a basis of comparison to the 46,000 completed foreclosures reported for November 2013, completed foreclosures averaged 21,000 per month nationwide between 2000 and 2006 before the decline in the housing market in 2007. Since the financial crisis began in September 2008, there have been approximately 4.7 million completed foreclosures across the country.

5.6 Million American Homes Repossessed 2006-2013

As reported here:

Including the 2013 numbers, over the past eight years 10.9 million U.S. properties have started the foreclosure process and 5.6 million have been repossessed by lenders through foreclosure.

Is It A Coincidence John Roberts' Law Clerk Is A Utopian Progressive?

Birds of a feather flock together.

Joshua D. Hawley, here, clearly a friend of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic":

Christians’ purpose in politics should be to advance the kingdom of God—to make it more real, more tangible, more present. Or should I say, to immanentize the eschaton.

Laura Ingraham and Raymond Arroyo Discuss Spanish Healthcare.gov Slaughtering The Language

After which Raymond Arroyo uses the English phrase "full plethora".

You know, the opposite of which is the empty plethora.

Just now on the radio show.

Estimating Retirements Added To Those "Not In Labor Force" 2009-2013

It is often forgotten that retired people are classified as not in the labor force. The measure of those "Not in labor force" has grown to a staggering all time high of 92.338 million, not-seasonally-adjusted, as of December 2013.

Between 2009 and 2013 alone, the figure has grown by 11.05 million, and people like Rush Limbaugh thump loudly about all these people "not working" because of the bad economy.

The question is, though, how many of these are retirements?

I say it's theoretically possible that all of them are.

Those turning 66 years of age each year from 2009-2013 were born between 1943 and 1947.

And here are births from 1943 to 1947:

3.1 million 1943

2.9 million 1944

2.9 million 1945

3.4 million 1946

3.8 million 1947.

How many of these survived to age 66?

The CDC publishes annually the life tables, the latest of which came out a few days ago for the year 2009. A person aged 63 in 2009 (born in 1946) was among the 86% who survived to 63, according to the tables. In the 2008 tables from a year ago, that same person at age 62 was among the 87% who survived to 62. In the 2007 tables at 61 he was among the 88% who survived to 61. Extrapolating forward to 2012, we will estimate that at 66 he was among the 83% who survived.

So for persons born earlier than 1946 we can estimate their survival rate as follows:

Born in 1943, retiring at 66 in 2009: 80% survive, or 2.48 million

Born in 1944, retiring at 66 in 2010: 81% survive, or 2.35 million

Born in 1945, retiring at 66 in 2011: 82% survive, or 2.38 million

Born in 1946, retiring at 66 in 2012: 83% survive, or 2.82 million

Born in 1947, retiring at 66 in 2013: 84% survive, or 3.19 million.

Total theoretically possible retirees: 13.22 million, 2.17 million more than actually left the labor force.

Obviously, not everyone retires at 66. Some keep working. And especially these days some keep working because they have to. The employment level of the 55 and over set has grown by 4.5 million over the period 2009-2013.

It appears to be the case, however, that an even larger number are deferring both Social Security benefits and work because they can afford to: Social Security reports that retired workers and their dependents receiving benefits grew only 5.6 million from the end of 2008 to the end of 2013.

Of the 11.05 million added to "not in labor force", I'd estimate at least 5.4 million are well off enough to forgo both work and Social Security until they reach age 70, and perhaps more than that if Social Security recipients who continue to work according to the rules are counted instead as part of the labor force.

Manufacturing Jobs In 2014 Are At 1941 Levels

Is The All-Time High In Temporary Help Forecasting A Recession?

Why HealthCare.gov still isn't fixed: Obama regime quietly dumps CGI Federal on Friday, to hire Accenture which built California exchange

WaPo reports here:

The Obama administration has decided to jettison from HealthCare.gov the IT contractor, CGI Federal, that has been mainly responsible for building the defect-ridden online health insurance marketplace and has been immersed in the work of repairing it.

Federal health officials are preparing to sign early next week a 12-month contract worth roughly $90 million with a different company, Accenture, after concluding that CGI has not been effective enough in fixing the intricate computer system underpinning the federal Web site, according to a person familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private negotiations.

... it is not yet able to automatically enroll people eligible for Medicaid in states’ programs, compute exact amounts to be sent to insurers for their customers’ federal subsidies or tabulate precisely how many consumers have paid their insurance premiums and are therefore covered.

... As federal officials and contractors have been trying to fix various aspects of the Web site in the past few months, about half the new software code the company has written failed when it was first used, according to internal federal information.

"Bad" job reports for two years have been great for higher corporate earnings

Barry Ritholtz, here:

It has taken quite a long time for many investors to understand that reduced labor costs, greater productivity and ever-increasing efficiency has led to higher earnings. The basic assumptions about “good” or “bad” job reports may not be accurate relative to what equities do over time.

-------------------------------------------------------

That's correct. The latest employment situation report indicates that there hasn't been much change up or down in jobs for two years running even as the stock market made over fifty new all-time highs in 2013.

Additions to non-farm payrolls have been averaging 182,000 and 183,000 a month in 2013 and 2012. Same old same old.

To the unemployed: The L-shaped "recovery" continues . . . without you.

Obama draws a red line in America . . .

. . . of job losses, the worst in the post-war, 71 months and still counting.

Summertime peaks in full-time work continue to recover despite ObamaCare

There is still no evidence that the numbers usually working full-time are in decline because of ObamaCare.

Since the passage of ObamaCare in March 2010 the metric has made new highs each summer and shallower lows each winter.

Those usually working part-time have not increased in number since passage of ObamaCare in 2010

November 2008 through December 2013

And that's because the government measure of part-time doesn't care if you work 29 hours, 30 hours or 34 hours per week . . . all are equally part-time schedules to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The increasingly less deep lows in the summers since 2010 are consistent with the long term trend of increasing part-time work as population grows. Significant new highs above 28 million, however, remain non-existent.

Crony Capitalism Is A Feature, Not A Bug, Of Contemporary Liberalism

Jeffrey Snider, here:

Employment grows not on the pace of redistribution-derived consumer spending in the lower classes, but as new firms innovate and grow to replace older firms that have seen their last days. Failure and rebirth are the capitalist "secrets", and demand always follows supply in that line. Interrupt it at your peril.

Unfortunately, we see in the 21st century a different strain of imperialism that is rooted in Hobson's preferred solutions to it. By giving government more power over industry and business, Hobson suggested that government would be able to end business agitation toward external colonialism. But in doing so, governments have introduced the seeds of cronyism that take the form of internal imperialism. Big businesses have achieved regulatory leverage in a manner that may preclude the innovation and business cycles from creating that positive economic trajectory. And monetary policy, all in the name of aggregate demand, appears to be playing a large role.

... OWS [Occupy Wall Street] and its sympathizers ... are really protesting their own philosophies put into practice via a bastardized capitalism - so corrupted by devotion to aggregate demand in this era that it can hardly be referred to as such.

There will never be, and has never been, any such thing as fully free markets, nor should there be. What we are arguing is not absolutes but proportions. ... In perhaps the greatest and most tragic of ironies here, the Fed appeals directly to inflation as a means to destroy savings, an impulse to which I have to think Hobson would readily approve, but that inflation is itself a means of redistribution that further concentrates savings among the wealthy. More than an irony, it seems as if this inconsistency is a feature of this philosophy, as taken to its logical ends it produces something akin to circular reasoning. It is a place where the socialists of OWS criticize directly the tools of socialist monetary policy as if they are anything apart from each other.

New study finds psychotic episodes occur at an earlier age among marijuana users

Yahoo reports here:

Among more than 400 people in South London admitted to hospitals with a diagnosed psychotic episode, the study team found the heaviest smokers of high-potency cannabis averaged about six years younger than patients who had not been smoking pot. ... The researchers found that males were more likely overall to use cannabis and also had a younger age of onset of psychosis. The mean age at the time of the first psychotic episode for male users of cannabis was 26, and for female users was nearly 29. That compared with nearly 30 years old for male non-users and 32 for female non-users.

December 2013 Unemployment Falls To 6.7%, Total Nonfarm Jobs Up Only 74,000

The employment situation report for December 2013 is here.

The headline rate falls to 6.7% ending 5 years of unemployment at or above 7%, with massive numbers of people continuing to leave the labor force.

In the last year the number counted as unemployed fell 1.9 million, while nonfarm employment grew at a rate of 182,000 per month in 2013 vs. 183,000 per month in 2012, or 2.18 million. Roughly a wash.

Total nonfarm employment continues below the 2007/2008 peak of 138.1 million, still lagging that level by 1.2 million fully 6 years later (seasonally adjusted) despite growth in the population since that time of at least 14.3 million.

The headline unemployment rate has fallen from 7.9% at the beginning of 2013 to 6.7% at the end largely because those not in the labor force increased by 2.89 million in the last year (not-seasonally-adjusted). The not-seasonally-adjusted level reached a new high at 92.338 million. People who leave the labor force are not counted as unemployed.

In the 8 years from 2001 through 2008 under Bush those not in the labor force increased by 10.3 million, or 14.7%. That record has already been matched under just 5 years of Obama: 11.3 million have left the labor force, or 14.0% (numbers seasonally adjusted).

The civilian labor force participation rate, the percentage of working age people actually working, remains mired at Carter administration levels from 1977 and 1978.

 

Drudge's New Headline Writer Can't Spell To Save His Life: Makes At Least 6 Errors This Morning

knockout

roommate

opponents'

children's

anti-Semitic

Fournier

Rush Limbaugh Today Totally Botches Income Quintiles On The Program

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

The relevant passage is here:

Poverty is expressed as an income level. Most economists break down income in America to five brackets, called quintiles, and people move in and out of these. The top quintile, I think, is like a million plus, and that'd be the top 1% of 1%. I forgot what the breakdown is, but the poverty level, it's roughly, what, $14,000 for a family of four? It's around there. People move in and out of these all the time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is rich.

A quintile in this instance is one of any of the five groups of American households divided into those five groups based on how much money they make.

By definition, then, the top quintile is the richest 20% of households in America. So it's impossible for the top quintile to be "the top 1%", let alone "the top 1% of 1%".

As embarrassing as that is, Rush has absolutely no concept what it means to reach the top 20% of household income in this country.

The fact is it doesn't take all that much, and certainly nothing close to $1 million, hard as it may be to get there.

Currently the point in the middle of the top 20% of households by income is only about $181,905 per annum. That means about half the people in the top quintile make more than that, and about half make less. And interestingly enough, the middle of the richest 5% of households in this country isn't anywhere close to $1 million, either. The average household income of the top 5% is just $318,052. (For a good presentation of the data, see here.)

And Rush is equally out of touch about what it means to be poor. The federal definition for a family of four is about $23,500, not $14,000. The latter is about what it means for just one person to be poor, not four (see here).

Rush Limbaugh complains constantly about the sorry state of public education in this country. He even did so today in the same segment:

[L]ook at [President] Johnson's solutions. Education, job training, medical care, housing. That hasn't changed. The same weapons, the same language, the same way they tug at heartstrings. It's 1964, and they keep using the same lingo, obviously because it works. But look at how our education system's been since 1964 with them in charge.

Yep. Look at how it's been.

Rush is Exhibit A . . . the most popular radio host ever for a reason.

24hour Minimum Temperatures In The Lower 48 Yesterday And Today

Hey, Uncle Si Will Take Your Underwear Clean Off Your Butt!

Hey Obama! We Could USE A Prolonged Period Of Excessively High Temperatures Right About Now!

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Polar Temperatures Well Below Zero Invade The Heart Of America

Temperatures before 8:00 AM Eastern:

"Ben Bernanke Has An Almost Unbroken Record Of Being Wrong"

Bye Bye Ben.

Seen here:

Ben Bernanke has an almost unbroken record of being wrong.

In 2006, at the zenith of the housing bubble, he told Congress that house prices would continue to rise. In 2007, he testified that failing subprime mortgages would not threaten the economy.

In January 2008, at a luncheon, he told his audience there was no recession on the horizon. As late as July 2008, he insisted that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, already teetering on the verge of collapse, were “ adequately capitalized [and] in no danger of failing.”

Following the Crash of 2008, Bernanke’s prognostications did not much improve. Nor did Yellen’s, who had also misjudged the housing bubble, and who became Fed vice chairman in 2010.

The two of them got the “recovery” they predicted, but the weakest “recovery” in history.

Peter Wallison Says The Housing Bubble Is Back

Here in The New York Times, where he blames sub-prime down payments, not interest rates:

Between 1997 and 2002, the average compound rate of growth in housing prices was 6 percent, exceeding the average compound growth rate in rentals of 3.34 percent. This, incidentally, contradicts the widely held idea that the last housing bubble was caused by the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy. Between 1997 and 2000, the Fed raised interest rates, and they stayed relatively high until almost 2002 with no apparent effect on the bubble, which continued to maintain an average compound growth rate of 6 percent until 2007, when it collapsed. ... Between 2011 and the third quarter of 2013, housing prices grew by 5.83 percent, again exceeding the increase in rental costs, which was 2 percent.

Many commentators will attribute this phenomenon to the Fed’s low interest rates. Maybe so; maybe not. Recall that the Fed’s monetary policy was blamed for the earlier bubble’s growth between 1997 and 2002, even though the Fed raised interest rates during most of that period.

Both this bubble and the last one were caused by the government’s housing policies, which made it possible for many people to purchase homes with very little or no money down. ...

When down payments were 10 to 20 percent before 1992, the homeownership rate was a steady 64 percent — slightly below where it is today — and the housing market was not frothy. People simply bought less expensive homes.

Obama Has Completed 160 Golf Outings In The Last 5 Years: The Practice Hasn't Helped

White House Dossier here reports that the president golfed 9 out of the 15 days while on his Hawaiian vacation, which means Moochelle was pretty much a golf widow during the time.

She did not return to DC with her family. The cost to the taxpayers of this early "birthday gift" of an extended stay may come to as much as $200,000 or more according to a separate entry here.

The Washington Times noted here the family's vacation was already "regal", and featured a video in which the president misses a long put on a green and then takes what he clearly deems a "gimme" but misses it, and picks it up off the green, not out of the cup. I'll bet his scorecard is minus the stroke . . . a lie like everything else about these people.

We Will Barry You

h/t Theo

Vanguard's Worst Performing Bond Funds In 2013

Long Term Treasury Fund, VUSTX:                          -13.03%

Long Term Government Index Fund, VLGSX:     -12.74%

Long Term Bond Index Fund, VBLTX:                       -  9.13%

Inflation Protected Securities Fund, VIPSX:          -  8.92%

Long Term Corporate Bond Index Fund, VLTCX: -  6.86%

Long Term Investment Grade Fund, VWESX:       -  5.87%

And as badly as they have performed, I don't see a net asset value for any fund which represents a bargain: they all still look too expensive to me. 

Antarctic Global Warming Scientists Rescued, But Rescue Ship Also Gets Stuck In Ice: Story Never Mentions It's Summer In Antarctica

Chinese Snow Dragon stuck in ice after rescue

Why would they go there at this time if they didn't think they could get to Antarctica?

The story is here.

Evidently the rescue ship is Chinese, but the scientists were transported from their stuck vessel to an Australian vessel which subsequently has been dismissed from the area despite the troubles of their rescuers' vessel, also now stuck.

Reminds me of the tow truck which came to retrieve a neighbor's dead vehicle the other day. The tow truck itself got stuck, and had to be towed by another tow truck. Needless to say the neighbor's vehicle didn't get towed until yet another tow truck came yesterday.

And that's how icy it is, from Antarctica to Michigan.

Current Fair Value Of The S&P500 Is . . . 1005

Doug Short updates his regression analysis for the S&P500, adjusted for inflation, to come up with the S&P500 today about 80% above the long term trend going back to 1871:

"If the current S&P 500 were sitting squarely on the regression, it would be around the 1005 level. If the index should decline over the next few years to a level comparable to previous major bottoms, it would fall to the 450-500 range."

Charts and discussion here.