Total Consumer Debt Has Barely Budged Since Late 2010

Americans continue deep in debt at $11.44 trillion in Q1 2012, which is $.04 trillion higher than in late 2010, according to this and the latest chart from the New York Federal Reserve:

As of December 31, 2010, total consumer indebtedness was $11.4 trillion, a reduction of $1.08 trillion (8.6%) from its peak level at the close of 2008Q3, and $155 billion (1.3%) below its September 30, 2010 level.

What's The Difference Between A Light Bulb And A Rear End?

You can unscrew a lightbulb.

The Queers Are Only 2 Percent Of The Population

Not 10 percent, and certainly not 25 percent of the population.

They just make up for their small numbers by being loud and by otherwise acting like pricks.

Story at The Atlantic, here.

AP Obama and CNBC.com Team Up To Poo-Poo All That "Obama Is A Socialist" Stuff

What else would you expect from the ideological nexus of media and academia?

Honesty?

These people can't even acknowledge we've experienced a minor economic depression let alone the utter failure of the predictions of their analysts and economists. Instead of failed 5 year plans as in the former Soviet Union we are treated to weekly, monthly and quarterly misses of an astounding variety so routine no one bothers to remark them any more except the gluttons for punishment in the blogosphere.

Remember the green shoots of recovery gibberish that went on and on for months after the so-called recession ended? Or the jobs created or saved nonsense? Or the bottom in housing? Before all that it was how bad was Bush's economy, an economy which Obama now only wishes he had so he could boast about it, which is why he must continue to denigrate it four years removed.

The regulation of American business by government is so massive it is a joke to call this a capitalist economy. Designed to pick the winners and the losers, the revolving door between the two carries a veritable freeway of crony traffic a 1930s fascist would envy.

It's almost pathetic the article spends most of its time quibbling about definitions from the left when Obama's is a socialism of the right.

The whole point is to obscure this fact.

Socialism is a wonderland, Alice, where words mean whatever they say they mean.     

Part Time For Economic Reasons Up Almost 400,000 During March and April

Data and graph here.

The all-time high in this metric was reached on 9-1-10 when 9.25 million were part-time for economic reasons.

The most current reading puts 7.98 million part-time.

It was in late 2008 when the measure reached above 7 million for the first time, and the lowest below 8 million we've fallen since 2009 was in March 2012 when 7.58 million were part-time.

Long Term Investors In Japan Down Over 15 Percent . . . Since 1984!

Housing Prices Need Not Increase, Just Remain Stable, For Economic Recovery

So says Harvard's Edward Glaeser for Bloomberg.com here:

The 1990s offer us one upbeat message. Housing prices stayed static for six long years after 1991, and in real terms, housing prices were no higher in 1998 than they were in 1991. Yet real GDP grew an impressive 28 percent between 1991 and 1998. It’s a myth that the housing market must recover before the larger economy can surge.

Not quite.

The average Case Shiller Home Price Index for 1991 was 125.55, and was 125.10 for 1998, but the chart for the period was flat to slightly declining, until the provisions of the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 helped begin the housing bubble. Prices reached a nadir for the period in 1996 at 117.64, a decline of over 5 percent from 1991.

Crude Is Down Nearly 25 Percent In 3 Months, Gasoline Is Falling

On February 25th I reported that gasoline prices had spiked in Grand Rapids, Michigan, from $3.13 to $3.48 in about one week's time, an 11 percent jump.

On June 1 I filled at $3.55 the gallon. Today the cheapest price is already $3.38 the gallon, a 5 percent fall.

The top price I paid this season was $3.89 the gallon, so we've fallen only 13 percent overall . . . so far.

Obama Blames High US Unemployment On . . . Europe!

Betcha thought he blamed Bush again, right?

The story is here:

Obama, speaking at a Chicago fundraiser on June 1 as he bids for re-election in November, said that a report showing the slowest month of U.S. employment growth in a year was in large part “attributable to Europe and the cloud that’s coming over from the Atlantic.” The “whole world economy has been weakened by it,” he said.

With this guy the buck always stops somewhere else.

Vehicles Sales At 14.4 Million Units Annualized Through March 2012

The chart is here and the data here.

Total auto loans outstanding in Q1 2012 came to approximately $686 billion, or 6 percent of the $11.44 trillion total household debt, according to the May 2012 report of The New York Federal Reserve.

The Shiller p/e Will Have To Get Much Lower Than This Before We Can Talk Of Capitulation

Capitulation means a multiple between 5 and 10, and assumes a complete lack of interest in stock investing. Tonight's multiple is still quite elevated above 20:

(This post replaces a previous one containing erroneous information about the Shiller p/e and has been deleted).

Misspelled Words Have Become Routinized At The Atlantic

As seen here, where the writer evidently thinks "routenized" is built off of "route", or something:

Gold To Oil Ratio Vaults To 19.5

Gold surged on US economic weakness and euro fears to $1,622 the ounce today, while oil has tumbled to $83 the barrel, elevating the gold to oil ratio 30 percent off the 15 level.

Average Unemployment: Pick A Year . . . Any Year

2001 4.7 percent

2002 5.8 percent

2003 6.0 percent

2004 5.5 percent

2005 5.1 percent

2006 4.6 percent

2007 4.6 percent

2008 5.8 percent

2009 9.3 percent

2010 9.6 percent

2011 9.0 percent

2012 8.2 percent (five months to date).

As soon as Obama takes credit for a year, you'll know it's no longer George Bush's fault.

Moral Hazard In Pictures

US Federal Reserve

European Central Bank

Bank of England

People's Bank of China

German Bundesbank

Bank of Japan

Banque de France

Swiss National Bank

The British Knee Is On The March!

“It’s quite impossible that the man who had invented Sir Roderick Spode in 1938 was prey to any covert sympathy for fascism.”

-- Christopher Hitchens on P.G. Wodehouse, quoted here

Deposit Insurance In Spain Is Meaningless

If you want to know why 100 billion euros have fled Spain in the first quarter of this year, here's why:

In Spain there are about 800 billion euros of insured deposits, but the deposit insurance fund has assets of just 7.9 billion euros, and 5.3 billion has already been committed to troubled savings bank Caja de Ahorros del Mediterraneo (CAM), Barclays analysts estimated.

Unemployment Rate Climbs To 8.2 Percent Despite Weasel Words From Bureau Of Lies And Statistics

Obama's Laser-Like Focus On Jobs

The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics may be found here. PDF here.

Notice the attempt to weasel out of the fact that the rate actually increased 0.1 from last month by stating the rate was "essentially unchanged":

Nonfarm payroll employment changed little in May (+69,000), and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 8.2 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in health care, transportation and warehousing, and wholesale trade but declined in construction. Employment was little changed in most other major industries.

The Obama regime is presiding over an employment catastrophe above 8 percent for his entire presidency: 3 years and 4 months.

GDP Revised Down For Q1 2012 From 2.2 Percent To 1.9 Percent

You talkin' to me?

Way to go, Brownie!

Here's the story from the horse's mouth:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 1.9 percent in the first quarter of 2012 (that is, from the fourth quarter to the first quarter), according to the "second" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter of 2011, real GDP increased 3.0 percent.

The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the "advance" estimate issued last month. In the advance estimate, the increase in real GDP was 2.2 percent (see "Revisions" on page 3).

The increase in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), exports, residential fixed investment, private inventory investment, and nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by negative contributions from federal government spending and state and local government spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

The deceleration in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected a deceleration in private inventory investment, an acceleration in imports, and a deceleration in nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by accelerations in exports and in PCE.

Michelle Obama Lies About When And Why Obama Gave Up Pot

Neither one can tell the truth

Here's what Michelle Obama has just claimed, as quoted here, in response to a question about her husband's prolific pot-smoking habits:

'When he lost his father, that was one of those click-in moments. And he really buckled down, he transferred schools, went to Columbia, and thought about how to use his life to the fullest.'

This is nothing but the same sort of fictionalization we've come to expect from Obama himself, say, about his girlfriends, experiences with whom are conflated in his book in composite characters, not real ones.

Michelle is lying about the chronology of events which supposedly led to Barack becoming a serious person, pinning it all of the death of Barack Obama Sr. But Obama's father died late in 1982 when Barack was already at Columbia for a year. Barack transferred to Columbia in the fall of 1981. See for example, here.

The death of Obama's father had nothing to do with transferring to Columbia. In fact, the death post dates the move from Occidental to Columbia by two years.

The truth is we don't know when Obama quit smoking weed. But we do know Michelle Obama isn't telling the truth about it.