Q1 2013 Real GDP First Estimate At 2.5%, Q4 2012 Remains At 0.4%

So reports the BEA here:

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 2.5 percent in the first quarter of 2013 (that is, from the fourth quarter to the first quarter), according to the "advance" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP increased 0.4 percent.

Inflation-adjusted GDP under Obama continues to print in a narrow low range, averaging just 0.83% from 2009 through 2012, the worst on record in the post-war. With an average annual report of 2.04% under George Bush, economic growth was almost 2.5 times better under Bush than under Obama. GDP under Bush only seemed so bad because growth under Clinton's second term was so good at 4.5% per year.

In order to best George Bush's lacklustre record, Barack Obama is going to have to put up average real GDP numbers every year 2013 through 2016 of at least 3.5%.

At 2.5% in today's report, he's already off to a very slow start.

Central Bankers Buying Stocks: Is This Another Sign Of A Top?

Bloomberg reports here:

Central banks, guardians of the world’s $11 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves, are buying stocks in record amounts as falling bond yields push even risk-averse investors toward equities.

In a survey of 60 central bankers this month by Central Banking Publications and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, 23 percent said they own shares or plan to buy them. The Bank of Japan, holder of the second-biggest reserves, said April 4 it will more than double investments in equity exchange-traded funds to 3.5 trillion yen ($35.2 billion) by 2014. The Bank of Israel bought stocks for the first time last year while the Swiss National Bank and the Czech National Bank have boosted their holdings to at least 10 percent of reserves. ...

Currency reserves among the world’s central banks climbed by $734 billion in 2012 to a record $10.9 trillion, according to data from the Washington-based International Monetary Fund. That’s about 20 percent of the $55 trillion market value of global stocks, data compiled by Bloomberg show. ... 

Even so, 70 percent of the central bankers in the survey indicated that equities are “beyond the pale.”

Notice how the first paragraph calls central banks "risk-averse investors", showing that the line between investing and banking has been completely erased in the popular reporting even as the evidence of the survey shows that for most central bankers the line remains boldly drawn. Banks don't invest, they bank.

Purchases of gold by central banks in recent years is interesting in that context. While buying stocks might mean investing to central bankers, something to be shunned, buying gold is not really investing, otherwise they wouldn't have been doing so much of it.

Gold reserves in the world now total roughly 31,000 tonnes, or about $1.5 trillion if gold is $1,500 the ounce. This amounts to 13.7% of the total forex reserves of $10.9 trillion mentioned in the article. In the context of the Basel III capital rules, that's considerably more hard collateral being set aside by the folks running the show as time goes by than by the downstream bankers who protest against building up to seven, eight or nine percent capital ratios.

I'm glad central banks are buying more gold. They should do even more of it. But investing in stocks by banks, central or otherwise, isn't banking. It's gambling, especially at these levels.

Compared to all of 2013, initial claims for unemployment are down 10% in the last month.

The 4-week moving average of raw first time claims for unemployment is 339,000. Today's initial claims  report is here, showing the contrasting seasonally adjusted figure at 358,000, about 6% higher than the raw numbers indicate is the situation over the last month.

The lower raw figure yields an annualized rate of 17.6 million in the last month, the higher seasonally adjusted figure an annualized rate of 18.6 million. Up until today the raw annualized rate for all of 2013 has been running at 19.5 million, so the trend is definitely lower, almost 10% lower, in the last four weeks and is positive for job gains. 

The Millions Who Lost Their Jobs, 2001-2012

What follows are first time claims for unemployment compensation, not-seasonally-adjusted, by year from 2001 through 2012, using Department of Labor figures, here, rounded to the nearest thousand weekly and totaled:

2001 20.9 million
2002 20.9 million
2003 20.8 million
2004 17.7 million
2005 17.7 million
2006 16.2 million
2007 16.7 million
2008 21.6 million
2009 29.5 million
2010 23.7 million
2011 21.7 million
2012 19.4 million.

George W. Bush, first term average = 20.1 million annually (387,000 weekly)
Barack H. Obama, first term average = 23.6 million annually (454,000 weekly)

George W. Bush, second term average = 18.1 million annually (348,000 weekly)
Barack H. Obama, second term average = ? (at 375,000 weekly for the first 15 weeks of 2013, that's an annual rate of 19.5 million to date)

George W. Bush, total average over both terms = 19.1 million annually (367,000 weekly)

FBI Can't Keep Track Of 27,000 Threats In TIDE Database, So Forget 159 Million On Visas

About 40% of illegal aliens in the US overstay their visas.

Reuters reports here:

The FBI found nothing to suggest [Tamerlan Tsarnaev] was an active threat, but all the same placed his name on the "Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment" list. The FBI has not said what it did find about Tsarnaev.

But the database, which holds more than half a million names, is only a repository of information on people who U.S. authorities see as known, suspected or potential terrorists from around the world.

Because of its huge size, U.S. investigators do not routinely monitor everyone registered there, said U.S. officials familiar with the database.

As of 2008, TIDE contained more than 540,000 names, although they represented about 450,000 actual people, because some of the entries are aliases or different name spellings for the same person. Fewer than 5 percent of the TIDE entries were U.S. citizens or legal residents, according to a description of the database on the NCTC website.

Janet Napolitano's System Works Again

Rich Liberals Pay People Under The Table. Doesn't Everyone?

The Washington Post has drunk the KoolAid offered up by The New Yorker that there is an enormous underground economy out there where child-walkers and nannies get paid under the table helping to account for as much as $2 trillion in unreported income. $2T! Imagine it!

This must be part of a softening up campaign underway to raise taxes on the middle class. After all, we can afford to pay, they lie to themselves. But in all my long life in the middle class, I have known exactly two persons who could afford a nanny, one of whom can't anymore. She is an MBA who worked in an industry that actually made things. People stopped buying those things, and she lost her very good job. The other one deals in trouble. She is a liberal insurance company lawyer who still has hers. As for the child-walkers, I have known exactly none. In fact, I've never even seen one, not in Colorado, not in Illinois, and not in Michigan where I now live.

This is a liberal fantasy projected onto the rest of the country. It is rich liberals, denizens of America's great cities, who hire the nannies and pay the child-walkers, all under the table. The rest of us drive our own kids to school or walk them to the bus ourselves, clean our own homes, and do all the other things of daily living for ourselves. We can't afford to hire anybody. In fact, we're plundering our retirement accounts just to maintain our former standard of living. You know, the one we had in the years B.O., Before Obama. For many of us in the years A.O., our income has been cut in half because we got fired after long, productive careers. The nearly 30 million people who filed first time claims for unemployment in 2009 were a response to the 2008 election, not the effect of you know who. Employers knew what was coming, and boy, were they right. That contractor I'd like to hire and pay cash to replace the windows with the broken seals will just have to wait, about four more years is my guess.

In 2011 over 80% of wage earners made less than $60K per year, but we are somehow supposed to be the ones paying all these people under the table for services we can't afford? That's 122 million wage earners out of 151 million who are shelling out all this dough? You know, the same ones who've canceled cable, stopped eating out, jacked-up all their deductibles and learned a hundred ways to make red beans and rice.  

They used to call it liberal projection syndrome back in the day when education was good enough to transmit subtlety. Now we just call it bull.

New Home Sales Under Obama The Worst Since 1960s

Unlike previous dips to the 400,000 level going back to the 1960s, there's been no sharp recovery in sales of new single family homes back up to the 800,000 level. In four out of six previous dives to the depths new housing sales quickly punched back up above 800,000.

We, by contrast, seem to remain stuck in the basement. The second graph shows new sales under Obama, also at the seasonally adjusted annual rate, averaging 374,000 in 2009, 321,000 in 2010, 307,000 in 2011, and 367,000 in 2012. That's a pathetic average of 342,000 new home sales annually during Obama's first term.

Pace Karl Popper, The Open Society Has Become The Enemy.

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance."

We don't make sure foreigners visiting our country legally actually leave, as reported here:

The Senate is discussing an overhaul that would require the government to track foreigners who overstay their visas. The problem is the U.S. currently doesn't have a reliable system for doing this. ...

Talk of illegal immigration often conjures images of people sneaking across the U.S. border from Mexico, but an estimated 40% or more of those now illegally in the U.S. entered with a valid visa. ...

In 2011, there were 159 million nonimmigrant visits to the U.S., according to the Department of Homeland Security. More than three-quarters were for pleasure. But millions also involved business travelers, temporary workers and students.

Sean Hannity Is Hopeless

Sean Hannity is hopeless.

He's playing as of yesterday in the opening to his radio program the excerpt of Boston Red Sox player David Ortiz shouting his profanity over the weekend, bleeped, of course.

What do you tell your kid when he asks, "Why'd they bleep that, daddy?" Not even talk radio can be left on in earshot of the children.

That's libertarianism for you, unable to conserve much of anything, including your kid's innocence.

Terrorists Win: Fascist Police Shred 4th Amendment In Watertown MA

Where are the Oathkeepers now, huh?

“The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army” – Gen. George Washington, to his troops before the battle of Long Island

After violating the 4th Amendment rights of just about everybody in Watertown, Massachusetts, the incompetent police couldn't find Tsarnaev, but the wretched of Watertown meekly groveled and even thanked their oppressors.

"Haende Hoch!" the Gestapo cries in the video, except in English. You'll be hearing this next at your local train station, bus stop and at road checkpoints manned by Obama's ever-expanding army of TSA goons, just as you do now at every airport. 

Video here.

Story here.

Incompetent FBI Interviewed T. Tsarnaev In 2011, Overlooked Travel In 2012

What we have after all these billons of tax dollars wasted by DHS, TSA, FBI and the rest of the federal alphabet soup is another case of the one that got away. The "security" was just theatre.

As one astute guest said yesterday on the Sean Hannity show, nobody at the FBI remembered a guy whom they interrogated personally in 2011 (after being alerted by the Russians in 2010) when they reviewed photo and video evidence of the bombing in Boston showing Tamerlan Tsarnaev in April 2013. That's right. It took a victim, Jeff Bauman, to finger Tamerlan's brother to get to Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

And now Sen. Lindsey Grahamnesty is claiming the exit of Tamerlan Tsarnaev to visit Russia in 2012 for what looks like six months of terrorist training was missed by the FBI because his name was misspelled.

That was the same problem with the Fruit of Kaboom bomber, who got on a flight to the US because even though he was supposed to be on a no-fly list his name, Abdulmutallab, was misspelled by a government employee, as reported here:

"Officials say the failed plot also tipped them off to the potentially serious consequences of a small mistake: a spelling error. The State Department incorrectly spelled Abdulmutallab's name on his visa application. When Abdulmutallab's father warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria that his son had been radicalized, embassy staffers couldn't find Abdulmutallab's name in their visa database — because it was entered with an incorrect spelling."

That was months before the flight to Detroit.

As I've maintained before, people who can't spell are dangerous.

CBS story here.

Washington Times story here.

The New Yorker Magazine Engages In Pure Fantasy About The Underground Economy

This is your stereotypical New York look-down-your-nose-at-the-rubes dismissal of fly-over country where God, guns and cash deals are the bogeymen gussied up with an appeal to an ignorant authority even as real retail adjusted for population shows we are still over 8% below the 2005 peak:

Off-the-books activity also helps explain a mystery about the current economy: even though the percentage of Americans officially working has dropped dramatically, and even though household income is still well below what it was in 2007, personal consumption is higher than it was before the recession, and retail sales have been growing briskly (despite a dip in March). Bernard Baumohl, an economist at the Economic Outlook Group, estimates that, based on historical patterns, current retail sales are actually what you’d expect if the unemployment rate were around five or six per cent, rather than the 7.6 per cent we’re stuck with. The difference, he argues, probably reflects workers migrating into the shadow economy. “It’s typical that during recessions people work on the side while collecting unemployment,” Baumohl told me. “But the severity of the recession and the profound weakness of this recovery may mean that a lot more people have entered the underground economy, and have had to stay there longer.”

It's pure fantasy that $2 trillion in income (!) didn't get reported to the IRS based on nominal numbers of less than, for example, $5 trillion in retail sales in 2012, all generated by suddenly sidelined people (!), when real retail adjusted for population growth and ex-gasoline is still over 8% below the 2005 high:

(See Doug Short's discussion, here.)

That's right. The patriotic core of the country is a bunch of dishonest tax-evaders who are robbing the government blind with their vibrant, dishonest cash economy! They don't even have bank accounts, the pikers!

How dare they?!

The Line Of The Day Belongs To Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh parodied Rev. Jeremiah Wright today:

"Obama's Chechens . . . have come home . . . to roost!"

In Boston Bombing Case, The Score Is Actually Police 0, Citizens 2

Victim Jeff Bauman identified the bagman.

Boatowner Dave Henneberry bagged him.

Julius Genachowski's Favorite Baseball Player Talks Just Like The Terrorists' Friends

The Boston Red Sox' David Ortiz and Azmat and Diaz share a rather limited vocabulary.

Story here.

Julius Genachowski, Public Menace At The FCC

Obama's amoral commie at the FCC.

To Julius Genachowski, public menace:

Your statement excusing the public profanity of Red Sox player David Ortiz is completely unacceptable.

It's public officials like you who are responsible for advancing the decline of America pushed by its worst examples in sports and entertainment. You are supposed to enforce standards of public decency, but your disgusting rationalizations only mean our children will be exposed to more and more barbarity without our consent, degradations from which we find it increasingly difficult to protect them.

I can't say for whom I feel more contempt, David Ortiz, you, or the ne'er-do-well who gave you your job.

Signed,

A Patriot

Incompetent Government Couldn't Stop Tsarnaev Or Find Him Afterwards

Our incompetent government, after spending billions of our dollars to stop terrorists and shredding our liberties in the process through surveillance of email and cellphone traffic and body searches at airports, couldn't stop yet another massacre by a couple of determined punks.

And afterwards it couldn't find the last suspect, even though the rights of a free people were trampled with the imposition of a police state and the shut down of a great American city:

"Up until the younger man's capture, it was looking like a grim day for police. As night fell, they announced that they were scaling back the hunt because they had come up empty-handed," it was reported here.

Maybe we should rethink who we let in here and why, instead of what we are doing, which is acting more like the unfree world from which immigrants to our country flee.

Why A Hailstorm Of Gunfire If Tsarnaev Was Found By Homeowner Curled-Up In A Ball?

These reports don't add up:

CNN here, where the video doesn't show the boat covered in a blue tarp but white, casting doubt on the credibility of what the stepson says but CNN seems to accept as fact anyway:

Henneberry [the homeowner] climbed a stepladder to look inside. "He basically stuck his head under the tarp (and) noticed a pool of blood," Duffy said. It was dark under the tarpaulin, so the boat owner could only make out vague contours, "but he definitely noticed there was something crumpled up in a ball," the stepson said. A pool of blood; a manhunt in Watertown; time to call 911. Squad cars with lights flashing raced in and lined the streets. Officers fanned out around the house. ... Duffy said he tried frantically to call his mother and stepfather as he watched on TV while law officers unleashed a hailstorm of gunfire into the backyard.

UK Daily Mail here, whose photos clearly show not a blue tarp but white, quotes the police spokesman unaccountably ringing the same bell that Tsarnaev was too out of it to resist:

'He had lost a lot of blood. He was so weak that we were able to just go in and scoop him up,' state police spokesman David Procopio told the Boston Herald adding that the suspect was in 'serious if not critical condition'.

Another video of gunfire, here, which is mostly noteworthy for what you hear, not what you see:

Barack Obama Wants Us All To Become Yuri Zhivago

"Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) is essentially apolitical but he is also an idealist and when he returns home from the war to Moscow to discover that the People have taken over his home and moved 15 families into it, he pauses to process this infomation and then says 'It's much better this way. More just.' When his slightly more cynical uncle (Ralph Richardson) laughs at this, Yuri insists, 'but it is more just!'"

-- Kyle Smith, here

"President Obama’s fiscal 2014 budget has a section prohibiting individuals from accumulating over $3 million in tax-preferred retirement accounts. It states: 'Individual Retirement Accounts and other tax-preferred savings vehicles are intended to help middle class families save for retirement. But under current rules, some wealthy individuals are able to accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving. The budget would limit an individual’s total balance across tax-preferred accounts to an amount sufficient to finance an annuity of not more than $205,000 per year in retirement, or about $3 million for someone retiring in 2013.'"

-- Blake Hurst, here