Economic Stress: Top 10 Selling Cars In July All Get Combined 28-32 MPG

The top 10 selling cars in July 2013 all get a combined MPG between 28 and 32 in their four-cylinder offerings with automatic transmission. In June most consumer spending was on autos and gasoline, and when those were backed-out, remaining retail was actually down 0.1%, the first time in a year. Soaring gasoline prices have no doubt been at work in spending allocated to more fuel efficient vehicles. Gasoline has been averaging above $3.50/gallon nationally since the beginning of February. See Good Car Bad Car here for car sales data by month.

Toyota Camry 28 mpg

Honda Civic    32

Honda Accord 30

Nissan Altima  31

Chevy Cruze    30

Toyota Corolla 29

Hyundai Elantra 32

Ford Fusion (fwd) 28

Hyundai Sonata  28

Ford Focus          31

To Fix The Mortgage Market, Pay Wholesalers And Brokers Over Time, Not Up Front

So suggests Jeffrey Dorfman, here:

"If we want to avoid a repeat of the recent mortgage market meltdown, we would be wise to reform the incentive structure in the mortgage industry. No government regulation is needed to accomplish this. Wholesalers can change the way they pay brokers and investors can require wholesalers to keep some skin in the game by taking at least some of their profits over time along with the investors. Spreading payments over even as little as three to five years would significantly change the incentives.

"If wholesalers and brokers got paid only if the mortgage borrowers made their payments, I suspect that we would have fewer mortgages with repayment problems."

Real 10-Year Cost Of Being In Cash

With an average annual return of 1.77% in the last 10 years, July 2003 to July 2013, the cost of being in cash in VMMXX comes down to the inflation-adjusted return because inflation has averaged in excess of the nominal returns to cash: 2.43% annually over the period. That results in an average annual real return of -0.644% in cash. Ouch. By contrast, the real rate of return of the S&P500 has been +4.63% annually June 2003-June 2013, dividends fully reinvested. Going back 38 years to the inception date of VMMXX, 6-4-1975, the S&P500 has returned a real rate of 6.83% per annum. Cash has returned a nominal 5.58%, but with inflation averaging 3.95%, the real rate of return in cash has been just 1.568% per annum since 1975.

Your Real Return In Stocks Since 2000? Just 0.32% Per Year!

Sad, but true.

Check for yourself, here.

The Bernank Bombs The Buck

US Dollar Currency Index watchers have been reaching for the gin in recent weeks:

This was supposed to be a summer when the U.S. dollar would stand tall, pumped up by higher interest rates and the prospect of an improving economy.

But instead it's been sagging, with the dollar index losing 3.6 percent to 81.02 since July 10. On that day, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke clarified the Fed's intentions about what it means to 'taper' its $85 billion a month in bond purchases. He emphasized that even with paring back of bond buying, the Fed would take its time pulling back from easing, and it has no plans to raise short term rates any time soon.

Read the rest from Patti Domm at CNBC here.

Obama Can See The Gulf Of Mexico From Three Atlantic Ocean Ports

The world's smartest president strikes again:

"If we don't deepen our ports all along the Gulf — places like Charleston, S.C., or Savannah, Ga., or Jacksonville, Fla. — if we don't do that, these ships are going to go someplace else and we'll lose jobs," Obama said.

Video and story here (AP dishonestly added the "(and in)" to the quotation above before the word "places").

Affirmative action in editing.

The link is now dead. Mediaite still has it all, here.

Mark Levin Only Just Discovers TSA VIPR Program Tonight

Mark Levin's recent discovery of TSA VIPR operations reinforces his interpretation of the developing police state, but it's just old news to us.

Welcome anyway, Mark.

40 Million In Individual And Small Group Health Plans Will Be Hit Hardest By ObamaCare

McClatchy reported here in June:

Those two coverage areas – the individual and small group markets – face the biggest rule and cost changes next year, when the main provisions of the Affordable Care Act finally kick in. ... About 24.5 million people have small-group coverage through companies with 50 or fewer employees, according to federal estimates. Just 15.4 million people purchase individual coverage, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health care research center.

Learn more at ObamaCareWatch.org.

Conservatives Have Completely Dismissed Sen. Marco Rubio And Rep. Paul Ryan

Poll at lauraingraham.com.

Long Term Care Insurance Getting Harder To Get As Firms Exit The Business

So reported CNBC here last week:

Three major plan providers, Metlife, Prudential and Unum, have stopped selling individual policies within the last three years.

"Companies have had a very difficult time hitting profit objectives," said Marc Cohen, chief research and development officer at insurer LifePlans. "Many of the assumptions underlying the pricing of these policies didn't hold true."

Among the assumptions firms made when they began selling plans in the 1990s was that policyholders would let their coverage lapse at about the same rate they do life insurance products. The lapse rate for long-term care has proven to be much lower. Policyholders who buy coverage during their senior years tend to hold onto their coverage and collect on their claims.

"The largest claim that's still open is from a woman," said Slome. "She's been on claim for 15 years. Her insurance policy has paid out one point $8 million to date and it continues to pay. She only paid $881 for three years before her claim began."

The industry has responded to that kind of bad underwriting by tightening qualifications for the coverage, setting caps on benefits and raising prices.

With 76 million baby boomers reaching retirement age over the next decade, the need for long-term care services is expected to surge.

Economic Distress: Average Age Of American Car Climbs To 11.4 Years From 9.9 In 2006

Story here.

Total Public Debt Outstanding Stuck At $16.738 Trillion For Over Two Months

The normal explanation for this would be that redemptions of Treasury securities are running at precise equilibrium with issues, which might imply there has been a big shift away from note and bond purchases by the public since the end of May when Ben Bernanke first floated the possibility of a tapering of Fed purchases in the secondary market. Bond outflows in June of nearly $62 billion dramatically reversed a trend (albeit declining) of purchases in 2013 through May.

Theoretically total public debt outstanding occasionally goes down in the rare cases when redemptions exceed issuances, but the maintenance of a consistent level equilibrium is indicative of a deliberate policy, that is, a policy not to exceed the debt limit of $16.7 trillion. This is effected by recourse to extraordinary measures on the part of the US Treasury Dept.

Tax revenues are also running higher in 2013, helping remove pressure from the situation as is the sequester which is curbing outlays. Revenue has also increased from the GSEs, in excess of $59 billion according to Reuters, here. The Associated Press has reported here for July 18th that the current fiscal year deficit is projected to come in over $300 billion less than last year when all is said and done.

Now you know why Congress felt it could take the traditional August recess without doing anything about the debt ceiling. They'll just let Jack Lew sweat it out.

The Kookiest Jobs Story In Months: Republican House Ways And Means Tallies Just 270k Full-Time Since 1-09

Story here.

What's next, 911 really was an inside job? Paul McCartney did die?

To believe this number you have to believe all the numbers reported all the time by the Bureau of Labor Statistics have been wrong for 4.5 years and that everyone who works there is content to keep a secret, and can, but I'll bet you those are precisely the numbers House Ways and Means have been "crunching" to arrive at the "truth". 

I realize John Crudele at The New York Post is fond of that skeptical pose now that a former BLS official has been talking to him about his skepticism about the numbers, but really, have we all gone off the deep end in order to drive home a political point about what ObamaCare is going to do to the nature of work in America when it's not really yet self-evident? For example, average hourly earnings should be plummeting if Ways and Means is right, but they are not. Wages are up nearly 1.9% in the last year. Nothing to write home about, but completely dispositive of the thesis.

As usual the devil is in the details, which in this case means the word "net", as in net total. Well, net from what benchmark? The all-time high of full-time at 123.219 million under George Bush? Full-time isn't anywhere near recovering to that level, so it's impossible that for the Republicans net means net above the all-time high by the paltry sum of 270,000, as in 123.489 million full-time jobs. Would that the Republicans were right!

Alas, they are not. Usually full-time is presently 117.688 million, 3.873 million above the January 2009 level when Obama took office, not 0.270 million above the January 2009 level. That's the nominal number. Doug Short at Advisor Perspectives could run the population-adjusted figures for us to show us just how far behind we really are in recovering to trendline at the Bush peak. Population has continued to grow causing employment-population ratios to plummet and labor participation rates to tank under truly dismal GDP conditions, so there is value in looking at it from that perspective. It's true. Obama is a total failure at job creation. When he turns his gaze to them, they seem to vaporize. Rush Limbaugh thinks this is on purpose.

Meanwhile the numbers continue to improve because this is a giant capitalist ship with tremendous inertia whose communist captain can't turn her on a dime for another go at the iceberg. He wishes we were China, but we aren't.

God bless the Republican House, but get off the number-of-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. It's August, and we have gin to drink.

US Marine Helps Flagging 9-Year Old In 5k Finish Race: "Will You Run With Me?"

The United States Marines, America's finest.

Story here.

Colorado Democrat Faces Recall After Narrow Victory Courtesy Of Libertarian Spoiler

Ross Kaminsky has the story in The American Spectator, here:

Forty-five miles north, Senate President John Morse is in even bigger trouble. Although his senate district includes the quirky (and liberal) town of Manitou Springs, John Morse won his 2010 election by only 252 votes in a race in which a Libertarian candidate won five times that number. In other words, if not for the presence of a third party candidate, Mr. Morse would likely have lost; this is not a safe “blue” seat, despite redistricting since 2010 having made the district lean slightly more Democratic than its prior configuration. ... [P]erhaps most galling, even to Morse’s liberal constituents, were comments he made on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show in which he proudly said (while claiming the mantle of Abraham Lincoln) that he counseled fellow Democrat senators to avoid reading e-mails from constituents. To be fair, Morse probably assumed that nobody was watching the show.

"The current state of valuation is as clear as a bell. We're not cheap here."

Joshua Brown, here, who notes that value investors are raising cash:

"In the meantime, many famous value managers are husbanding their cash - either because they can't find compelling values or because they foresee better opportunities ahead."

Fox News Thinks Abu Ghraib Is In Afghanistan

How soon they forget.

They report, you decide.

Story here.

The Trend To Part Time Jobs Is A Myth, Otherwise Average Hourly Earnings Would Be Down

Earnings are up 1.87% in the last year

So says Jim O'Sullivan, here:

Jim O'Sullivan, chief U.S. economist of High Frequency Economics . . . is not convinced that part-time, low wage jobs are driving the nation's employment growth. Average hourly earnings most of this year have been rising about 2% at an annual rate, notwithstanding a slight dip in July. That's consistent with the rest of the four-year-old recovery. If low-wage jobs were growing much faster than other positions, they should be pulling down average wage growth, O'Sullivan says.

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Not only are earnings up modestly year over year, the not-seasonally-adjusted figures for usually full time workers show a year over year increase of 1.55 million jobs, or 1.34%. Usually part time is up more, 1.59%, but that's only a net 430,000 workers.

The Part-Timing Of America Has Been Slowing Down, Not Speeding Up

The part-timing of workers was a much more severe phenomenon from the 1960s . . . when teenagers used to bag groceries, for example.

That was a good thing. We should have more of it, not less.

Is it a coincidence that as the minimum wage rises over time part-timing decreases?

!

Usually Part Time Is Up Only 1.25 Million Since Obama Elected In 2008

That's a less than 5% increase in the size of this group over the period, and a less than 1% increase in usually part time compared to the total size of usually part and usually full time taken together in November 2008.