The US Dollar Currency Index Low Was 71.58, Reached In April 2008

71.58 on the US Dollar Currency Index in April 2008 represented a decline of the dollar in excess of 40% from the 120 level which prevailed before the closing of the gold window in 1971.

Since 1967 The US Dollar Currency Index Average Is 97.76, But 120 Remains The Gold Standard Benchmark

The US Dollar Currency Index benchmark is really 120 since that is the level which prevailed before the closing of the gold window in 1971, after which the index declined to average 97.76 to date.

September Unemployment Falls To 7.2%, The Broadest Measure To 13.6%

Obama: Making this time different than all the rest

The BLS employment situation report is late, here, due to the government shutdown.

The number of unemployed remains high at 11.3 million, accounted for in the headline rate of 7.2%. The U6 measure at 13.6% includes those, plus the part-time for economic reasons and the marginally attached workers, which all together still number 21.5 million, unchanged from August.

Just 148,000 jobs are said to have been added in September, but the average number of jobs added monthly over the last year now comes in at 185,000, or 2.22 million. In August the figure was 184,000 and two months prior to that 182,000, so there has been very minor progress in job growth.

Average hours worked remains unchanged at 34.5 hours for private non-farm employment, and average hourly earnings are up 2.1% in the last year, or 49 cents, to $24.09/hour.

Don't spend it all in one place.

Obama's employment recession, already easily the very worst and deepest in the post-war, is now 1.75 years longer than Bush's at 5.67 years and counting. And unless things improve dramatically on the jobs front, it looks to me like it's going to take almost another year for Obama's red line in the graph to get back to zero.

Vindictive CNSNews.com blames Speaker Boehner for $3 trillion jump in total public debt

Here:

Thus, all spending and borrowing by the federal government are the de facto and de jure—n.b. constitutional—responsibility of the House of Representatives that John Boehner leads.

Well, yeah, and the Bible says "Judas went and hanged himself" and "go and do thou likewise".

The author of the posting, Terence Jeffrey, never once places the spending and borrowing in their broader historical context of the economic depression which ensued in 2007, long before John Boehner took the reigns as Speaker of the House in 2011.

Never once does Mr. Jeffrey mention the revenue side, which dried up like an old prune in consequence of the panic which saw home prices crash and a record 29.5 million people file first time claims for unemployment in 2009. Nor does he bother to mention the deliberate, bi-partisan decision taken to reduce revenues to relieve the American people in this situation by temporarily cutting their Social Security taxes by 33% for back to back years in 2011 and 2012 when nothing else seemed to be working to revivify the economy. Revenues constrained by declining tax receipts due to depression-like conditions all over the economy coupled with these tax cuts, after peaking in fiscal 2007 at $2.568 trillion, for the next five fiscal years never once got above that level after reaching their low in 2009 at $2.105 trillion. What did Mr. Jeffrey expect to happen given that, the debt to decline?

One suspects Mr. Jeffrey isn't interested, however, in any of the facts and their context, only in slamming John Boehner. Otherwise he'd have mentioned them, and that Boehner's predecessor Democrat Nancy Pelosi increased the debt at a rate 63% faster in 2009 and 2010 than Boehner has in his nearly three years as Speaker.

Really bad form, old boy.

If profit margins were historically normal, the Shiller p/e would be about 29 here, not 24

So writes John Hussman, here, on Tuesday last:

Meanwhile, the current Shiller P/E (S&P 500 divided by the 10-year average of inflation-adjusted earnings) of 24.2 is closer to 65% above its pre-bubble median. Despite the 10-year averaging, Shiller earnings – the denominator of the Shiller P/E – are currently 6.4% of S&P 500 revenues, compared to a pre-bubble norm of only about 5.4%. So contrary to the assertion that Shiller earnings are somehow understated due to the brief plunge in earnings during the credit crisis, the opposite is actually true. If anything, Shiller earnings have benefited from recently elevated margins, and the Shiller P/E presently understates the extent of market overvaluation. On historically normal profit margins, the Shiller P/E would be about 29 here. In any event, on the basis of valuation measures that are actually well-correlated with subsequent market returns, current valuations are now at or beyond the most extreme points in a century of market history, save for the final approach to the 2000 peak.

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You have been warned.

Hey Mark Levin! Who Got The Bush Tax Cuts Made Permanent Under A Democrat President?

John Boehner, you ingrate.

George Bush couldn't do that even with control of the House and Senate.

Total Public Debt Owed Jumps $328 Billion After Debt Ceiling Extended

click to enlarge

Rush Limbaugh Reaches Conclusion Reached Three Years Ago By Michael Savage: We've Been Taken Over

Here's Michael Savage back in April 2010:

"a takeover by the Red Diaper Doper Babies"

OBAMA DID SAY TODAY THAT THE SPREAD OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS TO MORE STATES IS AN UNACCEPTABLE RISK TO GLOBAL SECURITY. AND YET THIS INSANE TREATY INCREASES THAT RISK. OBAMA ALSO SAID TODAY THAT WHILE THE TREATY WAS A GOOD FIRST STEP FORWARD, IT’S THE FIRST IN A LONG WAY FORWARD. “IT WILL SET THE STAGE FOR FURTHER CUTS.” FURTHER CUTS. OBAMA DOESN’T JUST WANT TO REDUCE OUR ARSENAL. HE WANTS TO ELIMINATE IT COMPLETELY. HE IS OUR DESTROYER-IN-CHIEF. AND THE ONE REMAINING CHANCE TO END HIS AGENDA OF APPEASEMENT IS THE U.S. SENATE, WHICH MUST RATIFY THE TREATY BY A TWO-THIRDS MAJORITY. HE COULD BE STOPPED THERE, BUT WHERE IS THE REPUBLICAN OPPOSITION? EACH DAY, MORE AND MORE, IT’S AS IF A HOSTILE FOREIGN POWER HAS TAKEN OVER THE COUNTRY.

Here's Rush Limbaugh on October 15th:

You know what's happened here? You know what this feels like, folks? I'll tell you exactly what it feels like to me. You tell me if this isn't close. It feels like we've lost a war to a communist country. It's almost like there's been a coup. There's been a peaceful coup. The media has led this coup, and the Democrats have taken over with popular support. We're getting policies and implementations and things that were never, ever part of this country's design and founding. ... It feels like we've lost the country. In some estimations it's almost like we lost a battle for the country. Some outside force has actually come in and taken over, and they did it without firing a shot, 'cause there wasn't really a war going on that anybody saw. Sort of like a peaceful coup. It happens gradually and then all of a sudden everybody wakes up, "Gee, what in the name of Sam Hill's happened here?" I understand it.

Lefty Peter Beinart Calls Republican Surrender A Victory

Here:

If this is Republican surrender, I hope I never see Republican victory. ... Let’s pause for a moment to underscore the point. In early September, a “clean” CR—including sequester cuts—that funded the government into 2014 was considered a Republican victory by both the Republican House Majority Leader and Washington’s most prominent Democratic think tank. Now, just over a month later, the media is describing the exact same deal as Republican “surrender.”

Ted Cruz And Mike Lee Aren't Heroes. They Hung John Boehner Out To Dry.

During his non-filibuster filibuster, Sen. Ted Cruz had called defunding ObamaCare a matter of life and death: 

“In a football game we all cheer for our respective teams. I cheer for the Houston Texans. It’s a good thing to cheer for your team…This isn’t a team sport. This is life and death. There is a fundamental divide between the government and the people."

Presumably a matter of life and death means you'd do anything to stop ObamaCare, including block the raising of the debt ceiling to accomplish that.

That's what could have happened yesterday afternoon if Cruz, or Lee, or Rand Paul or Marco Rubio or any of the other senators opposed to ObamaCare in the Senate had moved to delay, which any of them easily could have. Then the deadline set by the US Treasury would have come and gone, and all hell would have broken loose.

Yes, within a day or two the bill in the Senate still would have been passed and sent to Speaker Boehner, who, being perhaps another man by that time, might have refused to bring the bill up for a vote in the US House, throwing down the gauntlet once and for all.

We'll never know, but no Republican in the Senate gave Mr. Boehner any political cover to take such a courageous stand and desperate action to stop the single biggest assault by government against free enterprise in this country in its history.

Speaker Boehner for his part received a standing ovation from the Republicans for his leadership in this affair because he went to the mat for members with whose views he personally disagreed, views they shared with Cruz and Lee. Too bad Ted Cruz and Mike Lee didn't go to the mat for him.

The Far Left Also Realizes Boehner Won. Too Bad Republicans Don't.

The Nation, here:

Because the deal only includes minor concessions, the Beltway consensus is that it represents a resounding defeat for Republicans, who “surrendered” their original demands to defund or delay Obamacare. In the skirmish of opinion polls, that may be true, for now. But in the war of ideas, the Senate deal is but a stalemate, one made almost entirely on conservative terms. The GOP now goes into budget talks with sequestration as the new baseline, primed to demand longer-term cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And they still hold the gun of a US default to the nation’s head in the next debt ceiling showdown.

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Boehner, last August, who got exactly this, despite having to try the so-called Tea Party gambit of defunding ObamaCare, which failed because of all the RINOs in the Senate, and was destined to fail from the beginning for that very reason, if only people like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee had bothered to check their voting records:

“When we return, our intent is to move quickly on a short-term continuing resolution that keeps the government running and maintains current sequester spending levels,” Boehner (R-Ohio) said on a conference call with GOP lawmakers, according to a person on the call.

“Our message will remain clear,” Boehner said. “Until the president agrees to better cuts and reforms that help grow the economy and put us on path to a balanced budget, his sequester — the sequester he himself proposed, insisted on and signed into law — stays in place.”

Boehner Actually Wins Again Despite Himself: His Position From August 22nd Was A Clean CR Keeping The Sequester, And That's What The Senate Compromise Is Going To Provide

The Washington Post reported, here, at the time:

House Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday that he plans to avert a government shutdown at the end of September by passing a “short-term” budget bill that maintains sharp automatic spending cuts, known as the sequester.

“When we return, our intent is to move quickly on a short-term continuing resolution that keeps the government running and maintains current sequester spending levels,” Boehner (R-Ohio) said on a conference call with GOP lawmakers, according to a person on the call.

“Our message will remain clear,” Boehner said. “Until the president agrees to better cuts and reforms that help grow the economy and put us on path to a balanced budget, his sequester — the sequester he himself proposed, insisted on and signed into law — stays in place.”

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Well, that's what we're getting from the Senate at the very last minute after a two-week government shutdown: a short term continuing resolution which keeps the sequester cuts for that term.

It was libertarian Republicans who found this unacceptable and forced Boehner to try the shutdown gambit, which was incredibly stupid given the optics of the government running out of funding on September 30th and ObamaCare launching on October 1st. Clearly no one in Boehner's opposition was watching the news stories predicting problems with the internet exchanges, nor reflecting on what powerful weapons they were putting into Obama's hands when they've had five years' worth of examples of Obama usurping powers, acting unconstitutionally, and generally acting "out of character" for a president.

The president continues to go outside the experience of his enemy, but the enemy still hasn't figured that out. Now that they know how far Obama's willing to go, his enemies need to be more careful next time.

Boehner Knew The Political Danger Of A Shutdown. Republicans Should Have Listened To Him.

As always, Republican disunity becomes the Democrat opening, but Boehner deserves blame for not insisting on his preference and for letting someone else set the agenda, which unfortunately is his habit. The speaker of the House must assert the co-equality of it.

Politico, here:

Boehner allies strongly reject the idea that the speaker could be damaged by this latest debacle. After all, it was Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who was setting the terms of this debate, not Boehner. The Ohio Republican wanted to pass a clean government-funding bill more than a month ago, while organizing a tidy negotiating process around the debt ceiling. Instead, everything became one big mess, where House Republicans were unsure what they were asking for, what they should be seeking, and for what price.

Janet Yellen's Crystal Ball Utterly Failed Her In May 2007: She Never Saw The Crisis Coming

(as always, click on the image to enlarge)

“Taking a longer view, I anticipate real GDP growth over the next two and a half years [2008 & 2009] of about 2.6 percent, just a bit below my assessment of potential. My forecasts of both actual and potential growth are a tenth or two stronger than the Greenbook forecasts; but the basic story is very similar, and the underlying assumptions, including the path for the nominal funds rate, are essentially the same. I view the stance of monetary policy as remaining somewhat restrictive throughout the entire forecast period. The key factors shaping the longer-term outlook include continued fallout from the housing sector, with housing wealth projected to be roughly flat through 2008. Given the reduced impetus from housing wealth, household spending should advance at a more moderate pace going forward than over the past few years.” (Quoted here)

Obama Keeps Michelle's Website, letsmove.gov, Up During The Shutdown, But Not bea.gov

letsmove.gov is open for business during the shutdown

bea.gov is not

How Rep. Paul Ryan Is Just Like Sen. Ted Cruz

Here in The Wall Street Journal on October 8th, Rep. Paul Ryan says he is willing to swap sequester cuts for cuts to mandatory spending:

If Mr. Obama decides to talk, he'll find that we actually agree on some things. For example, most of us agree that gradual, structural reforms are better than sudden, arbitrary cuts. For my Democratic colleagues, the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act are a major concern. And the truth is, there's a better way to cut spending. We could provide relief from the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act in exchange for structural reforms to entitlement programs.

And the reason is there's more to be gained over the long haul from cuts to the mandatory side, which is 60% of annual outlays anyway:

These reforms are vital. Over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office predicts discretionary spending—that is, everything except entitlement programs and debt payments—will grow by $202 billion, or roughly 17%. Meanwhile, mandatory spending—which mostly consists of funding for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—will grow by $1.6 trillion, or roughly 79%. The 2011 Budget Control Act largely ignored entitlement spending. But that is the nation's biggest challenge.

But just why Republicans like Paul Ryan expect us to believe they can negotiate cuts to mandatory programs from Democrats who have just rammed a new one called ObamaCare down our throats is quite beyond me. It's as unrealistic as Senator Ted Cruz thinking libertarian Republicans could get Obama to defund that program without unity in the party on the subject in the first place. Cynics quickly decided Cruz was just fundraising for 2016. And Rep. Ryan could just as plausibly be trying to re-establish some street cred with conservatives after his involvement with the Facebook-financed immigration amnesty debacle.

There's plenty of unrealism to go around in the Republican Party, which still hasn't figured out that Obama and the Democrats are the enemy, which is surprising since that's how he views them. But that seems to be a particularly libertarian penchant, expressed as it is in interminable losing electoral challenges throughout the country which do nothing but help elect Democrats. Maybe Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz are just libertarian spoilers on the national stage, for whom success is keeping Republicans from succeeding.

Figuring out how to proceed when your country has been taken over by a hostile foreign power without having fired a shot remains the central problem for an opposition which doesn't realize it is one, especially when your own ranks have been infiltrated by an enemy.

Where are the non-libertarian economic conservatives? 

Today's Average Price for Gas in GR is $3.35/gallon

The cheapest price for gas is at Sam's Club for $3.19/gallon at this hour.

The average inflation adjusted price for gasoline going back a hundred years is $2.60/gallon in June 2013 dollars, so gasoline remains about 29% too expensive by historical standards.

Without Issuing New Treasury Securities, Something Would Have To Give After Just 22 Days

How long can the government pay all its bills without selling any additional Treasury bills, notes or bonds? The answer is really about only 22 days.

The suggestion that the answer is indefinitely is completely wrong. The Sean Hannitys of the world who otherwise protest incessantly that we borrow 40 cents of every dollar that we spend are in denial about this.

Consider revenues in the last fiscal year: $2.712 trillion, or $226 billion per month.

Then consider outlays in the last fiscal year: $3.6849 trillion, or $307 billion per month, or $10.233 billion per day. So revenues will last about only 22 days, after which we'll need to find another $81 billion somewhere, or not pay some bills.

The monthly shortfall of $81 billion adds up to $972 billion over a year, or 26.4% of all outlays in the last fiscal year.

Discretionary spending in the Obama 2012 budget request was $1.510 trillion. Slashing that $972 billion across the board represents a 64.4% cut to discretionary spending.

By agency that means, for example, defense spending would have to be cut by $429 billion and Homeland Security by $35 billion, and the EPA by $5.9 billion and Agriculture by $17 billion.

That's why just about everyone in both parties wants to see the debt limit increased: no one can stand it that they'd have to take such a huge hit to live within our means. It's really all about that, not about "default" per se. Interest on the debt runs to only $34 billion to $35 billion per month. There's plenty of income to allocate to that. So we won't default, but spending cuts would of necessity be nothing short of draconian.

The squealing of the pigs continues.

CNBC Exaggerates That The Debt Party Is Back On

Debt is expanding year over year at a rate 33% faster than compared to the previous period, but even so, CNBC's Jeff Cox here is exaggerating the significance:

"Whether it's corporate loans, all quality levels of bonds or simple consumer credit, the debt party is back on in the U.S., whether it's in the boardroom or the living room."

Debt expansion between April 2012 and April 2013 is up at a rate of only 3.5% compared to the period a year earlier when total credit market debt outstanding (TCMDO) expanded at a 2.6% rate.

TCMDO increased from $55.592 trillion in April 2012 to $57.563 trillion in April 2013, the latest date for which figures are available. In April 2011, TCMDO stood at $54.150 trillion.

As welcome as the present higher rate of debt expansion might be from a monetarist perspective, it's still a far cry from the historic post-war pattern which has witnessed TCMDO double every 6-11 years, with an average doubling time of 8 years.

A doubling time of 11 years implies an annual rate of debt expansion of about 6.5%, not quite double the actual rate in the last year. At the present rate, it will take TCMDO 20 years to double, an unprecedented slowdown in the pattern since the end of World War II.

The United States remains severely hampered when it comes to its traditional post-war debt-based economy.

Larry Kudlow Says He Believes In Abraham Lincoln's Idea Of Political Persuasion

You mean like this, Larry?