Americans Still Earn Way Too Little To Afford The Median Priced Home

The national median price for an existing home in December 2013 was $196,300.

Median household income at the end of 2013 had reached $52,297.

That's a ratio of 3.75:1, which is even higher than the 3:1 ratio which prevailed a year ago, and 44% higher than the recommended ratio of 2.6:1.

Either housing is still much too high or wages are much too low to support ownership of the median priced home in the United States. It is more likely that both things are true.

And forget about buying a new house on such an income.

The median new house price reached a new record in December at $270,200, vaulting the ratio to 5.17:1.

Housing prices have continued to rise because of deliberate government policy to reinflate the housing bubble.

Sellers should sell and buyers should beware. 

Like The Size Of The Civilian Labor Force, Average Weekly Hours Have Stopped Their Recovery

Edward Lazear for The Wall Street Journal here has called attention to two months of back to back declines in average weekly hours, using the seasonally adjusted figures.

average weekly hours, not seasonally adjusted, quarterly average

It got me to looking at the not seasonally adjusted figures, which do not show the same thing. In fact, they show that we've been flirting with the 34.3 level quite a bit in 2013, but also even since before the Great Recession, and before ObamaCare and the recent spate of nasty winter weather. But what is interesting is that the quarterly average of the figures shows that we failed to make a new high in average weekly hours last summer, breaking a pattern of ever higher highs in 2010, 2011 and 2012 which had developed after the lows in late 2009, early 2010. You'll also notice a pattern had developed of higher lows in the measure at the beginning of 2011 and 2012,  but broken at the beginning of 2013.

civilian labor force level, not seasonally adjusted

This is interesting because you can see this same pattern in the level of the civilian labor force. The post-recession level bottomed at the beginning of 2011 and made higher lows at the turn both to 2012 and 2013, but not to 2014, which appears to signify more than seasonal shrinkage. Similarly there's been a pattern of ever higher highs in the summers in 2011, 2012 and 2013, but if the pattern doesn't hold in the summer as it hasn't in the winter, we'll not beat the 2013 summer level in the summer of 2014.

It stands to reason that as the civilian labor force recovers and grows, which it has, average weekly hours should rise, which they have, until recently. But the recent weakness in hours probably goes hand in hand with recent weakness in the size of the labor force, not with something else, like ObamaCare or the weather. And that probably has more to do with flagging demand in the economy than anything else.

What This Country Needs Is A Good 5-cent Dollar

Which would be an improvement of 25%.

Between March 5-12 Someone (Russia?) Yanked $104.5 Billion In US Treasuries From US Custodial Supervision

Peter Coy has the story here:

There’s circumstantial evidence that Russia may have yanked tens of billions of dollars in assets out of a custodial account at the U.S. Federal Reserve, possibly to keep it from being frozen by U.S. authorities in case of heightened conflict in Ukraine.

LA Employment Agencies Place Illegal Chinese In Jobs All Over America

The LA Times reports here:

Here in this bare room, where a map of the U.S. is one of the only decorations on the walls, a young man newly arrived from northeast China can find work washing dishes in Minnesota or Utah for 12 hours a day, six days a week. ...

"You can call from any part of the country to get a nanny or a restaurant worker sent to you," said Xiaojian Zhao, a professor of Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara who has studied the employment agencies. "They are like labor distribution centers for the ethnic economy." ...

"We have been the portal, the Ellis Island, of Asian immigrants for 30 years," said Talbot, the [Monterey Park, California] city manager. "We see people walking down the sidewalk with suitcases. They've just landed. I don't know how they get here from the airport, but they get here."

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

Politically the area has in the past routinely elected Democrat notables such as Judy Chu and Hilda Solis.



h/t Mickey Kaus

Bet You Didn't Know Japan Has 44 Tons Of Plutonium

I didn't either.

Story here:

Japan now has 9 tons of plutonium stockpiled at several locations in Japan and another 35 tons stored in France and the U.K. The material is enough to create 5,000 nuclear bombs. The country also has 1.2 tons of enriched uranium. ...

It also has plans to open a new fast-breeder plutonium reactor in Rokkasho in October. The reactor would be able to produce 8 tons of plutonium a year, or enough for 1,000 Nagasaki-sized weapons.

FDIC Sues 16 Big Banks Saying LIBOR Rigging Hurt 38 US Banks Which Eventually Failed

CNBC reports here:

The FDIC said the defendants' conduct caused substantial losses to 38 banks that the U.S. regulator had taken into receivership since 2008, including Washington Mutual Bank and IndyMac Bank.

Among the banks named as defendants include Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings, JPMorgan Chase, the Royal Bank of Scotland Group and UBS.

Sink Sunk In FL 13 By Libertarian Spoiler In Low Turnout Special Election Where Fixing ObamaCare Got No Traction

Flashback to November 2010 when Eric Cantor already said he wanted to keep the good parts of ObamaCare and not repeal the thing outright. Eric Cantor never saw the Republican blowout in 2010 as a resounding verdict against ObamaCare, even though the Republican sweep of the House was history making. Newsmax reported Cantor's remarks here.

Today, repeal of ObamaCare is much more appealing than keeping it as is, by almost 2:1 in December polling by Gallup, here. Those who want to scale it back or expand it somehow to fix it are evenly divided in the polling data and together represent 40% of those polled. The polling overall, however, is negative on ObamaCare by 52% to 37%.

The narrowly won Florida 13 District seat this week by a Republican was a test of the Democrat strategy of running on a platform of fixing ObamaCare. It didn't work.

Politico reports here:

Democrats had hoped that defeating Jolly would show that they could beat the GOP’s anti-Obamacare offensive. Sink had embraced the national Democratic Party’s “fix it, don’t repeal it” mantra, which candidates across the country are expected to adopt this year.

Election results at 10 News WTSP here show that a libertarian spoiled the race for the Democrat Alex Sink. Usually libertarians ruin elections for Republicans, not Democrats. The libertarian strongly supported marriage equality and liberalization of marijuana laws.

Turnout was low in the narrowly Republican majority district where older voters weren't particularly engaged by ObamaCare, as reported separately, here.

San Fran Gay Rights Activist Sentenced For Child Porn

Just remember people, homosexuality is completely unrelated to child sexual abuse. Completely.

Vivian Ho of The San Francisco Chronicle reports here:

Veteran gay rights advocate and former San Francisco Human Rights Commission staff member Larry Brinkin was sentenced to one year in county jail Wednesday for possessing child pornography. ... Brinkin, who worked as a senior contract compliance officer with the rights commission until his 2010 retirement, was arrested in June 2012 after e-mail attachments were found on his AOL subscriber's account that contained images of toddlers engaged in sex acts with men.

h/t Savage

Here come the Chinese industrial bankruptcies: Officials to respond with a mixture of capitalism and Keynes

The Chinese premier's comments are discussed here in The UK Guardian:

Premier Li Keqiang told lenders to China's private sector factories they should expect debt defaults as the world's second largest economy encounters "serious challenges" in the year ahead. ... Li's warning followed the failure of Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy to make a payment on a 1bn yuan (£118m) bond last week. The default was the first of its kind for China and widely seen as pointing to the end of 11th-hour government bailouts for troubled enterprises. Some analysts said the decision to let some indebted firms collapse was a sign the authorities had learned from the Japanese boom and bust experience of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tokyo was plunged into two "lost" decades of stagnation after it prevented zombie companies from declaring bankruptcy – even blocking petitions from bondholders in the courts - when a property collapse exposed debts many times the value of their businesses.

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

If only we could get Americans to practice some similar capitalism by letting companies and banks fail instead of bailing them out.

China can afford the Keynesian stimulus, however, unlike the US. They've got the savings Keynes prescribed, in the form of massive foreign reserves.

Too bad America has no such savings.

Malaysia Still Can't Find Boeing 777 Missing For 5 Days

Amazing. Maybe they should start looking on the ground, like in Pakistan.

FERC Study Warns Sabotage Vs. 0.01% Of Electrical Grid Could Blackout The Nation For Months

Reported here:

A study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission raises concerns about the seriousness of electricity grid vulnerability, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The study found that if saboteurs attacked just nine of the country's 55,000 electric-transmission substations, the country's power network would collapse. An ensuing nationwide blackout could last weeks or even months, the newspaper said.

Uh Oh, A Lot More Than The 1% DON'T Worry About The Economy

Gallup, here.

Incidentally, precisely 59% of American wage earners in 2012 made less than $35,000 per year. You need to make about $80,000 to reach the top 11%.

January Margin Debt Was 5th Record High In A Row

Reported here:

Margin debt hit record levels at the end of January, according to New York Stock Exchange data. Margin debt at the end of January reached $451.3 billion, its fifth record month in a row. Margin debt returned and surpassed record levels set in July 2007 back in April when it topped $384.37 billion.

Senate Dems Pull All-Nighter Talking Global Warming As Lake Michigan Posts All-Time High Ice Cover

The Christian Science Monitor reports here:

Twenty-eight Democrats and two left-leaning Independents, including Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada and his top lieutenants, are scheduled to speak in shifts until about 9 a.m. Tuesday. The event is not a filibuster, nor is it related to any legislation. The intent is to urge a divided Congress and nation to “wake up” on this issue.

Meanwhile Lake Michigan broke a record on Saturday for ice coverage at 93.29%, as reported here:

The National Weather Service says more than 93-percent of the lake was covered in ice on Saturday. A rapid build-up of ice came with a stretch of cold weather from late February into the first week of March. The Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory measured the ice cover at 93.29 percent. That's the most since record keeping started in 1973, breaking the record of 93.1 set in 1977.

NR's Libertarian Kevin Williamson Helpfully Informs Us The Koch Bros. Support Sodomy

Kevin Williamson of National Review obviously has no imagination when he says "There is no CPAC of the Left" right after almost busting his buttons informing us that Gov. Rick Perry at CPAC and Mike Lee and Ted Cruz in the US Senate all support reductions of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders.

Of course there's a CPAC of the Left. It's called CPAC.

But this was helpful here:

Senator Reid’s recent obsession with denouncing Charles and David Koch from his congressional perch is of a piece with that: Never mind the merits of the things the Kochs endorse politically — from liberalizing energy markets to gay marriage — they are a handy bogeyman. And, given the politics of the situation, Senator Reid surely would prefer to talk about the Koch brothers’ allegedly nefarious plans for world domination (the great “libertarian conspiracy to take over the world and leave you the hell alone”) than about Democrats’ recent meandering energy policies, which would hold hostage U.S. producers in order to appease the Birkenstocks-and-white-boy-dreadlocks set.

Tyranny Of The Legislative: The Worst Congress(es) Ever Because Of ObamaCare

Discussed here:

David Mayhew, a professor of political science at Yale University, pointed to the debates over ObamaCare as one cause of [Congressional] inaction.

“The subject has been dominating the domestic politics for several years and nobody can get over it. It’s really quite unusual. It’s bogging them down,” he said.

All The Republicans, Especially CPACers, Will Sell Out On Immigration

Louis Woodhill: Premature Signifi-ca-tion

not seasonally adjusted civilian labor force February 2008 to February 2014

Louis Woodhill, here, evidently referring loosely to the seasonally adjusted measure of the civilian labor force level, which is up 523,000 on January 1 and 264,000 on February 1 to 155,724,000:

It was extremely significant that labor force participation continued to move up during February, after its big surge in January. This confirmed that allowing extended unemployment benefits to expire in late December was the right thing to do.

Progressives predicted that limiting unemployment benefits would cause people to drop out of the labor force, but the exact opposite occurred. It turns out that people respond to incentives. Who knew?

Otherwise, I don't know what he's talking about.

The not seasonally adjusted figure was down January 1 and up February 1, more on which below. The seasonally adjusted participation rate was up slightly on January 1 and flat on February 1. Not seasonally adjusted the rate was down Jan. 1 and up February 1.

In the key 25-54 age group, the labor force level is up both seasonally and not seasonally adjusted two months straight: 607,000 and 402,000. That's important because this measure of the vital core of the workforce has been in freefall from the 105 million level reached before the Great Recession. But as it is, the members of this group are still struggling to pop back above 101 million. The deficit in the level of this group's participation is key to a jobs recovery: 4 million people. It's hard to tell why they are back in the labor force in the last two months. It could be their unemployment benefits ended, as Woodhill says. It could also be they've finished new degrees and certifications and have reentered the fray. It could be both of these things, and more.

Not seasonally adjusted, unfortunately, the civilian labor force level still looks troubled to me. Since the beginning of 2011 the level has made three consecutive new highs and two consecutive higher lows, until January 1, 2014 when the low at 154,381,000 fell below the March 1, 2013 nadir of 154,512,000. That broke the pattern of higher lows. At least the level went up on February 1.

The real test is if we make a new high in the summer of 2014 above 157,196,000, the last high and the all time high on July 1, 2013.

Arguably had the Great Recession not intervened, we'd be talking about levels more like 164 million by now. That's how far we still have to go.

Number Of Words Actually Contributed By Sarah Palin To Dr. Seuss Send-Up At CPAC

                    crony

                  spying, man

               Oh

we're       we     there's

              reporters'

                      their

and we won't take

All the rest, not just a couple of lines as she said, predated her speech at CPAC by over 3.5 years. View them here.