Bank purchases of Treasurys at highest level since 1Q 1994 help drive demand and prices higher, yields lower

The Wall Street Journal reports here:

U.S. banks also have been big buyers of government debt. Treasury bondholdings of commercial banks and savings institutions rose to $237.2 billion at the end of March, the highest since 1995, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Traders and analysts said the purchases have been driven by tighter banking regulations aiming at improving banks' balance sheets after the 2008 financial crisis. Overhauls such as the Dodd-Frank financial law in the U.S. and global regulations require financial institutions to hold more high-graded debt. The $12 trillion U.S. Treasury bond market is the world's most liquid bond market.

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The 1Q 1994 level held by financial institutions was $310 billion.

The 10 year Treasury yield fell to 2.44% yesterday. On May 1 it had stood at 2.57%.

Obama GDP Failure: 1Q 2014 GDP revised down to -1.0% from +0.1% in second estimate

From the BEA news release here, which fails to make mention of either "winter" or "weather" in the report:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- decreased at an annual rate of 1.0 percent in the first quarter according to the "second" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  In the fourth quarter, real GDP increased 2.6 percent. ...

The downturn in the percent change in real GDP primarily reflected a downturn in exports, a larger decrease in private inventory investment, and downturns in nonresidential fixed investment and in state and local government spending that were partly offset by an upturn in federal government spending.

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The consensus estimate for the revision had been -0.2% from +0.1%, while worst case scenarios had talked about -0.4%, so this is quite the stunner to go all the way down to -1.0%.

If the American economy has become so fragile that a little bad weather can knock off economic growth while China doesn't let a little thing like that stop it, we're in worse shape than I thought.

What's really showing up here is continuing weak demand after a quarter which included Christmas which could only muster so-so GDP at 2.6%. The weakness was already evident there.

The failure that is Obama continues. His average report of GDP after 21 quarters falls to 1.70%.

If "climate change" caused famine and brought down the Bronze Age, why did hungry conquerors DESTROY food?

It's a question which this classicist doesn't seem to have asked himself before writing here, in The New York Times:

The marauders are thought to have been the Sea Peoples, possibly from the western Mediterranean, who were probably fleeing their island homes because of the drought and famine and were moving across the Mediterranean as both refugees and conquerors.

One letter sent to Ugarit advised the king to “be on the lookout for the enemy and make yourself very strong!” The warning probably came too late, for another letter dating from the same time states: “When your messenger arrived, the army was humiliated and the city was sacked. Our food in the threshing floors was burned and the vineyards were also destroyed. Our city is sacked. May you know it! May you know it!” ...

We still do not know the specific details of the collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age or how the cascade of events came to change society so drastically. But it is clear that climate change was one of the primary drivers, or stressors, leading to the societal breakdown.

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There's famine, and then, well, there's famine.

Temperature was quite a bit warmer 3000 years ago than it is today, but without the present day scale of supposed human-caused climate change. Why aren't people asking why? And somehow mankind survived to produce what we know as human history despite all that. It is sad to see academics who specialize in the ancient world jumping on this bandwagon of climate hysteria when their own area of expertise ought to tell them that there is something terribly wrong with the contemporary theory. It is more plausible that the much warmer conditions of the past simply produced more human flourishing than the food supply at that time could sustain. And those much warmer conditions of past human history ought at least give them pause. 

Brian Wesbury sounds just like the regime: Dude, that bad GDP report was so two months ago

Brian Wesbury, here:

But regardless of which part of the GDP report accounts for the downward revision, the most important thing to remember is that the report is for the first quarter, the last days of which ended almost two months ago. It's a "rearview mirror" picture of the economy. The winter weather was awful, everyone knows it, and everyone knows that the economy in Q1 was weaker than in recent years.

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Like Obama administration narratives which have consistently blamed exogenous events for bad economic news everytime it comes out, which has been every time (it is a global economy after all), facts must never be allowed to interfere with the reality, which in Wesbury's case is his narrative of the ploughhorse economy of continued growth of a plodding, unspectacular but nevertheless good-enough sort that we should all embrace as indicative of the resilience of the great free-market economy of the United States.

Ya man, hallelujah.

Nevermind growth has been declining since 1984 and precipitously since 2004 as America made the shift to wanton free trade and debt-fueled economic growth. TCMDO doubled at its fastest pace in the post-war under Carter/Reagan from 1977 to 1983 and under Reagan from 1983 to 1989, building the foundation of our present discontents in the form of massive debt.

When those bad actors pulled prosperity from the future into their present, our past, they neglected to tell us that we have to pay it back when we get to the future they pulled it from, our future, our now.

Welcome to it. Time to pay up, ploughhorses.

We remember and give thanks with countless others

I love Kim Strassel of The Wall Street Journal, but they can't let her on again without fixing her teeth

Seen here.

And the makeup and eyelashes are pretty bad, too.

This is just criminal to do to such a good journalist.

Whack job writes in support of reparations

Errin Haines Whack in the UK Guardian article

 

"The 'Case for Reparations' is solid, and it's long past time to make them: Ta-Nehisi Coates's piece reveals the conversation that Americans need to start about our history of racial oppression",

 

here:

[A]n African-American writer telling this story in a legacy, mainstream publication like The Atlantic . . . adds weight and validity to the argument – and makes reparations harder to dismiss, yet again, as "crazy talk".

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Translation: We've got liberal whitey licked. Time to drive the knife home.

These people have always lusted for blood, and they may get it. The knife cuts both ways.

Recent Obama appointee Judge Matthew Leitman saves John Conyers' incompetent rear end

The lead from the story in The Detroit Free Press here:

U.S. Rep. John Conyers’ on-again, off-again roller-coaster ride for the Aug. 5 ballot took a new twist Friday when U.S. District Judge Matthew Leitman put the 85-year-old congressman back on the ballot.

Leitman’s decision, released late Friday, contradicts the Secretary of State’s review of Conyers’ petitions, which found earlier in the day that Conyers had less than half the required signatures of valid registered voters on the petitions he turned in to qualify for the Aug. 5 primary ballot.

But Leitman said the requirement that petition circulators be registered voters — the issue that got Conyers booted off the ballot in the first place — put serious limitations on the free speech rights of the circulators, the people who signed the petitions and Conyers.

“The public interest favors the enjoining of the likely unconstitutional Registration Statute,” for circulators, Leitman said.

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Every matter great and small

passed by the States into law

lately suffers in the thrall

of Fed'ral power's giant maw.

What's the point of passing them

just to feed Leviathan?

-- Brutus

The median existing home is affordable if you make $77,577

The median existing home in April is affordable if you make at least $77,577.

Unfortunately, only about 13% of individual wage earners make that much, which means two incomes are generally required to buy it and keep it. Long gone are the days when one income can support a wife raising children in the home.

The price for the median existing home has climbed to $201,700 in April, and the homeownership rate as of the beginning of the year has fallen to a level first achieved in the early 1970s.

At $154,600 in January 2012, the lowest median existing home price since the late housing bubble, the then median existing home was affordable if you made at least $59,461, which was the case for 20% of individual wage earners at the time. The homeownership rate then was 65.4.

So in just two short years the percentage of wage earners for whom housing is affordable has contracted by a whopping 35% as prices have rebounded in excess of 30% under the influence of Federal Reserve interest rate policy.

The birth rate in 2012 at 12.6 per 1000 women is half what it was in 1955 and the lowest yet in the post-war.

Friday's new S&P500 high at 1900.53 beats the old one by just 0.16%

Floatin' like a butterfly . . .

Bank Failure Friday: The 500th bank failure since February 2007 and the 8th failure in 2014

The banking crisis which began in 2007 has reached its 500th milestone. Columbia Savings Bank, Cincinnati, Ohio, failed today, the eighth bank failure of 2014, costing the FDIC $5.3 million.

"Congress created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933 to restore public confidence in the nation's banking system", says the press release, as says every press release going back to the first failure of the current banking crisis seven years ago.

Instead read: Congress created the FDIC in 1933 to make the public believe the banks are sound even though they are not. Hell, the banks are designed under the Federal Reserve and the FDIC to be precisely NOT SOUND.

Extend and pretend works its way through, ever so quietly, ever so unremarked.

Opportunity is a stern goddess to whom the only acceptable offering is cash

Seen here, quoting a diary from the Great Depression:

July, 1933: "Again and again during this depression it is driven home to me that opportunity is a stern goddess who passes up those who are unprepared with liquid capital."

Median existing home prices climb to $201,700 in April from $198,500 in March

Forbes reports here:

Year-over-year data indicates that price gains are slowing. The median existing-home price for all home types in April was $201,700, 5.2% higher than one year earlier. By contrast, during the first quarter of 2014 the median price for all home types was well above that, at 8.6% higher than one year earlier.

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At that price level the median existing home price becomes affordable only beginning at $77,577 of annual income.

Unfortunately 87% of individual wage earners made less than that in 2012.

47% in the news today

47% is in the news today: that's the percentage of unemployed in a new survey of 1,500 such people who have entirely given up looking for work.

Story here. 

The extremes of the bond market rarely make sense

So says Eric D. Nelson of Servo Wealth Management, here:

For diversified, long-term oriented investment portfolios, interest rate and bond price changes matter very little. Most of a portfolio’s volatility comes from stocks.

Interest rate cycles can last for very long periods of time which makes interest-rate forecasting almost impossible. Further, the extremes of the bond market (cash or long-term bonds) rarely make sense. Sticking with bonds of between one and five years in maturity works best. Long-term bonds sometimes produce the best returns, but this tends to coincide with periods when stocks are also doing very well, when the bond component of a diversified portfolio is needed the least.

A “variable maturity” strategy is superior to simple indexing or the “laddering” of bonds by taking advantage of current bond prices and higher-expected return environments when yields are significantly higher for longer-maturities (up to five years), while limiting interest rate risk when yields are flat or inverted across the bond market. This approach eliminates any need to forecast future interest rates, even if such a thing were possible.

Current premiums you will have to pay to own popular Vanguard bond funds

Trading above the 10.40 level since August 2009, almost 5 years, Vanguard's short term bond index fund VBISX is currently priced at 10.55, a premium of 1.44%. The average annual return for the last three years through April has been 1.53% according to Vanguard. Current assets total $35.7 billion.

Trading above the 11.00 level since May 2010, 4 years, Vanguard's intermediate term bond index fund VBIIX is currently priced at 11.48, a premium of 4.36%. The average annual return for the last three years through April has been 4.92% according to Vanguard. Current assets total $14.7 billion.

Trading above the 12.00 level since April 2011, 3 years, Vanguard's long term bond index fund VBLTX is currently priced at 13.55, a premium of 12.92%. The average annual return for the last five years through April has been 9.73% according to Vanguard. Current assets total just $6.5 billion.

Trading above 10.50 since April 2010, 4 years, Vanguard's total bond market index fund VBMFX is currently priced at 10.83, a premium of 3.14%. The average annual return for the last three years through April has been 3.41% according to Vanguard. Current assets total a whopping $113.6 billion. 

The birth rate has fallen almost 12% under Obama to the lowest level in the post-war

The birth rate per 1000 women both in 2006 and 2007, according to the latest CDC figures, was 14.3, but in 2012 it had fallen to 12. 6 from 12.7 in 2011.

The falloff means that annually you get something like 364,000 fewer new Americans to take our place.

In the late 1950s peak birth rates were in excess of 25.0 per 1000 women.

So if we were doing our job reproducing ourselves today like we were in the 1950s, we'd have something like 7.9 million newborn Americans in 2012 instead of 3.95 million.

Birth rates fell into the 15-range in the 1970s and have stayed there pretty much ever since, until now.

Now you know why GDP is also half what it used to be.

We are literally committing suicide.

Zillow says 10 million mortgages remain underwater concentrated among homes worth less than $100,000

CNBC's Diana Olick reports here:

Nearly 10 million borrowers still owe more on mortgages than their homes are currently worth, according to Zillow. That has kept them stuck in place. ... affordable homes are still drowning disproportionately. They are three times more likely to be underwater than expensive homes, according to Zillow. Thirty percent of mortgaged homes in the bottom price tier ($98,400 and below) are in negative equity, compared with 18 percent in middle tier ($90,400 to $306,700) and 10.7 percent in top tier ($306,700-plus).

Junk thought from Mish on labor force, employment and population

Here:

Since April 2008, the population in age group 25-54 declined 0.8%, but the labor force declined 3.6%, and employment declined 4.6%. ...

In the core age 25-54 age group, the population is down 1,053,000 but employment is down a whopping 4,614,000.

Thus, in the 25-54 age group, roughly 3,561,000 people are not working who should be working. The figure is higher if you include other age groups.

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Mish is looking at the issue from a zero-sum perspective which forgets that the age groups have changed in composition over time. Of course employment levels are down. The question is where did it all go, and why did it go there.

The 25-54 age group was full of Baby Boomers in 2008 who in 2014 are now in the 55+ category where the employment level has continued to grow and grow despite the recession. What has happened is that the Baby Boomers in the 25-54 age group have been replaced by subsequent demographic tranches bringing up the rear which were much less numerous because birth rates to Baby Boomers dropped dramatically compared to their parents' era. As a consequence no age group will ever reproduce labor force sizes which match what they were as the Baby Boomers grew up. In fact, the size of the 25-54 group will continue to decline for five more years until all the Baby Boomers cross over to the 55+ group.

The supposed four million+ deficit in employment in the 25-54 age group today can be explained entirely by demographics.

I presented the data here, concluding:

"It appears therefore that the fall-off in the employment level of those 25-54 can be explained entirely by the aging of their cohort in which many millions over the last seven years have moved on to the next level, and by the failure of the younger members of this group to bring up the rear in terms of their aggregate numbers because there just weren't enough of them born. The reason for the decline of their employment level is therefore structural, not economic, and will continue to be so for the next five years.

"Indeed, workers aged 55 and older have escaped a decline in their employment level. There are in fact 6.9 million more working at this age right now in 2014 than there were exactly seven years ago, which is what one would expect from the data. The Baby Boom is simply aging and continuing to work as it did before, and it has a lot of room left to run."

Facebook's Zuckerberg is the poster child for H-1B visa sins

From a story reported here by Breitbart's Tony Lee:

High-tech lobbies like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us have poured in millions of dollars in high-profile campaigns to secure more high-tech visas.

And they have partly been succeeding. The Senate's amnesty bill that passed last year would double and possibly triple the number of high-tech visas and, as Breitbart News has reported, House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Bob Goodlatte's (R-VA) "SKILLS" Act that ... passed out of his committee would double the number of H-1B visas.

Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology who has worked on these issues for more than a decade, said on the conference call that the H-1B visas that are filling the supposed "gaps" are "doing more harm than good" to the U.S. science and engineering workforce.

He noted that the majority of the H-1B visas are being used for "cheaper workers" from abroad and mentioned that offshoring firms used 50% of the cap last year to further their business model of bringing in "lower-cost H-1B workers to replace American workers." [Rutgers University's Hal] Salzman said that even after American software engineers train their replacements, they cannot speak out about their experiences for fear of being blackballed or having to forfeit their severance payments.

Hira said that the H-1B program has run amok because "Congress sets the wage floors way too low" and "far below the market wages for American workers" while not placing any "requirement to look for or recruit American workers first, so there is no displacement of American workers."

"As a result, you are basically inducing companies to game the system to bring foreign workers to undercut American workers," Hira noted. "Instead of complimenting the U.S. workers as it should, it's substituting for the U.S. workforce and taking away future opportunities by shifting the work overseas."

Salzman said that in this arrangement, the employer has nearly total control of the "indentured" H-1B workers because they hold their work permits. ...

Further, Matloff emphasized that H-1B visa holders earn 5-10% less on average than American workers and there is a high churn rate that gives companies a "never-ending supply of new hires," allowing them to replace workers over the age of 35 while weakening the "bargaining position of current workers." The Senate bill, Matloff said, exacerbates this problem by providing 150% of the visas that the IT industry has said they needed at the beginning of the debate.