Sunday, July 14, 2013

The Swiss Overwhelmingly Want To Be Home Owners But Aren't

And the famous Robert Shiller really doesn't care, here:


Consider Switzerland, which by several accounts has had one of the lowest rates of homeownership in the developed world. In 2010, only 36.8 percent of Swiss homes housed an owner-occupant; in the United States that same year, the rate was 66.5 percent. Yet Switzerland is doing just fine, with a gross domestic product that is 4 percent higher, per capita, than that of the United States, according to 2011 figures produced at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s not that the Swiss inherently prefer renting. A 1996 survey asked a sample of Swiss whether, if they could freely choose, they would rather be homeowners or renters. Eighty-three percent said homeowners.

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To hell with what people want, right? Just keep property values so high only the likes of David Niven, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Tina Turner can afford to own there.



Saturday, July 13, 2013

Krauthammer On Big Sis' Resignation: "Her Record Was The Underwear Didn't Explode"

The Price Of Gas Is 147% Higher Than It Was 11 Years Ago

The price of gasoline today is 147% higher than it was eleven years ago, but the CPI is up just 29.15%, May on May, 2002 to 2013 (latest available figures). So gasoline in Grand Rapids in July 2002 at $1.51 per gallon adjusted for inflation measured on "all items" arguably should be just $2.13/gallon today.

Instead gasoline's cheapest price today in GR is $3.73/gallon, 147% higher than in 2002.

What, oil companies weren't making a profit eleven years ago?

Friday, July 12, 2013

How A Good Central Banker Is Supposed To Behave

not like this under Greenspan and Bernanke
David Merkel, here:


A good central bank fights the politics of the nation of which it is a part and tries to preserve purchasing power, ignoring labor unemployment. It tries to be a paper "gold standard." That has not been the Fed for 25+ years.

Bernanke Contradicts Himself

So says Jeffrey Snider, here:


Chairman Bernanke stole the show yesterday, certainly by his accommodative and now contradictory stand. I suppose that is the danger in trying to talk “markets” toward “targets”, much like Greenspan in the late 1990’s. Toward that end, he made at least one prediction that will likely come true (in sharp contrast to the Fed’s history), namely that the unemployment rate understates the weakness in the jobs market. ... As to the potential for tapering, that has always been about the rock and the hard place; the rock being asset bubbles in housing, credit and, yes, stocks vs. the hard place of lackluster, at best, economic performance. Given the problems of real time economic tracking and the dubious record of ferbus and other econometric models in use it would make sense that the FOMC appears to subscribe to each and every possible outcome concurrently. The committee both backs the accommodative approach (employment might be weaker than indicated) and the taper approach (things are getting much better) all at the same time.
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Still, it's an odd way to behave if you are being shown the door in a few months.


Rep. Cantor Divines New Founding Principle Which Just Happens To Lead To Dream Act




"One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents."

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Well, if anyone should know about founding principles, it's Eric Cantor:


"Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." -- Exodus 20:5


Thursday, July 11, 2013

Bernanke Reverses Himself With More "Accommodation", Tanks Dollar Over 2%

Someone must have found out something about The Bernank. Was it with the help of the NSA? In May bald Ben broached the topic of tapering just two days after Obama effectively fired him by saying Ben had been at the Fed too long just like Mueller has been too long at the FBI (a total slap in the face to Ben), and when Ben doubled down on the tapering again in June to show that he was really serious opinion broadly ridiculed him. Bonds took it in the shorts, and savers lost a lot of money. Now he's completely reversed himself all of a sudden, stocks are flying to new heights and the dollar erases its gains. He's either a manic depressive, or Obama's got something on the guy.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Obama Thinks He's King James II

Michael W. McConnell of Stanford Law School and the Hoover Institution says as much, here:


President Obama's decision last week to suspend the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act may be welcome relief to businesses affected by this provision, but it raises grave concerns about his understanding of the role of the executive in our system of government.

Article II, Section 3, of the Constitution states that the president "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." This is a duty, not a discretionary power. While the president does have substantial discretion about how to enforce a law, he has no discretion about whether to do so.

This matter—the limits of executive power—has deep historical roots. During the period of royal absolutism, English monarchs asserted a right to dispense with parliamentary statutes they disliked. King James II's use of the prerogative was a key grievance that lead to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The very first provision of the English Bill of Rights of 1689—the most important precursor to the U.S. Constitution—declared that "the pretended power of suspending of laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of parliament, is illegal."

To make sure that American presidents could not resurrect a similar prerogative, the Framers of the Constitution made the faithful enforcement of the law a constitutional duty.

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I'd say rather that this episode raises grave concerns about Obama's commitment to the role of the executive in our system of government. He understands it well enough, and wants to dispense with it. We therefore should dispense with him.


Yep, That Could Be Obama's Boy Alright

Monday, July 8, 2013

The (Loser) Republican Establishment Is Behind Immigration Amnesty, Not Conservatives

The newest ad campaign supporting the immigration amnesty bill from the US Senate is from American Action Network, according to the Chicago Tribune, here:


“This is the tough border security America needs,” said the television ad, the first to specifically target the House from American Action Network, whose Hispanic Leadership Network has sought to educate lawmakers about immigration. It notes that the surge is supported by conservative leaders, including what is essentially a who’s who of potential 2016 presidential contenders: Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the former vice presidential nominee. The ad will run nationally in prime time this week on the Fox News channel.

The founders of American Action Network are Fred Malek of Nixon administration Bureau of Labor Statistics "Jewish cabal" infamy and ex-Democrat Norm Coleman, who lost his US Senate seat to that formidable foe, Stuart Smalley. The sister organization to the Network is American Action Forum headed by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, of losing John McCain campaign fame. Evidently Messrs. Rubio, Bush and Ryan don't mind it one bit being mixed up with these retreads, but then again, Rep. Ryan knows all about hooking up with losers.

Malek managed the losing reelection campaign of Pres. George Herbert Walker Bush, and was co-chair of the John McCain presidential campaign finance committee. Oh yeah. In a civil fraud action brought by the SEC in 2003 Malek reportedly paid a personal fine of $100,000. Unlike President Obama, Malek has denied having any taste whatsoever for barbecued dog.

Obama And NSA Are The Equivalent Of The Stalinist Stasi, But Globalized

So says Daniel Ellsberg, here:


[Edward Snowden] found that he was working for a surveillance organization whose all-consuming intent, he told the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, was “on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them.” It was, in effect, a global expansion of the Stasi, the Ministry for State Security in the Stalinist “German Democratic Republic,” whose goal was “to know everything.” But the cellphones, fiber-optic cables, personal computers and Internet traffic the NSA accesses did not exist in the Stasi’s heyday. ... What he has given us is our best chance — if we respond to his information and his challenge — to rescue ourselves from out-of-control surveillance that shifts all practical power to the executive branch and its intelligence agencies: a United Stasi of America.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Temporary Employment Is No Worse Today Than Before ObamaCare

Temporary employment is lower today than it was at its peaks in 2000, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Temporary employment is no worse today than before ObamaCare.

Peak was 2.767 million in October 2006, and crashed below 1.8 million in the panic of 2008-2009.

The level of temporary employment today is 2.689 million. You could almost call that a recovery, and almost a full one.

Update: Oh yeah. You could almost call it a leading indicator of coming recession, too.

Saturday, July 6, 2013

Forbes Contributor John Goodman Uses "Reactionary" Like A Marxist

John Goodman, here:

"[T]he topic du jour on the left these days is inequality. By inequality they mean inequality of income. And they want government to do something about it. ... [W]hy are intellectuals on the left so obsessed with money inequality instead of the inequality of life’s blessings that people value much more? Certainly in their own lives they don’t act as though money is the most important value. They’re all writers and professors when they could have earned a lot more by getting a law degree or an MBA. I believe the answer is that they are reactionaries. They’re living in the past."

Well, when else would the topic du jour be du jour if not "these days", hm? And if advocates of classical liberalism like Goodman aren't reactionaries by his own definition, I don't know who is:

"Throughout the entire 20th century, what did the left consider its intellectual rival? Classical liberalism. That was the political philosophy of our founding fathers. It was classical liberalism that eliminated slavery from the civilized world, gave us women’s suffrage, and extended economic and political freedom to people all over the globe. The contrast between these two worldviews could not be more stark. The classical liberals believed the state should be the servant of free men. The 20th century left believed that men should serve the state. The results are in. The 20th century was the century of economic instability, depression and war. The 19th century was the century of price stability, economic growth and relative international peace. The 20th century was the century of dictatorship and genocide on an unimaginable scale ― with 125 million people killed by their own governments! The 19th century was a century of liberation and increasing personal freedom."

The problem with our side in these discussions is that we continue to accept the redefinition of the categories foisted upon us by a victorious left. It was the Marxists who successfully made "reactionary" into a dirty word, despite attempts like Paul Elmer More's in the early 20th century to steal that weapon from the Marxist arsenal aimed against us. What the continued use of the term "reactionary" in the perjorative sense by the right shows is that the right, for all its vindication by experience, evinces a shared world view with the left which is mistaken, and because it is mistaken is impotent in face of the challenges facing the West.

The hostile pose of the present toward the past means it can never really accept anything from it, and perhaps more to the point can and will therefore be deceived by the promise of the future. As long as people believe that human nature can be changed for the better, that its progress is inevitable, and that arrangements to check it are no longer necessary, they will no doubt face as they have before a future brotherhood of man as fraught with fratricide as any past we have ever experienced. Worldviews are not imposed from above, they spring from the inner conception of the self, and unfortunately for us, the prevailing inner conception remains servile, not free. If we cannot throw off this illusion of the present, we are doomed to be ruled by others instead of by ourselves.

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"Look over the whole creation, and you shall see, that the bond or cement, that holds together all the parts of this great and glorious fabrick, is gratitude."

-- Robert South

Did We Really Lose 240,000 Full Time Jobs Between May and June Due To ObamaCare?

That's what all the organs of political opposition to Obama and ObamaCare are saying in the wake of Friday's unemployment report.

Investors Business Daily is an example, here:

"It's even worse when you consider all of the net addition to June jobs - repeat, all - were part time. Compared with the 360,000 part-time positions created, full-time employment shrank by 240,000. Year to date, only 130,000 full-time jobs have been added to our economy. The rest of the jobs - 557,000 - have been part time. ... The No. 1 culprit, though, is ObamaCare. The added costs this monstrous piece of legislation has imposed on employers of full-time workers encourages them to hire only part-timers, who get few benefits and no health care."

That is a very one-sided presentation of the "facts", cherry-picked from the seasonally-adjusted numbers from the government's models of what's happening. The seasonally-adjusted chart of full-time for 2013 to date, for example, clearly shows a sudden 240,000 decline in full-time jobs. But the chart of the government's own raw full-time data for 2013 to date, clearly shows that full-time is up well over 3 million jobs for the first half of the year, not "130,000" as Investors Business Daily says. This chart also shows that the current level of full-time is over 1.2 million higher than the seasonally-adjusted model says it is, and that instead of a month over month decline in full-time of 240,000 jobs, we've just experienced an increase of 757,000 full-time jobs in June.

Why the discrepancy? The model anticipates events based on past history which may or may not occur. A case in point is modeling auto manufacturing jobs in the summer, which I think is what the 240,000 drop in the chart is all about. This is anticipatory, an expectation of plant shut downs this summer for retooling, which may or may not occur. The model tries to anticipate these events based on past history. But given strong demand for autos recently I'm guessing the shut downs may not materialize to the extent the model expects them to, introducing more noise into the seasonally-adjusted chart as the summer unfolds. At any rate, I say the chart is already noisy for this reason and should be taken with a grain of salt.

I say stick with the raw data, and chill out with political rhetoric.

Wall Street Journal Falsely Blames Part-Time For Economic Reasons On ObamaCare

"Imagine how much better [the US labor market] might do if ObamaCare weren't encouraging employers to hire so many part-time workers", crows The Wall Street Journal here in "Part-Time America" by Steve Moore, the lead story at Real Clear Markets this morning.

Too bad it's all a lie. I say "too bad" because I'd like to blame ObamaCare for everything that's wrong with the labor market, too, but it just isn't so. Employers aren't hiring "so many part-time workers" any more now than they were before ObamaCare was passed in March 2010, but you wouldn't know that from the charts presented in The Wall Street Journal because they don't go back before the recession began. The Journal is cherry-picking the data to show that the swings in the metric have been wild since ObamaCare passed. There's a reason for that. The long term charts show that the high level of part-time for economic reasons is an artifact of the recession, and has been trending lower ever so slowly since it ended. Equally disturbing is the Journal's attribution of a recent relatively small surge in the metric to ObamaCare when we've had much larger drops in the measure after the bill's passage. ObamaCare has had nothing to do with either, and it's transparently political to carp in this way. And it's embarrassing.

Print your story, Steve Moore, when part-time for economic reasons hits 9.5 or 10 million, and we'll talk then.


Friday, July 5, 2013

Mish Is Crazy For Saying "Massive Increase In Part Time" Due To ObamaCare

Mish says it here:


Digging under the surface, much of the drop in the unemployment rate over the past two years is nothing but a statistical mirage coupled with a massive increase in part-time jobs starting in October 2012 as a result of Obamacare legislation.

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But there has been no massive increase in part-time, whether due to ObamaCare or something else, which, by the way, passed in March 2010, not October 2012. The raw numbers are actually down from the beginning of 2010 before ObamaCare was passed. Is part-time down due to ObamaCare?

Part time not-seasonally-adjusted is lower than it was before ObamaCare
















Measured with the government "model", part time is up since 2010, but you can't say massively so, as Mish does. The 300,000 to 400,000 increase in part time since the beginning of 2010 using this measure is a relatively modest variation given the wild swings in this category of a million or more.

What made this measure of part time decline for most of 2012? ObamaCare?
















Frankly, I think Mish has a meme in his head which is not supported by the data and is just phoning it in. Well, he did just get re-married.

Sorry Zero Hedge, Full-Time Is Up 0.65% From May To June, Not Down

full-time government model is down a smidge
If you use the seasonally-adjusted government "model", you'll get a different result: full-time jobs down 0.21%. Big whoop, I weigh less too after I poop. That may be politically expedient to Zero Hedge, here, but the raw numbers paint a different picture of full-time employment increasing a little bit in the last month. Yeah, full-time employment remains in depression. That's obvious from either measure, but no one wants to say the truth because the truth is politically incorrect and saying it gets you marginalized as an extremist kook, a racist, or a political partisan. People who deny the truth are the kooks. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery.






full-time raw measure is up a little

Sorry Zero Hedge, Part Time Isn't Unequivocally At An All Time High

The high not-seasonally-adjusted was in early 2010
It's an axe to grind at Zero Hedge, here, that usually part-time is at an all time high. In the seasonally-adjusted category, it is. But not according to the raw not-seasonally-adjusted numbers.

What are you going to believe, the government's "model", or the raw numbers? 

Clearly it is politically expedient for Zero Hedge to follow the government model because it gives them something to say against the government today.

We don't need a number to say Obama sucks, who has sucked from the beginning when Zero Hedge voted for him and then kept on sucking.

The seasonally-adjusted high from early 2012 is now barely beaten

Gold/Oil Ratio Plummets To 11.75 On Rising Oil Prices, Surging Dollar

1212.70 divided by 103.22 = 11.75, another very strong technical buy signal for gold. But the signal is distorted by rising oil prices on Middle East instability because of the military coup in Egypt.

DoDoDoDo DoDoDoDo . . . Only 47% Of Adults Work Full Time

Sorry, the 47% just keeps turning up like a bad penny. Saw it again, here:


"Of the 144 million Americans employed last month, only 116 million were working full-time. Friday's report showed that 58.7% of the civilian adult population of 245 million was working last month. Only 47% of Americans, however, had a full-time job."