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LMAO!.. .this post now deleted for "personal attack"
even tho it was posted to "none"... LMFAO!
Request Deletion Review
Post Date: 1/31/2011 5:00:56 PM
Board: Your Economy Reason: Personal Attack
Obama and Business May Get On Well, but When Will That Produce Jobs?
By SIMON JOHNSON
President Obama is embarked on a major charm offensive with the business sector, as seen, for example, in the appointments of William M. Daley (formerly of JPMorgan Chase, now White House chief of staff) and Jeffrey R. Immelt (chairman and chief executive of General Electric and now also the president’s top outside economic adviser).
This should not be an uphill struggle – much of the corporate sector, particularly bigger and more global businesses, is doing well in terms of profits and presumably, at the highest levels, compensation. But when exactly will this approach deliver jobs and reduce unemployment? And does it increase risks for the future?
Republican rhetoric over the last two years was relentless in its assertion that the Obama administration was antibusiness. Supposedly, this White House attitude undermined private sector confidence and limited investment.
In reality, the opposite was the case. Relative to any postwar recession, the rebound in profits during the Obama administration has been dramatic. To be sure, the end of 2008 was shocking to many entrepreneurs and executives, as credit was disrupted in a much more dramatic fashion than they thought imaginable. Large and immediate cuts in employment followed.
But then the government saved the failing financial sector. The means were controversial, but the end was essential – without private credit, the United States economy would have fallen far and for a long time.
And profits rebounded almost at once. The financial sector recovered quickly on the back of implicit guarantees provided to our largest banks. The only bad quarter was at the end of 2008 (leading to great angst among bankers about their bonuses in 2009). The nonfinancial sector has done even better.
Profits for the private sector fell no more than 20 percent from top to bottom in the cycle, and in the third quarter of last year (the latest available data from the Bureau of Economic Affairs), profits were back at the level of 2006. After the deep recessions of the early 1980s, it took at least three times as long for profits to come back to the same extent (I went through this comparison in more detail last week for The New York Times’s Room for Debate).
Investment in plants and equipment has also recovered fast – this was the one bright part of the domestic economy in the last two years (the other being exports). Look around at the places you work, where you do business and where you shop. Is there any indication they have cut back on information technology spending recently?
Over all, the policies of late 2008 and early 2009, including the much-debated fiscal stimulus, protected corporate profits to an impressive degree. Even though this was the steepest recession of the last 70 years, profits fell only briefly and seem likely to be just as strong as they were before the crisis.
Large global American-based companies, in particular, are well positioned to take advantage of growth in such emerging markets as India, China and Brazil. But the link between corporate performance — measured in terms of profit or executive pay for American companies — and domestic employment has fundamentally changed in recent decades.
At the very least, employment responds more slowly now than in previous cycles as output and sales recover. Consider this chart from the Calculated Risk blog (and revisit it regularly). As the picture shows so vividly, we are still waiting for employment to turn back up decisively. Compared with previous recessions, the delay is simply stunning.
Ideally, in a situation like this, we’d provide more stimulus to the economy in some form. But our monetary policy is already close to exerting its maximum efforts, and the scope for using fiscal policy was undermined by high deficits during the “boom” years of the 2000s, so there is no safe fiscal space for action – even if the politicians could agree on what to do.
We are reduced to waiting for the private sector to recover enough to want to take on new employees. No one has a good answer for why this is so slow – perhaps because it is so easy and so cheap to hire workers in those emerging markets that are now booming, or perhaps because the skill mix available at prevailing wages in some parts of the United States is not what employers want.
Or perhaps companies are effectively keeping out new entrants, keeping profits artificially high and, at the sectoral level, limiting employment. The constraints on entrepreneurship in our post-credit-crisis economy need careful scrutiny.
Hopefully, the administration’s charm offensive will not prevent it from enforcing American antitrust laws, which were more than slightly neglected in the Bush years.
Listening attentively to the nonfinancial sector makes sense in this situation. In return, corporate leaders need to focus on creating jobs in the United States. But bending over backward to accommodate the wishes of the financial sector is exactly what got us into this mess to start with.
Allowing our largest banks to become even bigger and more dangerous would be a very bad mistake.
______________
Geopolitical unrest and world oil markets
Change is on the way in the Arab world, with Egypt the latest focal point. Here I review recent events and their implications for world oil markets.
I begin with a timeline, if not to connect the dots, at least to collect the dots in a single list.
• Sudan, Jan 9-15: Country holds a referendum whose apparent outcome will be a split of South Sudan into its own a separate country.
• Lebanon, Jan 12: Key cabinet ministers resign in protest against impending indictments from a U.N.-backed investigation into the 2005 assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, toppling the governing coalition. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered this assessment:
We view what happened today as a transparent effort by those forces inside Lebanon, as well as interests outside Lebanon, to subvert justice and undermine Lebanon's stability and progress.
• Tunisia, Jan 14: President Ben Ali flees the country in response to widespread protests.
• Iraq, Jan 17-27: Over 200 people killed in a spate of recent bombings, a sharp and tragic increase from the recent norm.
• Egypt, Jan 29: Cairo appears to be near anarchy as a result of an uprising against President Mubarak.
• Yemen, Jan 29: Demonstrations and rallies have resulted in clashes with police, with unclear implications at this point for the stability of the regime.
An optimist might see the common thread in many of these developments to be the realization across parts of the Arab world of the power of popular will to overthrow dictators, the first step toward democracy and a better life for the people. A pessimist might see in at least some of these situations deliberately orchestrated chaos for purposes of seizing power by a new group of would-be ruthless leaders. A realist might acknowledge the possibility of both factors in play at once, and worry that ideologically motivated uprisings have often turned out to be usurped by groups with their own highly anti-democratic agenda. In the event that some of the transitions of power prove to be more chaotic than peaceful, let me comment on their potential to disrupt world oil markets.
continued
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2011/01/geopolitical_un.html
Obama and Business May Get On Well, but When Will That Produce Jobs?
By SIMON JOHNSON
President Obama is embarked on a major charm offensive with the business sector, as seen, for example, in the appointments of William M. Daley (formerly of JPMorgan Chase, now White House chief of staff) and Jeffrey R. Immelt (chairman and chief executive of General Electric and now also the president’s top outside economic adviser).
This should not be an uphill struggle – much of the corporate sector, particularly bigger and more global businesses, is doing well in terms of profits and presumably, at the highest levels, compensation. But when exactly will this approach deliver jobs and reduce unemployment? And does it increase risks for the future?
Republican rhetoric over the last two years was relentless in its assertion that the Obama administration was antibusiness. Supposedly, this White House attitude undermined private sector confidence and limited investment.
In reality, the opposite was the case. Relative to any postwar recession, the rebound in profits during the Obama administration has been dramatic. To be sure, the end of 2008 was shocking to many entrepreneurs and executives, as credit was disrupted in a much more dramatic fashion than they thought imaginable. Large and immediate cuts in employment followed.
But then the government saved the failing financial sector. The means were controversial, but the end was essential – without private credit, the United States economy would have fallen far and for a long time.
And profits rebounded almost at once. The financial sector recovered quickly on the back of implicit guarantees provided to our largest banks. The only bad quarter was at the end of 2008 (leading to great angst among bankers about their bonuses in 2009). The nonfinancial sector has done even better.
Profits for the private sector fell no more than 20 percent from top to bottom in the cycle, and in the third quarter of last year (the latest available data from the Bureau of Economic Affairs), profits were back at the level of 2006. After the deep recessions of the early 1980s, it took at least three times as long for profits to come back to the same extent (I went through this comparison in more detail last week for The New York Times’s Room for Debate).
Investment in plants and equipment has also recovered fast – this was the one bright part of the domestic economy in the last two years (the other being exports). Look around at the places you work, where you do business and where you shop. Is there any indication they have cut back on information technology spending recently?
Over all, the policies of late 2008 and early 2009, including the much-debated fiscal stimulus, protected corporate profits to an impressive degree. Even though this was the steepest recession of the last 70 years, profits fell only briefly and seem likely to be just as strong as they were before the crisis.
Large global American-based companies, in particular, are well positioned to take advantage of growth in such emerging markets as India, China and Brazil. But the link between corporate performance — measured in terms of profit or executive pay for American companies — and domestic employment has fundamentally changed in recent decades.
At the very least, employment responds more slowly now than in previous cycles as output and sales recover. Consider this chart from the Calculated Risk blog (and revisit it regularly). As the picture shows so vividly, we are still waiting for employment to turn back up decisively. Compared with previous recessions, the delay is simply stunning.
Ideally, in a situation like this, we’d provide more stimulus to the economy in some form. But our monetary policy is already close to exerting its maximum efforts, and the scope for using fiscal policy was undermined by high deficits during the “boom” years of the 2000s, so there is no safe fiscal space for action – even if the politicians could agree on what to do.
We are reduced to waiting for the private sector to recover enough to want to take on new employees. No one has a good answer for why this is so slow – perhaps because it is so easy and so cheap to hire workers in those emerging markets that are now booming, or perhaps because the skill mix available at prevailing wages in some parts of the United States is not what employers want.
Or perhaps companies are effectively keeping out new entrants, keeping profits artificially high and, at the sectoral level, limiting employment. The constraints on entrepreneurship in our post-credit-crisis economy need careful scrutiny.
Hopefully, the administration’s charm offensive will not prevent it from enforcing American antitrust laws, which were more than slightly neglected in the Bush years.
Listening attentively to the nonfinancial sector makes sense in this situation. In return, corporate leaders need to focus on creating jobs in the United States. But bending over backward to accommodate the wishes of the financial sector is exactly what got us into this mess to start with.
Allowing our largest banks to become even bigger and more dangerous would be a very bad mistake.
______________
Geopolitical unrest and world oil markets
Change is on the way in the Arab world, with Egypt the latest focal point. Here I review recent events and their implications for world oil markets.
I begin with a timeline, if not to connect the dots, at least to collect the dots in a single list.
• Sudan, Jan 9-15: Country holds a referendum whose apparent outcome will be a split of South Sudan into its own a separate country.
• Lebanon, Jan 12: Key cabinet ministers resign in protest against impending indictments from a U.N.-backed investigation into the 2005 assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, toppling the governing coalition. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered this assessment:
We view what happened today as a transparent effort by those forces inside Lebanon, as well as interests outside Lebanon, to subvert justice and undermine Lebanon's stability and progress.
• Tunisia, Jan 14: President Ben Ali flees the country in response to widespread protests.
• Iraq, Jan 17-27: Over 200 people killed in a spate of recent bombings, a sharp and tragic increase from the recent norm.
• Egypt, Jan 29: Cairo appears to be near anarchy as a result of an uprising against President Mubarak.
• Yemen, Jan 29: Demonstrations and rallies have resulted in clashes with police, with unclear implications at this point for the stability of the regime.
An optimist might see the common thread in many of these developments to be the realization across parts of the Arab world of the power of popular will to overthrow dictators, the first step toward democracy and a better life for the people. A pessimist might see in at least some of these situations deliberately orchestrated chaos for purposes of seizing power by a new group of would-be ruthless leaders. A realist might acknowledge the possibility of both factors in play at once, and worry that ideologically motivated uprisings have often turned out to be usurped by groups with their own highly anti-democratic agenda. In the event that some of the transitions of power prove to be more chaotic than peaceful, let me comment on their potential to disrupt world oil markets.
continued
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2011/01/geopolitical_un.html
Extreme oversold condition in the Vix ?
http://gicharts.blogspot.com/2011/01/extreme-oversold-condition-in-vix.html
Just pay attention to the "extreme oversold condition" in the VIX.
Raise your stop on the SP 500 to 1260
Posted by Moise Levi
Gold and Silver warning
http://gicharts.blogspot.com/2011/01/gold-and-silver-warning.html
SPDR Gold Trust ETF (GLD) and iShares Silver Trust ETF (SLV) chart analysis ;
1) Using on both charts the support level (light grey) and their simple 50 days MA.
2) If you decided to go short on both, focus on the stop loss level
3) GLD shows a triple top ....
4) SLV shows a head and shoulder ?
5) Target on both ? 200 days simple MA ?
Not jumping to conclusions yet, but we do have a first real sign of a potential bearish reversal.
Posted by Moise Levi
Italy's Garbage Crisis Worsens
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/895402--naples-trash-crisis-highlights-berlusconi-weakness
Garbage hasn't been collected for weeks in Naples and blame is being directed towards Italy's prime minister.
The rotting garbage piled up on the streets of Naples has become an enduring symbol to Italians of the many problems facing Silvio Berlusconi’s crumbling conservative government. The prime minister came to power as a “Mr. Fix It” less than three years ago vowing to clean up a mess that his centre-left predecessor had failed to sort out, and often cites the clearing of Naples’ streets as one of his biggest successes. He even held his first cabinet meeting there, promising a break with past administrations that had failed to solve the chronic rubbish problem in Campania—the poor, southern region of which Naples is the capital. Halfway into his term, facing the prospect of early elections due to the implosion of his centre-right coalition and a string of sex and graft scandals, Berlusconi is seeing Naples’ trash back on the front pages of newspapers and TV bulletins. “Naples garbage? It’s just like two years ago,” read the headline of the daily La Stampa on Tuesday.
9 Photos Of The Garbage Crisis In Italy
http://www.buzzfeed.com/provincialelitist/9-photos-of-the-garbage-crisis-on-italy-4t5
The mother of all bull markets thanks to Shanghai
Posted by Moise Levi
http://gicharts.blogspot.com/2010/11/mother-of-all-bull-markets-thanks-to.html
Just type "Shanghai" in my blog search (see top left), and you'll notice that I use it as my leading indicator. Was able to call the bottom of the bear market thanks to the bullish break out Shanghai did in Feb 09.
You'll notice that I am also quite bullish on crude oil and copper.
I am expecting a MEGA HUGE bull market, driven by China.
Once the Shanghai index gets above the 3400 level, all markets will be on fire ..... until the next bubble ..... (I'll keep you informed if I see a parabolic rise).
A while ago I called this bear market the mother of all buy on the dip :)
Canadian couple who won $11.2m in the lottery give it ALL away to charity
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1326473/Canadian-couple-Allen-Violet-Large-away-entire-11-2m-lottery-win.html#ixzz14TIIZqUU
Massive stretches of weathered oil spotted in Gulf of Mexico
Published: Friday, October 22, 2010, 10:30 PM Updated: Friday, October 22, 2010, 10:57 PM
http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/10/massive_stretches_of_weathered.html
Just three days after the U.S. Coast Guard admiral in charge of the BP oil spill cleanup declared little recoverable surface oil remained in the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana fishers Friday found miles-long strings of weathered oil floating toward fragile marshes on the Mississippi River delta.
A boat travels through oil that was spotted in West Bay just west of the Southwest Pass of the Mississippi River Friday October 22, 2010.
The discovery, which comes as millions of birds begin moving toward the region in the fall migration, gave ammunition to groups that have insisted the government has overstated clean-up progress, and could force reclosure of key fishing areas only recently reopened.
The oil was sighted in West Bay, which covers approximately 35 square miles of open water between Southwest Pass, the main shipping channel of the river, and Tiger Pass near Venice. Boat captains working the BP clean-up effort said they have been reporting large areas of surface oil off the delta for more than a week but have seen little response from BP or the Coast Guard, which is in charge of the clean-up. The captains said most of their sightings have occurred during stretches of calm weather, similar to what the area has experienced most of this week.
On Friday reports included accounts of strips of the heavily weathered orange oil that became a signature image of the spill during the summer. One captain said some strips were as much as 400 feet wide and a mile long.
The captains did not want to be named for fear of losing their clean-up jobs with BP.
Coast Guard officials Friday said a boat had been dispatched to investigate the sightings, but that a report would not be available until Saturday morning.
However, Times-Picayune photojournalist Matt Hinton confirmed the sightings in an over-flight of West Bay.
Robert Barham, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, said if the sightings are confirmed by his agency, the area will be reclosed to fishing until it is confirmed oil-free again.
Just Tuesday, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, in charge of the federal response, and his top science adviser, Steve Lehmann, said that little of the 210 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf remained on the surface or even on the Gulf's floor. Lehmann pointed to extensive tests conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that included taking samples of water from various depths, as well as collections of bottom sediments both far offshore and close to the coast.
Those claims, announced on the six-month anniversary of the spill, brought quick rebuttals from a variety of environmental and fishermen's groups who insist their members have been reporting sightings of surface oil all along.
LSU environmental sciences professor Ed Overton, who has been involved in oil spill response for 30 years, said he believes both claims could be accurate. The Louisiana sweet crude from the Deepwater Horizon is very light and has almost neutral buoyancy, Overton said, which means that when it picks up any particles from the water column, it will sink to the bottom.
"It's quite possible that when the weather calms and the water temperatures changes, the oil particles that have spread along the bottom will recoagulate, then float to the surface again and form these large mats.
"I say this is a possibility, because I know that the (Coast Guard) has sent boats out to investigate these reports, but by the time they get to the scenes, the weather has changed and they don't see any oil."
"I think the reports are credible, but I also think the incident responders are trying to find the oil, too,'' Overton said. "This is unusual, but nothing about this bloody spill has been normal since the beginning."
Overton said it is important for the state to discover the mechanism that is causing the oil to reappear because even this highly weathered oil poses a serious threat to the coastal ecology.
"If this was tar balls floating around, that would be one thing, but these reports are of mats of weathered oil, and that can cause serious problems if it gets into the marsh," he said
The reports are a great concern to wildlife officials. The Mississippi delta is a primary wintering ground for hundreds of thousands of ducks and geese, some of which already have begun arriving. The West Bay area leads into several shallower interior bays that attract ducks, geese and myriad species of shore and wading birds each winter.
Earlier this month state wildlife officials were expressing optimism the spill would have minimal impact on most waterfowl visitors because little oil had penetrated the sensitive wintering grounds.
I never knew goats had such gonads... wowzers
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-1320804/Mountain-goats-climb-160ft-near-vertical-Cingino-dam.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
These incredible pictures show Alpine Ibex goats wandering across the face of the near-vertical dam in Northern Italy without a care in the world.
The gravity-defying goats typically live in very steep and rocky terrain at altitudes of up to to 4,600m and have no fear of falling whether climbing up or down the 160ft dam wall.
And they aren't doing it just to show off.
It is thought the goats are actually grazing, licking the stones for their salts.
http://www.ruralramblings.com/alpine-ibex-on-cingino-dam
Apparently the ibex like to eat the moss and lichen off the stone, and to lick the salt off the dam wall.
Request Deletion Review
Post Date: 10/12/2010 10:44:38 AM in reply to a deleted post by Paula
Board: Tornado Alley (PROG) Reason: Off-Topic
are you talking about this POS?
A Toothy Bird With a 17-Foot Wingspan Once Ruled the Air
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/09/16/a-toothy-bird-with-a-17-foot-wingspan-once-ruled-the-air/
Here’s a new creature for the record books. In Chile, paleontologists have found the fossilized remains of a huge, toothy bird whose wingspan stretched 17 feet across. That means the bird, Pelagornis chilensis or “huge pseudoteeth,” had the longest wingspan ever recorded–a wingspan that was about as long as a giraffe is high.
This newly named species belongs to a group known as pelagornithids, birds that had bony tooth-like projections and long beaks. The well-preserved fossil that researchers turned up belonged to a bird that weighed about 64 pounds and had relatively light, thin-walled bones, according to the description published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. It cruised the skies between 5 and 10 million years ago.
The enormous wingspan gave P. chilensis certain advantages, like the ability to travel long distances and reach areas of the open ocean thick with potential prey. The researchers think it feasted on fish and squid, and may have trolled its hunting grounds with its lower beak skimming the water until its teeth could clamp down on a wriggling meal. But lead researcher Gerald Mayr says that a 17-foot wingspan is probably close to the maximum for a flying bird.
“There are a number of drawbacks if you become so large,” he added. Chicks would have to be raised over a long period of time, making them more prone to predation. “Moreover,” he added, “bird feathers are quite heavy, so very large birds may have become too heavy.” [Discovery News]
Mayr notes that these giants of the sky were “true birds,” not winged reptiles like the pterosaurs of the Jurassic era. He also seems a bit jealous of our early hominid ancestors, who may have caught a glimpse of P. chilensis in the flesh. Says Mayr:
“Their last representatives may have coexisted with the earliest humans in North Africa…. Bird watching in Chile would be thrilling if birds with more than 5-meter wingspans and huge pseudo-teeth were still alive.” [press release]
