[QUOTE=ewmayer;306110]... mainly FB for me is the poster child for dotcom bubble 2.0, that's the only real interest for me.[/QUOTE]That's my main thinking on it with a soupcon of additional interest because of the botched IPO.

When I mentally did the numbers pre-IPO it seemed that they were valuing each user at over $100 and it seemed insane because many are kiddies of various flavors or non consumer world and other low quality accounts so I have been waiting to hear that the emperor has no clothes.

[QUOTE=Zeta-Flux;305845]I believe it was Obama who, when he was running last time, promised he would make any bill he was going to sign available for public scrutiny long before he signed it into law. How did that work out?[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Zeta-Flux;305937]cheesehead,

The website I would have cited is: [URL="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/234/allow-five-days-of-public-comment-before-signing-b/"]PolitiFact[/URL], [/QUOTE]Ah, I see now what was meant.

The idea of a five-day public comment period before signing a bill, after it's already been passed by Congress, was just a silly idea, providing nothing meaningful in terms of public opportunity to influence legislation beyond what was already open to the public. I can't see how it does anything significant besides allowing a bill's opponents to mount a last-minute campaign to urge a veto. (That, plus my own imagination of what "long before" meant -- not a mere five days -- is why I so doubted you.) I'd think less of Obama for keeping that particular promise than for not keeping it.

Other transparency promises had more substance, and thus actually deserve criticism for not being kept.

US GDP data confirm strong double-dip recessionary trend ... market rallies on - you guessed it - "expectations of further Fed [strike]idiocy[/strike] easing". Party on, Wayne!

Mish comments on another interesting U.S. demographic trend which made news this week:

[url=http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/07/housing-headwinds-us-birthrate-lowest.html]Housing Headwinds: US Birthrate Lowest in 25 Years as Twenty-Somethings Postpone Having Babies[/url]

On the "Economic Voodoo" front, great example of how economists deal with data which conflict with their religious dogma:

[url=http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-19/krugmenistan-vs-dot-estonia#p1]Bloomberg Businessweek: Krugmenistan vs. Estonia[/url]
[quote]In May 2009, months after the passage of a $787 billion stimulus package in the U.S., Estonia’s government took the opposite tack: the hard line. It did not dip into the country’s reserves or borrow money. Ministers say they never even considered devaluing what was then Estonia’s currency, the kroon, which would have derailed a 10-year plan to adopt the euro. To maintain the country’s balanced budget, a tradition it had honored since the end of the Soviet occupation, Estonia’s government froze pensions, lowered state salaries by about 10 percent, and raised the value-added tax by 2 percent. The gross domestic product dropped more than 14 percent that year.

At Estanc, which makes high-pressure steel containers at a plant outside of Tallinn, profits stagnated. The company postponed plans to double floor space at the factory. Unemployment in Estonia got as high as 16 percent, and many of the country’s welders took the ferry ride across the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki to look for work. Vaido Palmik, the plant’s managing director, had friends lose their jobs during the crash. “It was a very hard time,” he says.

The welders are back now. In 2010, Estonia’s GDP grew by 2.3 percent. At the end of that year, the country ran into a burning building and adopted the euro. Last year, GDP grew by 7.5 percent. Estanc has increased its head count by more than a third in 2012. Palmik sells to Finland and Sweden; he wants to break into the German market and has moved forward with plans for expansion. Estonia’s unemployment is down to 10.8 percent—not ideal, but less than half that of Spain, and enough to get both the country’s president and its ruling coalition reelected in 2011. Last November, the International Monetary Fund praised the country’s export-led recovery and “enviable fiscal position.”

Economists don’t get controlled experiments, so they have to take countries as they are. Right now, Estonia seems to show that monetary and fiscal restraint can, after pain, create growth. “If you look back, the crash is very good,” says Palmik.

Not surprisingly, Estonia, a country with 1.2 million people, has been offered as a model by advocates of austerity in Europe and elsewhere. On the far side of the Atlantic, however, Nobel prize-winning economist and [i]New York Times[/i] columnist Paul Krugman has been arguing for years against this kind of restraint, saying it leads to pointless misery. The argument is central to the future of the U.S.—and most other countries, too.

On June 6, in a blog post titled “Estonian Rhapsody,” Krugman took on what he called “the poster child for austerity defenders.” In his post, he graphed real GDP from the height of the boom to the first quarter of this year to show that, even after a recovery, Estonia’s economy is still almost 10 percent below its peak in 2007. “This,” he wrote, “is what passes for economic triumph?”[/quote]

Aside: I laughed at this bit from the article, as I've been slowly working my way through the same book the past few months: "After college, Ilves went to grad school for psychology until he read Thomas Pynchon’s [i]Gravity’s Rainbow[/i]. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do after finishing the book, but he knew he was done with grad school."

KKK (= Keynesian Klown Krugman) is of course going with his now-standard way of "explaining" away data which conflict with his religion - "The U.S. is not Estonia Japan Argentina Spain Greece Ireland Italy Zimbabwe".

May history judge him appropriately.


[b]Fun Friday Factoid:[/b]

This past Monday saw a big Happy 120th birthday party for [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Selassie_I]late Ethiopian ruler-for-life Haile Selassie[/url].

Interesting factoid: The Rastafarian movement is named after - and has as its messiah - Selassie, whose pre-regnal title/name was [i]Ras Tafari Makonnen[/i].

I did not know that. :)

(The [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Ethiopia_(1897-1936;_1941-1974).svg]flag[/url] should have been a tip-off, though.)

Selassie seems to have acquired a rather negative image in the West, as expressed e.g. by the appellation "dictator". Reading his history, he actually seems that in many way he was a pretty righteous dude, especially given the dismal standards of that general region of the world. The Mussolini-led Italians of the 30s, on the other hand, were busily out-Nazi-ing their Nazi buddies when it came to atrocious behavior..

[b]Friday Funnies, Late Saturday Olympic Edition:[/b]

[url=http://www.zerohedge.com/news/austerity-olympics-each-gold-medal-contains-134-gold]Austerity At The Olympics: Each "Gold" Medal Contains 1.34% Gold[/url]

Reminds me of an old [i]Wizard of Id[/i] strip I read as a kid, in which the King, in a rare moment of regal introspection, asks Sir Rodney "what are we fighting for, anyway?" The ensuing exchange goes something like this:

Rodney: "Gold, Sire."

King: "Is it really worth fighting for gold?"

Rodney: "You want we should fight over zinc?"

[QUOTE=ewmayer;306331][B]Friday Funnies, Late Saturday Olympic Edition:[/B]

[URL="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/austerity-olympics-each-gold-medal-contains-134-gold"]Austerity At The Olympics: Each "Gold" Medal Contains 1.34% Gold[/URL]
[/QUOTE]
So what? The last pure gold Olympic medals were awarded exactly one hundred years ago, in the last Olympics before World War One; afterwards they have always been almost pure silver.

[QUOTE=Random Poster;306346]So what? The last pure gold Olympic medals were awarded exactly one hundred years ago, in the last Olympics before World War One; afterwards they have always been almost pure silver.[/QUOTE]
Of course the medals are more important for their symbolic value ... but given that they blew several tens of $millions on the opening ceremony alone, I find it somehow amusing that they couldn't bring themselves to include even (say) an ounce of gold in the "gold' medals.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;306367]Of course the medals are more important for their symbolic value ... but given that they blew several tens of $millions on the opening ceremony alone, I find it somehow amusing that they couldn't bring themselves to include even (say) an ounce of gold in the "gold' medals.[/QUOTE]

Why would an ounce be appropriately symbolic and the currently-present six grams not?

Consider how many total medals they will award this year. The cost of the medals is up in the $1 million or more range.

DarJones

Speaking of gaming...
[URL="http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/30/4672960/electricity-trading-probed.html"]Electricity trading probed[/URL][QUOTE]State officials believe a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase & Co., the New York investment bank, pulled down an extra $73 million by exploiting a small wrinkle in California's electricity market over several months in 2010 and 2011.

Officials said they've recovered $20 million from the company so far.

For its part, JPMorgan said in court papers earlier this month that no wrongdoing has been found.[/QUOTE][QUOTE]What allegedly happened is complicated. McCullough, the consultant, said JPMorgan found a way to manipulate two wholesale markets run by the ISO – the "day-ahead" market, in which power is sold for future use, and the "real-time" market, reserved for last-minute deals.

In the day-ahead market, he said, JPMorgan priced its power cheaply – so cheaply that its bid was sure to be accepted. In the real-time market, he said, the company priced the power more expensively – so it was certain the market would buy little if any electricity.

Because its bids in the day-ahead market were accepted, McCullough said, the company ensured it would collect substantial payments – the "make-whole" fees – for running the plants at minimal output.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=fivemack;306373]Why would an ounce be appropriately symbolic and the currently-present six grams not?[/QUOTE]
Well, it would make the gold in the medal worth more than the silver, for one.
[QUOTE=Fusion_power;306386]Consider how many total medals they will award this year. The cost of the medals is up in the $1 million or more range.
DarJones[/QUOTE]
That is ~2% of the cost of just the opening ceremony, and is dwarfed by the cost of the overall olympic-hosting effort, which IIRC is in the 10-billion-pound range.

Look, it were up to me, I'd go back to they way did it through 1936, when the winners got ancient-Greek-style laurel wreaths. (I believe the Berlin Olympics introduced the 3-tier podium, but not the medals). But if you're gonna make a huge frickin' deal about the shiny medals (which in the current olympics are being housed in the Tower of London along with the crown jewels), you should spend just a little extra to make them worthy of the name.

FYI, I'm not meaning to pick on the Brits here - this "olympic coin shaving" has long bugged me.

We have been through Quantitative Easing a couple of times in the last few years.
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing[/url]

The "central banks" in the U.S. and Euro economies are in a pickle. They need to stimulate their geese to get them back to laying golden eggs. They have already wrung the goose's neck (the "twist") and they tried force feeding the goose (reduced key interest rates) with some high protein mix. The only thing left is to try feeding rocket fuel in hopes the poor goose will finally get down to business. Unfortunately, rocket fuel (printing boatloads of new money) is distinctly poisonous. It can give the poor goose a bad case of gas (inflation) which can be very messy to clean up later. This would not be so bad except that the euroconomies don't exactly have a single point of control of their goose (money supply).

So why all the foofaraw about a goose? Because they are preparing for another round of quantative easing with the stated intent of boosting cash reserves at banks in hopes the banks will then reduce the interest rate which in turn will lead to new rounds of borrowing which will be used to hire people which in turn will bring on a round of economic prosperity. Did you get all that?

One problem with quantative easing is that it has negative implications for people saving money because inflation eats away your principle while reducing the value of any potential interest earnings. You would be far better off spending your money on a riotous good time and having pleasant memories for the nonce.

DarJones