Misery Economic Theater 2011

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

<snip>

.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Report...269452809.html

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by R.D. Silverman

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Report...269452809.html

http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/18/news....htm?hpt=hp_t2

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by R.D. Silverman

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Report...269452809.html

Oh, now that S&P actually appears to be doing their job and the U.S. government happens to be the debt-issuer who got dinged, *now* the government is investigating S&P? What a shock, indeed.

Re. your Bachmann-promises-$2-gas link: Her fellow Republo-right-wing-religious-loon-o-crat candidate Rick Perry says prayer is the answer to the nation`s economic problems. So Perry should just lead a national prayer vigil for a return of $2 gas, then we don't need to that outcome to be subject to the whims and caprices of the voting public.

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Oh, now that S&P actually appears to be doing their job and the U.S. government happens to be the debt-issuer who got dinged, *now* the government is investigating S&P? What a shock, indeed.

Re. your Bachmann-promises-$2-gas link: Her fellow Republo-right-wing-religious-loon-o-crat candidate Rick Perry says prayer is the answer to the nation`s economic problems. So Perry should just lead a national prayer vigil for a return of $2 gas, then we don't need to that outcome to be subject to the whims and caprices of the voting public.

From the senior editor at Fortune Magazine:

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/...omy/?hpt=hp_t1

Among many witticisms:

" But despite being an irreverent professional skeptic, I never felt there was a total absence
of adult supervision in our nation's capital. Now I do.

I spent July on family leave, not writing columns, and watching with increasing horror as
market-illiterate know-nothings, abetted by the craven leaders of the Republican Party
(from which I'm about to resign) and the unspeakable ineptness of Obama and his minions,
brought our country to within an inch of defaulting on its debts.

Some policies and statements you hear from Tea Party types about the economy and the debt
markets are utterly insane. Any competent economics instructor would give you an F if
you asserted the same sort of nonsense on an exam."

[ewmayer]

Horrorshow Philly-Fed data causing another day of trouser-soilage in global equity markets - Here`s a snip from the German Die Welt online, translation and inline links are mine. ("Gift-cocktail" or "poison cocktail" is a common German expression roughly analogous in terms of usage to "perfect storm" in English):

Horror-Cocktail causes market plunge: The Dax crashed by almost 7 percent. New York also opens deep in the red. Cause of the selloff is a veritable poison cocktail.

A poisonous mix causes markets to plunge. In the USA inflation rose faster than expected. Multiple members of the U.s. Fed have criticized the loose monetary policies of Ben Bernankes. Also having a negative effect is the debate in the EU over the introduction of a financial-transaction tax the ban of short selling.

On top of that, a key economic indicator in the U.S. - the Philadelphia Fed Index – literally collapsed in August: The business-climate barometer plunged from +3,2 points in the previous month to -30,7 points, putting it at its lowest level since March 2009.

Economists had reckoned with +2,0 points. A value greater than 0 indicates expansion of economic activity, whereas a negative value signals contraction. The US-consumer price index jumped by its highest amount since March. The increase of 0,5 percent in July follows a decrease of 0.2 percent in the preceding month.

My Comment: So much for that European short-selling ban in financials "stabilizing the markets"...for example, Société Générale shares down over 12% as I write this. Oh, look! and there`s no buying from short sellers covering their now-in-the-moeny puts, either! That means any price support will come from "dips buying the dips", a much-more-unreliable pool of buyers.

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Horrorshow Philly-Fed data causing another day of trouser-soilage in global equity markets - Here`s a snip from the German Die Welt online, translation and inline links are mine. ("Gift-cocktail" or "poison cocktail" is a common German expression roughly analogous in terms of usage to "perfect storm" in English):

Horror-Cocktail causes market plunge: The Dax crashed by almost 7 percent. New York also opens deep in the red. Cause of the selloff is a veritable poison cocktail.

My Comment: So much for that European short-selling ban in financials "stabilizing the markets"...for example, Société Générale shares down over 12% as I write this. Oh, look! and there`s no buying from short sellers covering their now-in-the-moeny puts, either! That means any price support will come from "dips buying the dips", a much-more-unreliable pool of buyers.

And some more reading......

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn....t-europe-fall/

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn....obs/?hpt=hp_t2

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...8LJ_story.html

http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publicat...ull_report.pdf

[ewmayer]

Bob (and other posters), could you please do us readers the kindness of prettifying your posted links with descriptive text summarizing the article content? You can either paste the descriptive text (e.g. article title)

I have an easy way I do this when I read an online article which I find post-worthy (this is for Firefox, other browsers will have different meta-key sequences:

- Copy the article title from the page you are reading;
- Ctrl-L takes you to the url field of the browser;
- Left-arrow to put cursor at left of url-field, type (I insert a # between the [ and the 'url' to keep VB from treating my text as an inline url here) [#url=;
- 'End' to put cursor at right of url-field, type ]<paste article title>[/url#] (again you need to strip out the #);
- Ctrl-A to highlight the resulting VB-annotated url, copy and paste into your post.

It becomes very easy once you do it a few times and your fingers get used to the resulting keystroke sequence.

Thanks,
-E

[fivemack]

I think I would go further; I don't think there's much to be gained by posting isolated links (and particularly not chunks of text copy-and-pasted from links), especially for things which were the biggest headline on every finance news site today. I'd prefer having the links as occasional background in an actual discussion of the state of the world.

[xilman]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14587093

On Thursday, there was a sharp rise in the price of bonds issued by countries considered to be the least risky. This caused their yields - the implied cost of borrowing - to plummet to historic lows.

The 10-year US treasury yield briefly dipped below 2% to its lowest level since World War II.

The 10-year German bond yield also fell to a post-war low, while the 10-year UK gilt yield hit the lowest level since the 19th century.

So although the lower cost of borrowing is good news for those countries, the "torrent of money" going into putatively safe US and British government debt is redolent of a worrying trend, according to BBC business editor Robert Peston.

He says it means one of two things: "Either money tends to become harder to obtain by those in the private sector who take the risks which generate economic growth and wealth; or the climate of pervasive anxiety means that even when money is available to consumers and businesses, they don't want to spend or invest it."

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by xilman

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14587093


"Either money tends to become harder to obtain by those in the private sector who take the risks which generate economic growth and wealth; or the climate of pervasive anxiety means that even when money is available to consumers and businesses, they don't want to spend or invest it."

My bet is on the latter.

BTW: In regard to the unemployment situation in the U.S., NBC news had
a brief segment about Siemens Corp. They claim to have "several thousand"
jobs openings that they can't fill because they can't find people with the
needed skills. I saw another report showing that college educated people
are NOT having a hard time finding jobs. It is the uneducated (especially
minorities whose culture disdains education) that are having the hard time.
Thus, the unemployment problem may be as much a SOCIAL problem as it
is economic. ....... Comments?

[fivemack]

A bit of me thinks that 'can't find people with the required skills' often means 'can't face training up people who have approximately the required skills'; on the other hand on another forum I frequent someone's complaining that he's trying to recruit machine-tool operators and gets less than 30% correct answers, among what looked like serious applicants, to the question 'how many thousandths of an inch are there in an inch'.

I can see an argument for the government encouraging employers to take on and train unskilled people, by paying a substantial fraction of the newbies' salary while they're being trained; but after many years of assiduously trimming the fat, not many employers will have spare highly-competent people available to train newbies.