Thursday, October 31, 2013

Hoover in a nutshell

He is the Black Dragon Fly that shows up just when the aggregate passes through its stationary point. The move to mass markets was a sudden technology change, subject to out of proportion change by odd accelerators.

Hoover was a kind of Bill Gates; he got thrown into a mix of high level government where he seemed to 'get the change', he was the technogeek. A civil engineer, techno freak, who happened upon the corridors of DC.

In the end, Hoover, before the election loss, knew just that, he happened to be the techno geek of the moment when it mattered.  His point was, sorry, my bad, I got things out of whack by two years. This was a world in which most politicians did not get the technology, someone like Hoover, would have naturally moved up the ranks.

Sumner and Romer taught me all I need to know to prove anything

To prove fake causation select an unrepresentative sample. These two like to talk about what happens to specific examples of the economy, out of context, and thus learned much from the Great Depression.

So, easy to fact check, go to the NBER macro history and extract a true representative sample and find out what really caused the GD. I go there and think to myself, I have to set up my graphing and statistics software and I don't get paid, so screw it, I will pester a paid economist to do the work they are supposed to be doing.

But, I can do it in my head, and I have looked over hundreds of time series of the GD, and most of the changes happening in the spring of 1933 are most likely related to cheap energy.

When the Great Depression Hit the Oil Industry
The global oil industry faced a classic squeeze in the spring of 1933: falling prices and expanding supply.
This brutal dynamic would exacerbate the international tension and economic havoc already roiling the world's markets during the Great Depression. And it would help set the stage for a century of energy politics.

The world's oil producers blamed the U.S.
"In all the oil fields outside America, restriction of output is being enforced," the Economist wrote. But in the U.S., "the twin evils of over-production and illegal production" were preventing efforts to maintain prices.
Several American states mandated reduced pumping, and some operators' associations agreed to scale back. Other independent producers ignored restrictions, and in states where these producers were politically powerful, governments refused to act. Some oilfield producers pumped more to sustain their revenue, but they only triggered price collapses.
In 1932, U.S. heavy crude oil averaged 87 cents per barrel (about $12 today), and light crude averaged 82 cents. By spring 1933, heavy crude had fallen to 44 cents and light crude to 66 cents. Then the bottom fell out.

And, I might add, the continual, non stop road building the nation was doing added greatly to the utility of gas, as did the near complete expansion of boradcast networks.

So here is the complete theory:

In 1927, Hoover regulated the airwaves too soon and caused agglomeration of the broadcast industry before the transportation network was ready.  Roads became instantly clogged. The liquidity of radio broadcasting was an order of magnitude faster than the liquidity of money.  Roads 2 years behind radio, cities simply became parking lots, depression, low prices everywhere.  But everyone who cared knew the problem, that is why they built roads, standardized traffic systems continually, they knew what they were racing.

So, submit me to the test. Romer claims the wonders of gold caused us to buy light trucks in 1934. I have a a speculative bet, though I have glanced at the data. I bet that Romer must also explain how the wonders of gold caused us to sell  railroads simultaneously.

Paul Krugman proves the Austerian case

More debt, less growth.  Is Paul saying something else? Long term bond yields should follow long term growth prospects.   So Paul tells us to reduce debt and you can grow again!

Initial claims vs oil prices

Oil prices inverted and unemployment claims
Do high oil prices cause unemployment?  Yes it did,  during and shortly after the crash.  But conservation and fracking solved the immediate oil shortage problem.  We do not now suffer a bubble in oil prices, we have adapted. However, look at the recent report of initial claims out today, and recent oil prices. Oil prices down and claims up, a sign that producers reducing the demand for both oil and employees, the coefficient has reversed.  The second major constraint on the economy is prominent,  a negative force now drives claims up and oil down simultaneously.  Likely cause? DC multipliers still less than one.

Looks like multipliers less than one

The rapid rise on all components of spending as government purchases decline? That is an indication of multipliers less than one. The three components, except government, seem to be in more sustainable shape.  So thank you to all the austerians, they have achieved greater growth with government cuts. And that must be the badly behaved function that Martin Feildstein was talking about in 1979.

Brad seems to disagree, but this analysis seems as valid an anything Chris Romer has done in her research. A sudden and unexpected negative government stimulus leads to expansion of the private sector. Also looks a lot like the Clinton policy, I might add.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

It may look like good news

US Treasury
This issue includes the final budget results and details a deficit of $680 billion for fiscal year 2013.
This deficit is down from 1 trillion last year, mainly due to new taxes. But the boost in revenue is mostly the result of the bubbles, and they are collapsing within the next few months.

Barbara Boxer and The California Apartheid

All of the female Democratic senators signed a secret letter to Hillary Rodham Clinton early this year encouraging her to run for president in 2016 – a letter that includes the signature of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other senators who are mentioned as potential candidates, two high-ranking Democratic Senate aides told ABC News.
The letter, organized at the urging of Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., was meant to be a private show of support from a group of 16 high-profile former colleagues and fans who are now senators, urging Clinton to do what much of the Democratic Party assumes she will, the aides said.
The existence of the letter was not revealed publicly until this week, when Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., mentioned it at an event in New York City on Monday. That was an apparent slip-up that prompted a round of apologetic e-mails from her Senate office to other offices on Capitol Hill, according to the aides.
News Release from the Apartheid Party of California

Now we have Nancy Pelosi with Official Racism, John Perez with Official Deviancy, and Barbara Boxer proposing Official Sexism. These boneheads form the core apartheid coalition in America, the new Jim Crows. This fits right in with my theory, all of existence will collapse because or a huge black hole in the Undemocrats of California.

Bubblemania

All the bubbler that I know of
Here we go.  Bubble in stocks, house prices and oil.  Clear evidence that a dysfunctional DC is at the end of its time.

Citi Bank warns on peak bubble

Citi warns on market disconnect
In essence, Levkovich notes that the recent sharp move has come about as liquidity concerns have shifted to the sidelines; upward momentum for stock prices following the shutdown ending is just pulling in more short covering while long-only investors also have been buyers given the need to meet alpha generation or benchmark requirements; but operating performance by companies is simply not there in the manner that is perceived. As he concludes, "we have not seen this kind of deviation before and it is troublesome to us... we must admit to being a bit worried that investors might be facing some near term volatility."

A quick translation. The stock market gains and housing bubble is crrently a inflation effect, there is no growth to back up these claims. Various investors are betting the market goes lower, and as the bubble drives up prices, these investors lose, and they have to buy in the market, thus driving up prices further. Once the shorters retire from battle, the market will collapse because the shorter will cause a smooth decline if they play the short game. Absent the shorts, we get a collapse.

Many of the recession indicators will be popping higher soon, a downward correction is eminent.

Darrel Issa of California is a Communist

Make Darrell Issa of California pay. Using the vast apparatus of his House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, he is going after National Park Service rangers. Having shut down the government, Issa wants to know why popular parks and monuments were closed. The audacity! During an earlier hearing, a fellow congressman provided an answer: He held up a mirror and aimed it at Republican lawmakers. Republican Stupidity

Why did the folks in California send this bozo to Congress where he spends his time picking on park rangers because they are not socialist enough for him.

Yes debt matters

Interest expenses go up very fast with excessive debt
The chart contains interest payments by DC as a percent of GDP and DC debt as a percent of GDP.  We cannot grow for if we did the interest payments would jump. It was 5% of GDP under Reagan with total debt 30% of GDP.  Debt is now three times GDP, the potential cost of interest payments under growth is now at 10%.    Thus, politicians will bear the brunt of the chaos caused by rapid growth, they will be required to extract an additional 7% of GDP and cause a recession.  We are stuck at 1.6 real growth rate.   I blame California politicians for the disaster.

Did Jerry Brown lie about Obamacare?

Lots of talk about the Dems and the idea they did not warn California that Obamacare was a 15% marginal tax increase on the middle class. Also plenty complaints that Obamacare does not let Californians keep their existing coverage. Did anyone ever hear Jerry Brown bring these issues up? I mean, after all, we are the Undemocratic colony of DC, Jerry Brown is supposed to protect us from the place, not conspire to steal from a bunch of middle class California Latinos. Given the scam Jerry pulled off, why would he now want Latinos to speak English? Once they learn the language, they will immediately discover his fraud.

Lets create a model: Consider a small company in which the average turnover for employees is three years. Now the company needs to fill a higher level position by selecting from one of the existing employees. There cost model asys there is a gain to the company fo9r filling this position over three years. But the Obamacare charges a 15% increase in taxes for the promotion, over three years. Take that difference, and subtract the one time charge for promoting someone, about 2 grand maybe, amortized over three years. What you get is a positive wedge in the granularity of wage increases. Some mid-level positions are simply not justified, so the employee wage setting becomes more stratified, there are fewer of them, and fewer opportunities for promotion. The side affect is a great big increase in the grey market for labor, especially among Latinos.

Ok, anyone, did Jerry Brown know about this? Yes he did, he is not that stupid.  Did Jerry Brown tell anyone this? No, he would have been ostracized by the Undemocratic Party if he did.  Result, Latinos who barely speak the bastard language of DC are getting screwed.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Stupid or simply crooked?

Meet Sue Klinkhamer.
“I spent two years defending Obamacare. I had constituents scream at me, spit at me and call me names that I can’t put in print. The congressman was not re-elected in 2010 mainly because of the anti-Obamacare anger. When the congressman was not re-elected, I also (along with the rest of our staff) lost my job. I was upset that because of the health care issue, I didn’t have a job anymore but still defended Obamacare because it would make health care available to everyone at, what I assumed, would be an affordable price.”
“Blue Cross,” she said, “stated my current coverage would expire on Dec. 31, and here are my options: I can have a plan with similar benefits for $647.12 [or] I can have a plan with similar [but higher] pricing for $322.32 but with a $6,500 deductible.”
She went on, “Blue Cross also tells me that if I don’t pick one of the options, they will just assume I want the one for $647. … Someone please tell me why my premium in January will be $356 more than in December?” …
“And I was excited that previously uninsured people could now get insurance on the open market. But this is not affordable to me.”

Well, Sue, I dunno. How one could be in DC working on the thing and not figure it out. My feeling is that you and your former Congressman are either idiots or crooks. Either way, the American people have dumped you for good reason, evidently.

One of those Islamic rituals

A 13-year-old girl has dug herself out of a muddy grave after being raped by two men who then buried her alive in Pakistan.
The teen was abducted from her local village in the Punjab province while she was walking to Koran lessons.
Her father Siddique Mughal told police his daughter had been taken, but they refused to cooperate, Outlook India reported.

My home town, in the news

Right there, courtesy of WSJ via Zero Hedge. We have less than ten days of cash in the account.  I am going to be late with my garbage bill, just to see if I can push them over.

Chris Christie: Fat Dumb and Stupid

Chris Christie: We weren’t told the truth about ObamaCare
“It wouldn’t have made any difference, in fact,” Christie said. “What the federal government wanted us to do in the states was to take on this burden ourselves without telling us how much it would cost or what authority we would have to actually run our exchanges.” “That’s why myself and 33 other governors, Republican and Democrat, said no to a state-run exchange,” he continued. “The real problem is that people weren’t told the truth,” Christie added, pivoting to the White House. He said that the public was flatly told that they could keep their insurance plans if they liked them which is turning out not to be the case for millions.
No Chris, we were told the truth by Nancy Pelosi. Her approach was to lie, then tell us she lying, then tell us she was lying just to get Obamacare into the portfolio. This was common knowledge you idiot.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Zero Hedge is making my One Fifth Senator famous

Diane Feinstein looking important
They actually posted a picture of her. What was the famous quote my Affirmative Action Senator?
"The White House has informed me that collection on our allies will not continue, which I support,"

John Taylor makes a chart

The chart below tries to do this. It was put together from those resolutions passed last March. It provides the year-by-year totals (not ten years sums) needed to compare the two budgets. Says John.
But what are the growth assumptions? If we intend to grow at a real 3.2% with the Senate budget, then the Ten Year rate is likely to be 4.5%. Interest payments will be about 5% of GDP after the roll over effects.  If John is looking at lower growth rates, then we are screwed.  Otherwise, this Senate spending chart does not cover the rate risk with expanded growth.

My claim is that the thirty Little Hoover States have not thought this thing out, and Californians should be worried.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

When the banks can no longer measure a long term growth

Brad brings up the subject when he talks a sudden reversal in term of trade.  The Zimbabwe had no way to compute any estimate for the long term prospects for the nation, hence money become decoupled from the economy and one gets a currency crisis. Government will just print money to pay its bills.

It cannot happen in Britain, the nation is too dependent on the fiat.  They love it, their government needs it, the cost and risk is too great to get a new fiat banker.

Monetarists believe that the utility of the government fiat and cost of replacement allows some dictatorial ability to suppress rates to fund government without benefit of democracy.

When a citizen does not have a fair vote, the government fiat contract is weak because the citizen feel unresponsible for the taxes charged and services rendered. So one gets a situation where the owner of the fiat bank have no interest in its care and feeding. Aymmetric motivations about government debt and risk goes way up and the long term is uncertain.

Does the USA suffer this? Will we suffer a currency crisis? Absolutely, and soon than later.  As long as undemocracy rules in DC, the currency is at risk.  The 30 Hoovers cannot survive without a government owned fiat in DC. But the long term survival of the Hoovers increasing depends upon excessive taxation of Texas and California. Texas is not nearly as committed to the fiat as the Hoovers.  California is not stable enough to have its own currency. California will pay a high fee for using the fiat in DC. Unlike Texas, California has no future without DC.





Uproar time

Detroit pension cuts 'function of mathematics' -investment banker

On Friday, city financial consultant Kenneth Buckfire said he did not have to recommend to Orr that pensions for the city's retirees be cut as a way to help Detroit navigate through debts and liabilities that total $18.5 billion.
Buckfire said it was clear that the city did not have the funds to pay the unsecured pension payouts without cutting them.
"It was a function of the mathematics," said Buckfire, who said he did not think it was necessary for him or anyone else to recommend pension cuts to Orr.
"Are you saying it was so self-evident that no one had to say it?" asked Claude Montgomery, attorney for a committee of retirees that was created by Rhodes.
"Yes," Buckfire answered.
Buckfire, a Detroit native and investment banker with restructuring experience, later told the court the city plans to pay unsecured creditors, including the city's pensioners, 16 cents on the dollar. There are about 23,500 city retirees.

World trade leads to income redistributions

Everyone is talking about this chart. Go see Brad's discussion.

The chart says the bottom 10% of the world, far left,  is slated for extinction. And that huge dip in the middle us, middle America, taking a hit to relative income growth. Otherwise, China and India got that middle hump growth in the middle class. That wealth to the wealthy spike, far right,  is mostly in the USA, a big clue as to Whodunnit. When distributions are relatively distorted in the USA, we might start looking there for a guilty party.

This is a real delusion

In Fed and Out, Many Believe Inflation Helps to Spur Growth

As Federal Reserve policy makers prepare to meet this week, there is growing concern inside and outside the Fed that inflation is not rising fast enough.

Sorry to disagree, but the inflation expectations theory is bogus. In stead of expecting inflation, we compute the stock market bubble. And we are computing that the stock market cannot hold any more liquidity.Ben's inflation appears in that third spike. It has no where to go.

Bilingualism and education in California

Is bilingualism inefficient, and who wins or loses.  Latino families want English to be the primary language, mainly because the rest of the USA is.  The education theorists tells us that if the rest of school is english, then a period of intense english learning prior to beginning school works. But Latino families want insta-english.

When I grew up, Anglo parents wanted insta-spanish, oddly.  The language requirement in school was firm, and most of us knew Spanish was the winner. Anglos have always known they were a minority culture.  My hometown was given a Spanish name, even though it was founded by lilly white railroaders.  California is the Hispanic state if we define the Hispanic state as being mainly Latino but with large Anglo influence.

But in a world where English dominates across the country, it is easy for Anglos to be comfortable in a Latino land.  Not so for Latinos, you see.  Being a majority culture out here is no big advantage when the haunchos in DC speak English.

What to do? Ask the Latino families, they want immediate immersion. Who knows? Not me.

Evolution of my recession theory

I knew about the dot com bust, I was part of it. When the current crash hit, I immediately assumed this was a standard Great Depression, the clash between infotech and transportation. The Dot Com bust was the preliminary, it was UPS vs the Internet; UPS wins. Since this clash was a repeating pattern, and the electrical entertwine between info and transportation is long and old; I assumed immediately we needed robots in the street. My view partially confirmed by the decaying malls and dramatic rise of on line shopping, and UPS is still winning by a smaller margin.

This was about a year before Google and the robo-car. Transportation developed according to theory. I would have expected a very quick, dramatic and wealthy recovery. But bureaucratic opposition appeared on the margins, driven by local politics in California and that led me to the thirty year drop in yields. California, boys and girls, is a short term multiplier less than one. Households and firms in California, hoard up almost the moment the bill is signed.

My priors are that humans have an inherent logistic function going on, as a result of their herding capability. If this function were fundamental, then we could use it to detect inefficiencies in government flow. We can, I did, and there is a very disturbing mismatch between what happens in California an what happens in any of the 30 small Hoover States.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

California State Assembly Speaker John Perez breaks new LGBT barrier

(Maywood, CA) Hews Media Group – Community News has obtained an audiotape that details how the Office of California State Assembly Speaker John Perez collaborated with former Assemblyman Tom Calderon and officials with the Central Basin Municipal Water District in an attempt to coerce three Maywood Mutual Water Districts (MMWD) into taking on unwanted projects that if they did not accept, the districts, as Calderon said, would be “dissolved with a stroke of a pen.” The “stroke of a pen” meaning legislation that would be championed by Speaker Perez and passed in Sacramento to “dissolve the water companies.” The entities would then be taken over by CBMWD.
Good for him, according to California Law the news accounts of John Perez and legislative blackmail must include mention of his sexual orientation. OK, here is me obeying the law: John Perez has a desire for sexual relations with money.

Friday, October 25, 2013

My One Fifth Senator in the news

10 Senate Democrats Sign a Letter or Something
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)

That is her actual name in the list.

An economic puzzle

Zero Hedge Chart borrowed from Menzie
What happened in September that part timers got hired on as full timers? What happened in Oct? Backlogs in California, shut down boom, Obamacare efficiency, Obamacare delay, what? I dunno. OK, I guess. Expansion from austerity!!!

Heard any bad news lately?

The professors at Michicag want to know:
U.S. consumer sentiment slides in October on government shutdown
"When asked to describe in their own words what they had heard about recent economic developments, the number of consumers that negatively mentioned the federal government in October was the highest in the more than half-century history of the surveys," survey director Richard Curtin said in a statement.
 
I clicked thru to see what the actual survey asked:
A6. During the last few months, have you heard of any favorable or unfavorable
changes in business conditions?
IF NOT CLEAR WHETHER A CHANGE IS FAVORABLE OR
UNFAVORABLE, PROBE: “Would (MENTION CHANGE) be
favorable or unfavorable?” AND NOTE “FAVORABLE” OR
“UNFAVORABLE.”

Ok, have I heard any bad news about the shut down around here?

Actually not, really. The local news had it on page 2 for most of the episode. Is my local paper unusual? Who I am makes a difference. If I am one of the 30 Hoover states, I likely heard more about it. California is a long reverberation away from DCland.

Getting ready for the Big Short

The Fragile five! We have a new class in the global portfolio:
Fragile five: The new focus of currency wars
Forget the BRICS: what's really concerning investors now are the "Fragile Five". The spectre of "global contagion" from Brazil, Indonesia, India, Turkey and South Africa is looming, Alan Ruskin, global macro strategist at Deutsche Bank has warned. The phrase "Fragile Five" seems to have been first coined by Morgan Stanley analyst James Lord in August. Since then, the phrase has gained increasing traction as a catch-all for the most concerning emerging market economies - which together represent around 7 percent of the world's economy.
OK, give them a tiny spot on the yield curve to match their trade flows. A wormhole to pass thru when we do the Big Short
The Fragile Five's currencies saw a massive sell-off when it looked as though the U.S. Federal Reserve was going to gradually wind down its bond-buying program known as quantitative easing. As QE meant more readily available cash for investors, emerging markets have been benefiting with increased investment. But worries about the Fed "taper" to the QE program led to currency traders pulling their money out.
That was sort of a test run.
The Brazilian real (Exchange:BRL=) is now a "buy today, sell tomorrow" story because of the likelihood that the rise in interest rates may hit the country's economy, according to Bloom. Earlier this month, Brazil's outlook was downgraded from positive to stable by ratings agency Moody's amid concerns about slowing growth in one of the world's biggest exporters.
The Big Short requires a quick adjustment to terms of trade. The Fragile Five needs to adjust to lower trade flows real soon. Once Janet signals the Big Short, its duck and run as the market wobbles and wiggles its precarious way down. There is a rumor that Bubbles will remain true to form throughout the next business cycle. Don't think its possible.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

ISLM is back

I am hoping that I never understand it. The green curve says when you lower interest rate I would rather spend the money, otherwise I save it. I think that is as far as I have ever really gotten. My reading is from Wiki. I never get far into LM. I could never figure out what the guys inthe yellow were selling that was different than the guys in the green. Wiki tells me rates are low when the yellow guys hold more cash. I think the yellow guys are finance. If output is high they will borrow money for higher rates. The figure shows a shift to the right of the greens. They are willing to spend? at higher rates. The yellow guys say, hey no problem, we can afford these borrowing costs.  This is an expansion.

A contraction would be the greens saying, hell no, we aren't paying for that junk, they save their money. The yellows say, hey, no problem, we can produce less at these rates.

The Prince Guy is in the news.

Politically Oppressed Babe
Old Prince Guy
He has been out of the news as he dates ugly broads. But that Kate gal is a bit of an Oppressed Babe. Anyway, the Prince guy gets a write up for something.


Greenspan's Predictive Powers

Mish provides the humor:

Clueless Magoo's Crash Guarantee

The new order


Defeated by Hoovers.
Our leader receives the news, a Hoover rebellion in the Senate.  He now awaits his orders.
But our leader has a prize, Obamacare is included in the budget. So, Obama is now defacto partners with the Tea party, the Right Wing Hooverites of the small states. They keep the budget down and insure Obamacare makes it through the passage. In return, Obamacare gets a delay and more testing. Fair deal, so cheer up.

Oil at 96

Oil down to $96/ barrel. Normally a sudden plunge indicates tough times for producers, they cannot meet margins and are dropping from the field. But lately, I often suspect producers are good adapters. If oil drops to $93, I am going with dropping out, bad news; otherwise I have good adapters, good news.

Ben has bout of Bubble hysterics

Stocks Stumble On $200bn Liquidity Shortfall From Fed's Tougher-Than-Expected Bank Rules
Ginormous, repeating bubbles

Ben and Bubbles have noticed that the ginormous stock bubble is out scaling the two previous, expanding, bubbles in the periodic sequence. The peak of each bubble corresponding to the point at which the previous central banker panicked about the bubble peak. I think it is the third bubble in the series that panic Ben and Bubbles.  The problem is everyone thinks Bubbles plans on letting the thing peak another 30%.  But you can see in the chart, the new bubble, Bubbles' bubble, would make Bubbles the Ginormous Bubbler Panicker of all time.

Hillary make veiled threat against Bubbles

Doesn't Include Yelling
“Because we can’t move from crisis to crisis, we have to be willing to come together as citizens to focus on the kind of future we want,” she said. As the shouts grew louder from an upper section of bleachers, she added, “which doesn’t include yelling. It includes sitting down and talking.”

The market plunged on the news, prompting Janet to announce that Hillary is not yet elected. Hillary''s attack on Bubbles was clearly opening an offense for the domestic policies of her filandering husband. Though he may have been a sex addict, but at least he got domestic finance right, and that does not include Bubbles.

New York is the classic hegemon state

In what state was Obamacare actually an improvement? New York
What state is the symbiotic finance center for DC? New York
What state cannot manage without bribery? New York

All of US history we have this constant reverberation of things that go in New York, mostly because of the scale of trade it has with Europe. When something goes wrong in New York, our financiers there want DC to fix it, and the fix promulgates across the plains. California does this, they exported their own version of education onto DC, and we got NCLB. New York gave us deadweight light rail.

The Thirty Little Hoovers have their puny little Senators holed up in their Puny Little Senate Office trying to save their Puny Little Hold on the fiat. Meanwhile there are four hungry hegemon wolves at the gate. What a plot!

The key to medical socialism in the USA

Poor people have restricted access to medicine. Of all the causes of this restriction, insurance is not on the top of the list.  Just the general restrictions of poverty, the immobility and congestion of it, make emergency room and urgent care the optimum fit, in terms of medicine.

The most efficient subsidy from central government is behind the scenes efforts to make emergency room and urgent care clinics more efficient and less costly. And these facilities are labor cost driven. And the major restriction on labor supply is the local district liability for long term pensions. And behind the scenes subsidies for medical workers (and teachers) is contribution matching social security supplementals.  Isolating pension costs gives medical workers mobility; the losses for working in poor communities is less. Helping with pension costs is the best that DC can do.

Oppressed Babes in Politics Week

Here in California, LGBT is required. Among the category of the sexually oppressed I always choose the babes. Here is my babe of the California politically oppressed. I honor you Sarah for the horror of being the babe in college, or the sweetheart high school babe, or the babe that hangs with bikers. All these images I deny, you are Oppressed Babe of the Political Year, and more power to you! And a bonus for being a minority Anglo in California. But, no fear, I know plenty Latino lads who also think you are babe of the year.

Obamacare birth spasms

Obamacare still gets a Break in its Adjustment period:

I would say any portfolio change in central government gets a period of adjustment when we expect volatility. Plans get out of sequence because no trend has been established. Fewer people involved means absolute queuing theory applies at the moment of birth.  Private insurers are adjusting to the law sooner than the system can take new customers in. Sounds serious, but it is still adjustment time; even a libertarian move gets the same allowance.

When is the free period over for Obamacare? We need to see light sometime in March, 2014. Because beyond that, the Obamacare adjustments get built into trend, we start paying a longer term cost as efficiency gains are discounted. It becomes a known multiplier less than one.

From the liberal point of view.

 What can the liberals do to make Obamacare work? Avoid all the known government clusterfucks, like the large state. small state mismatch. Obamacare partially avoided the state mismatch problem with the exchange idea, good idea. Obamacare made the mismatch problem a bit worse with the medicaid changes, bad idea. Get it? Obamacare wants to avoid influencing the agglomeration function more than is its due. 

Now Obamacare has breathing room, and is not under existential threat. So, slow it down, and learn the gain coefficients slowly, as not to cause queuing. Exchange markets might be a winning  idea here, don't screw it up with dis-incentives.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Down Day in the Markets

S&P 500 1,746.38 -8.29 -0.47%

Dow 15,413.33 -54.33 -0.35%
Nasdaq 3,907.07 -22.49 -0.57%
10-Year Bond 2.49 -0.03 -1.07%
Gold 1,332.40 -10.20 -0.76%
Oil 97.15 -1.15 -1.17%
EUR/USD 1.3777 -0.0003 -0.02%

When in doubt, lend your money back to government.

When central government manages the fiat and the entitlements

That is a lower bound on the utility of the fiat.  The entitlement beneficiaries are the first ones pained when the fiat stumbles.  Hence, a firm guarantee the voters won't let the fiat stumble beyond a lower bound. The utility of the fiat trumps the cost of over running the seigniorage account.

Even a break up of the dollar zone poses little fiat risk, large obligations mostly are bargained across the divide, in proportion. The utility of the fiat inherits in a currency change, money realy is a lot more neutral than we presume. Utility of paper cash is very high relative to other components of retail.

But fiat stability hinges on this lock with voters, who usually own the fiat by government. Voters want the utility of the fiat, that sets a protection against government hyperinflation, even in a mal-proportioned democracy.  Investors who can estimate the lower bound in acceptable voter risk can calibrate monetary risk costs.

Say, for example, Texas opts for its own currency during a short term default. Is this legal?  Sure, as long as Texas notes where it has assumed authority, so that its operations can be resolved later. Texas is duty bound to keep stability within Texas when ordinary pocesses in DC are disrupted.  So no problem for Texas to use a temporary currency, as they might use a temporary IOU the other way around.

If US parties agree to a permanent currency dissolution , then Texas is motivated to take its share of entitlement obligations back home, in the negotiations.  The government, even governments at political separation,  always protect the fiat, always try to maintain fair and proportional dissolutions. The Hamilton Complex, the desire to back up the fiat by keeping promises, is natural because the utility of owning the fiat agency is too great to pass up.

Obamacare Whoops

Thousands Of Consumers Get Insurance Cancellation Notices Due To Health Law Changes
Health plans are sending hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters to people who buy their own coverage, frustrating some consumers who want to keep what they have and forcing others to buy more costly policies. The main reason insurers offer is that the policies fall short of what the Affordable Care Act requires starting Jan. 1. Most are ending policies sold after the law passed in March 2010. At least a few are cancelling plans sold to people with pre-existing medical conditions.

That would be a big multiplier less than one in Florida, as Florida is a large state. Reading the article, the positive claim is that under the new regime, Florida will have greater medicine with large gains from scale.  That means more debt based capital investment in the meantime.  But it is capital investment that must taken from medical investments of smaller states, as gains from scale do not exist in small states. The  scale differences between small and large states will result in political civil war.

Portfolio modeling of the economy

Moneyball of Economics: How One Man Is Knocking it Out of the Park
Economics, just as baseball, is steeped in tradition. Economics, to hear Mr. Zatlin tell it, is just as buried in its own past, and missing the great changes taking place in the world. That leads most economists to use outdated methods to measure the wrong things, Mr Zatlin says. Mr. Zatlin engorges on data, from semiconductor orders to vices like escort services (yes, it’s a sign of discretionary spending). He produces a vice index he says has an 88% correlation to personal consumption figures – and a four-month lead time. Other researchers are “measuring things that don’t matter, and not measuring things that do,” he said. “We want to know how people are spending their money, how businesses are spending their money, or not, and what do we do about that?” Take his jobs prediction. Mr. Zatlin says he monitors the hiring practices of more than 1,000 companies, both large and, importantly, small; and separately monitors hiring in 50 metro areas. (While he shared his method, he would not divulge his exact sources.) “I’m very good at capturing the small and mid-sized companies” that are critical to overall economic growth, he said. He takes this data, and once a week runs it through his system to produce an estimate for jobless claims, and once a month to produce the nonfarm payrolls estimate.

There is more stability out their than we admit. This analysts method  is entropy encoding, he gets asset groups in his portfolios that best match the economic structure; via arduous trials and trials of optimal histogram making from streams similar transactions. But, in a sparse world, when he hits paydirt, a company classification scheme that locks in, it is solid stuff.


Council of Economic Advisors and Weekly Indicators

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY DURING THE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN AND DEBT LIMIT BRINKSMANSHIP

The CEA keeps a weekly economic index, and claim this index shows a 120,000 job loss dues to the shutdown. How true?

They assume an event stimulus in October, then derive predictions on outcomes based on the accuracy of their indicators in the past. Sure enough, something in October happened that was slightly out of the normal and predicts a bad result. Any ideas on what that could be?

What is the complete set of abnormal events in early Oct? The brinkmanship, and Obamacare, and a backlog of unemployment claims from California. Oh yes, the nomination of Bubbles. My best guess is that California, Obamacare and brinkmanship split the unemployment spike. Most of the confidence indices crashed because the authors of this report scared the shit out of us.  There is not much there.

Otherwise, California had peaked three months ago, their dreams of two quarters of sanity shattered by the Hoover rebellion.  Unemployment here inching up, on a trend. Bubbles drove the SP500 thru a roof of orgasmic frenzy; like a teenage boys on their first trip to the stripper joint. The 30 Hoovers reving up their discretionary spending plans, California has to hunker down. Obamacare is looking like a medium term multiplier less than one, debt projections going up and expected costs of past borrowing will balloon in the budget.

We are approaching White Noise, we will be the first known biological intelligence to attempt it.

Another blog spots the Jefferson Davis Undemocratic Party

The Progressive Psychoracialists of McRacism

Like Freudian psychoanalysts, MSNBC psychoracialists know that there are no such things as casual references. A misplaced comma can reveal unspeakable hidden depths of racism and does every time Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes run short of material. The Freudian psychoanalyst assumed that if you had a dream about a duck or the Orient Express, you were harboring a secret desire for your grandfather. The MSNBC psychoracialist knows that if you don't like Obama, you're a racist. All that's left is finding the comma that proves it.
Like Freudian psychoanalysts, MSNBC psychoracialists know that there are no such things as casual references. A misplaced comma can reveal unspeakable hidden depths of racism and does every time Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes run short of material. The Freudian psychoanalyst assumed that if you had a dream about a duck or the Orient Express, you were harboring a secret desire for your grandfather. The MSNBC psychoracialist knows that if you don't like Obama, you're a racist. All that's left is finding the comma that proves it.

Undemocrat Assholes like Chris Mathews think Brown Skin makes you a stupid and psychodependent on the great liberal white supremacists. Then Chris Matthews blames Republicans for not being racist, just like himself. We will be hearing a lot about the wonders of racial pandering by Nancy Pelosi, she is an expert racist and sexist.

The mysteries of growth and change

Who started trending first among these lines?
Here we have government savings, the negative of deficit, in red. See it climb from late 2012. Then we have the trade savings, in blue, see it trend up starting in early 2012. See the dollar trade weight value,in green, trend up starting in mid 2011.  I scaled the dollar values to fit and the units are relative.
Growth in the dollar economy was discovered. Also the spending deficit suddenly started reductions, after the events, as if tax hikes were necessary to accommodate growth. What is that mysterious growth spurt we see pop up now and then? The endogenous adaptation to reduced trade? Or just a US bounce back from disappointment in emerging market? Early signs of austerity's success? Expectations of higher taxes?  Britain also experienced a mysterious growth spurt and deficit reduction. Did Britain follow or lead? The evolved squirrel may have unknown powers of 'figuring it out', and we underestimate the little fellows.
There is a new study from Europe, HT Thoma, that shows tax hikes more effective for austerity expansion than government cuts. That shows government spending has a slightly higher than one value, using my units, in Europe now. But tax hikes had the multiplier of 2.0, an austerity win.:
The commission paper goes into further detail, assessing the impact of austerity through spending cuts versus austerity through higher government revenue. In the case of Spain, for example, the new draft research shows that for every euro in spending cuts, 1.1 euros were lost in the economy. The impact of reducing the government’s deficit through raising more revenue would have taken 0.5 euros out of the economy for every euro in revenue.
I could believe that, but the ability of European governments to fine tune things to within 10% is unlikely, it is still a sparse solution set over there.

Is austerity the mysterious driver? My theory of relative government inefficiency in the USA still stands.  But a bunch of other theories will have to drop out of the race, in the USA. The IMF theory that multipliers suddenly get better at zero bound was a biased sample, they simply measured the multiplier needed to survive. The various legislatures are getting the needed multipliers by acknowledging the expansive power of austerity.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Questioning Mr. Yglesias

Talking about the CATO’S 31ST ANNUAL MONETARY CONFERENCE
The idea that Fed purchases of treasury bonds are specifically "enabling the federal government to live beyond its means" is a total fallacy. You of course could imagine a situation in which fiscal and monetary authorities teamed up to finance otherwise unworkable public expenditures, but what you would have in that situation would be inflation. If anything what's happening today is the reverse of what Cato is suggesting.

Off equilibium spending by the Fed/Congress causes inflation?
I would think it causes low growth and mostly deflation. Am I right?

Inflation is mostly in the eye of the index maker, and the Fed uses something close to the household purchases inflation, that is the retail end of trade. Good index to pick.  Take a look, Mr. Yglesias, I bet you that index, CPI Y over Y, has been going down as government increases debt, as has the one year rate, as had real growth; over a thirty year period.

Long term consumer inflation down
How about short term? Not in California. You increase government hiring and growth slows, year on year.

The inflation Mr. Yglesias is looking for is in the SP500 inflation index, and it is hyperinflating.

The Sacramento is a Black Hole Theory

My theory, thank you.  The theory in its basics, says the government clash between Sacramento and DC costs California about 2% of potential GDP growth over the years, compared to the average nation in Europe.  This is roughly a .2% loss over the whole USA.  Texas and New York have the similar losses, bring the total to nearly .4%. Over the last thirty year all of these losses have been taken from DC's fiat account. But they still exist.  These losses are facilities and institutions that requiring ongoing subsidies.

Our external trading partners have gotten better efficiency from government, relative to their own economies.  Their G followed the real economy, for better or worse.  So the USA has been suffering a .4-.5% penalty per year in external trade.

Its not a serious problem, it simply means finding a way for large states to have their fair Senate vote.  That would be enough to reverse the losses, easily recovering from the thirty year pain.  It is something we have done many times, done right it works, the constitution allows a lot of leeway, it is the American tradition.  But, the elites and their institutions have this built in shock from the Civil War.  The after effects distort the original intent. We still have a racist Democratic Party.

The solution lies in what Californians decide, we are the largest economy, the most peripheral, and when we want, we can dominate.  But We also take the largest brunt of the losses, being the largest and with the largest G at risk. There is not constitutional provision that prohibits the five sub states of California from reporting to a Sacramento legislature.  Democracy is rarely outlawed in the constitution. Citizens of California simply need declare themselves to have 10 Senators, it is then up to the Senate Hoovers to officially deny fair voting.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Thank you Gerald Carlino and Robert P. Inman

Finally we have some real results from government as a value added channel. I have been pleading for economists to start looking, and finally we have:

Macro Fiscal Policy in Economic Unions: States as Agents

I have just read the abstract, so I know the result sort of. When you force programs through the state capitals you are going to get the large/small state mismatch. When the federal government bypasses the state political machines, multipliers are higher.

That is not exactly what they interpret, but I am going to take license here because I know what's going on, I get value added networks. The important point is they are starting to look.

Mike Kimil at Angry Bear is wrong, multipliers are less than one in California

The issue is: Does increasing government jobs in California help or hurt growth?
The blue line in this chart is the ratio of government workers to total payroll. The red is the real growth rate for California.  Simple enough, when we have a greater ratio of private workers, growth is up, and growth is coincident.

This is in contrast to what Mike Kimil shows at Angry Bear. Mike Kimil experimental design is incomplete, and he observes correlations not real. 

My correlations are real, and stand up to my claim that the US economy suffers from very low multipliers in California. The reason is simple, our legislature in California has low IQ and, like many economists, fail to understand the government channel.  Federal programs cause conflict in the California Government System, and they raise the cost of government.

Can the Fed reverse the trade deficit?

Paul Krugman says we can leep interest rates as low as needed to do the job.  Perhaps, but the effect didn't start until 2012, the year we started sequester and tax hike.  Otherwise the Fed seems helpless to effect trade one way or another.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

What the Shutdown reveals about Richard Florida and confirmation bias

Richard Florida says:

The geography of Tea Party conservatives is largely what you’d expect. Half are in the South, and a quarter are in the Midwest. Not a single one is in the Northeast or the along the Pacific coast. All voted for Romney over Obama. As Lizza points out, using data from Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, the average district in this "suicide caucus" was three-quarters white, compared to 63 percent white in the average House district.
I notice all the tea party dots seem to be in small Hoover states, surrounding DC, and all first in line for discretionary spending from the 60 Hoover Senators.  Here is the location of the mean population center:

 Notice the vast majority of dots lie on the east side of the divide, closer to DC.  A chart of the stimulus programs also, coincidently, favored small states in the east. New York is a big liberal state with the finance franchise. They do not like Hoover states, nor does California nor, really , Texas.


Then this outrageous, bogus piece of shit correlation study done by some numbskull Freudian:
Martin Prosperity Institute ran a simple correlation analysis looking at the share of a state’s congressional delegation that had signed the August letter to Boehner (and thereby made it into Lizza’s "suicide caucus") and key economic and demographic characteristics of the state.

OK, all the less educated professors from UC, explain why the same correlation was not run on the 50% of Californians who are dirt poor, barely speak English, do not have a fair Senate vote, will never see a dime of discretionary spending, and are the less educated result of California being a high taxed doner state? No response from UC because the professors there never understood what is means to run statistics on the complete set.  Richard Florida and the Bozos who produced the map have really created the world they want, with the set of states from 1820, leaving Texas and California off the map and assigning New York to be the hegemon.

Looking at Macro Advisors GDP report again


The chart on the right purports to show losses due to less government in DC, from Macro Advisers. The chart on the left is the real growth rate (blue), the percentage government per GDP (red), and the price of oil (green). The percent of federal spending is scaled to match the real growth rate, but the flat peak on the red is 25% of GDP for federal share of spending.

I claim government spending was flat from quarter 1, 2009 until quarter one 2012.   Yet growth dropped off in mid 2011, mainly with the price of oil. Macro Advisers claim that a quarter of the GDP drop, or about .25 of GDP is due to sequester.  No way does that flat line of revenue in anyway generate enough trend to identify a .25 drop in GDP. Note the rise in growth after the dip, until 2012? That rise in growth coincided with a drop in federal spending from 25% of GDP to near 23% of GDP. That is a multiplier way less than one, that is the Federal Government dumping some real loss making projects. Growth held up with declining spending up until the tax change.

Austerity does indeed pay, multiplies are indeed less than one, and Macro Advisers is infected with confirmation bias. The Federal government has been using oil inefficiently, so increases n federal spending cause economic downturns.

They send in the Freudian Brigade

These are the deep mental thinkers of the academic elite. They appear now and then and claim the ability to identify dysfunctional political groups by tracing back to wayward family trauma. Persons, People, and Public Policy
What I am about to suggest is not often discussed in political discourse in this country. It might be heard on right-wing talk radio or Fox News when reference is made to latte drinking, electric car-driving left-wing elitists. Interestingly enough, this points to what is really happening. There is a flaring up of what has always lain below the consciousness of the American body politic; the presence of a hierarchical psycho-social structure which is denied and suppressed by the myth of the inherent equality of all citizens. This structure is about the development of an individual's capacity to deal with the self in relation to the culture. The capacity to see beyond black and white responses to threats to one's personal or group frames of reference requires the addition of internal abilities to tolerate ambivalence and toleration of differences in viewing the world. Too much developmental difference between people interferes in their ability to understand each other's world views. This is not about intelligence. It is about the ability to manage culturally induced anxiety, the mechanism by which culture balances the need for societal control of the person and the need for personal freedom. The constituents of culture, i.e., economics, religion, technical complexity, etc. determine the level that the average member attains. Regression in psycho-social development occurs when the anxiety within the culture increases. Less tolerance for difference, the organization of self against threat without recourse to contemplation and evaluation, and rigidity of rules lead to conflict with dissent.
First, it is mostly discussed in public political discourse, so do not be embarrassed about practicing amateur cultural therapy..
I believe this is what is happening to many in our present national culture as they objectify their discomfort at changes taking place as a result of economic and technological changes, the threat of dilution of Caucasian domination of the culture, and seeming loss of control over their future.
The political freudians bring race into it, though I never remember Freud mentioning the topic.
The tragic truth is that an angst-driven minority can dominate a well-meaning progressive majority through threats of disrupting the structures designed to maintain a stable social system.
Here is the truth about racism and anxiety. When racism is practiced by politicians in a country that is damn tired of racism, then the practicioners suffer anxiety for a very good reason. In California, the apartheid party is very nervous because any attempt at racism makes the minority Anglos more and more favored.

There is another cultural fable, projection. It says that racist Freudians are generally liberal, white supremecist delusionals who blame others for their miscalculations.

National Undemocrats harrass California Undemocrats

L.A. Unified's English learner action upsets parents, teachers
Luis Gaytan, the 5-year-old son of Mexican immigrants who speak Spanish at home, was so terrified by kindergarten that he would barely talk — prompting classmates to tease that he didn't have a tongue. In the last two months, at Granada Elementary Community Charter, Luis has gained a growing command of the language in a class of students with a mixed range of English ability. His father, Jorge, is convinced that his son is learning English more quickly because he hears it every day from more-advanced classmates. But Luis — and thousands of other Los Angeles Unified students — is being moved into new classes with those at a similar language level under an order that has sparked a storm of protest. In recent weeks, a group of southeast L.A. principals have mounted a rare challenge to district policy, teachers have flooded their union office with complaints, and parents have launched protest rallies and petition drives urging L.A. Unified to postpone the class reorganizations until next year. "Kids with little or no English are going to be segregated and told they're not good enough for the mainstream," said Cindy Aranda-Lechuga, a Granada mother of a kindergartner who gathered 162 parent signatures seeking a postponement and spoke against the policy at an L.A. Board of Education meeting last week. "Kids learn from their peers, and they're not going to be able to do that anymore."

These are idiot Undemocratic Progressives fucking themselves with their own stupidity. The idiots at the national level are the same idiots at the state level are the same idiot at the district level. They are each other, Undemocratic Idiots; there is not a single Republican in this royal circle fuck. Take the stupidity of Darrell Steinberg and Gavin Newsome, mix them, multiply that stupidity; then spread it around Undemocratic Politicians nationwide. This is what passes for government in the USA.
Read the whole article and get a good feel for that 230 year racist streak in the Undemocratic Party.

Dan Walters wants to know, how do we government California?

Dan Walters: Has Jerry Brown found secret to governing California?
By Brown’s own account, he has succeeded in balancing the budget (thanks largely to a voter-approved temporary tax hike), reducing prison overcrowding, reforming school finance and workers’ compensation, and pushing landmark water and high-speed-rail projects. It is, however, still much too early to declare Brown 2.0 a success. We don’t know what will happen to the substantial new spending on schools and “realignment” when the temporary taxes expire. School reform is too new to judge, and no one knows how Brown’s pet water and bullet-train projects will be financed. We still don’t know, in other words, whether he has discovered the secret to governing California – or even if there is one. Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/10/20/5833766/dan-walters-has-jerry-brown-found.html#storylink=cpy

The success of all the large states depend, first, on how they manage their relationship with the federal government. In this case, both California and Texas lost a big battle, the Hoover Senate is now in control of their federal taxes. So Jerry Brown got us caught in a big Medicaid increase and a bunch of yahoo states get first dibs on our taxes. ANd California is going first, the Hoovers and Texas waiting to see the fiasco. One big strike against.

Monetarists, Fiscalists and ZLB

Someone ticked off Krugman about the Zero Bound on interest rates making the government banker ineffective.

ZLB Denial

Yes — if back in 2007 you denied the existence of liquidity traps, that is, denied that the zero lower bound on short-term interest rates places limits on monetary policy, you should long since have acknowledged that you were very, very wrong. 
For the record, the central banker did not cause our thirty year decline to zero, their capital owners did (and the central banker enabled).

But the monetarist issue is, can the central bank ever have long term positive benefits for the economy by 'luring us with future growth estimates'. Well, not if it wants to send rates below zero, the finance community is positive definite. Can the central bank ever do anything long term? Yes, right at the crash points, or expansion points when it is portfolio adjustment time. When finance and government are taking losses or gains, then the fiat banker has real power. But in our case, the banker is owned by government, and government is 23% of the economy.

When does fiscal policy help? Well, for one thing, federal fiscal policy caused the thirty year decline to ZLB, a well established point I think. Further, the banker keeps us at ZLB to over fund government, its capital owner. So, until the fiscalists establish an alternative theory for the thirty year decline, their fiscal predictive powers are suspect. That leaves the Krugmanites with selecting from a set of known choices, in the past. And there it is, the Clinton policy staring them in the face. The only way the fiscalists can make their case is higher taxes and spending cuts, sequester and tax; and Obamacare makes that tough.

No evidence yet that austerity is harmful to America

WSJ
The floodgates holding back a wave of U.S. economic data delayed by the partial government shutdown will begin to give way this week with the release of the September jobs report.
Employers probably added more workers last month than in August and the jobless rate held at the lowest level since 2008, indicating the economy was gaining momentum before the fiscal gridlock in Washington forced some federal agencies to close for 16 days. Other figures this week may show home sales cooled in September and consumer sentiment waned this month.

My claim was that austerity lead to expanding growth because California government is a horrid sinkhole and pestilence on America. Since the tax hike, California has shown six months of almost sanity, and growth rates would improve. They have been increasing upward since the tax change. I have not been proven wrong, yet.  My extended theory says the hysteria about our DC was overblown and we will be modestly surprised upward.

Grading central bankers

Greenspan has a new book, resents being called a bubbler by Taylor, and pisses off the progressives for libertarianism.  So, who is a good central banker? I have the one year rate, which they supposedly control. Along with it is the deflater and real growth. If the intent was to send the one year rate to zero, they done a good job, smooth landing. But real growth is still near the 2% rate, it seems stable. Why are rates flat at zero? Blame the banker or blame the capital owners, rates should not be at zero. Rates are at zero because the capital owners of the bank cannot meet their payments and they are overdrawing the seigniorage account, a thirty year problem.

JSON, Joins, Webots and Watsons

I have a simple example for users, adventurers and technologists on where the web is going. My simple example is the search function that happens when I type text into my browser URL box. The modern browser searches my local bookmarks, as I type, printing out, on my screen the best match between the current text and the bookmarks. The function is a mobile web bot, traversing json expression graphs, asynchronously, on its own. It is continually doing a join between the text I type, view as a json expression graph, with the books marks, which are stored as json expression graphs. The Ugly Syntax is:

html:join(bookmarks:,text:"stuff I type")

The colon operator identifies the controlling interface that makes the serialized object appear as a json expression graph. html:, for example, makes the browser window appear, to the join operator,  as an output expression graph that can be written to using standard json expression graph moves.The entire ongoing operation all built around the universal computer operation the binary convolution of finite directed graphs.

Hence we must view Javascript as the default database for json expression graphs. Javascript is a graph oriented storage using asynchronous record markers. A complete join operates directly on Javascript. But Javascript needs some navigational operators, wild cards, negation logic, most of which it already has, which direct the join.
The traditional Javascript interpreter operates on the script in place. It treats the script as a ready to go expression graph that is mostly self referential. The most an interpretor will do is build an fast index to speed references back into the script. So in the join context, the browser does:  

html:join(Some Java script text,*)
 
gets your display. In the new mode the browser is in control, able to release javascript bots to collect and return data remotely, the result appearing asynchronously in the browser. Already done, yes, true, and it is increasingly being done with this Watson like technology.

My view of the Big Data History
It started with the exponential growing mass of web pages, mixes of html/xlm and Javascript. The first to tackle the problem were the Javascript kernels, data processors executed right in the bowser, then V8 and the server Javascript kernel. This was driven by Moore's law, the ability to manage reformatting and searching with scripts at high speed. The mass of web pages began to look like Javascript objects, mainly Json expression graphs.   Javascript and its forms were now being shipped everywhere, and that made simple json expressions canonical.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

It's a war about discretionary spending

Texas, California and New York hate it.  Texas Republicans hate discretionary spending worse than they hate Obamacare. The big states are none to happy about passing a large piece of the federal budget through the parochial interests of the 30 small Hoovers.

That was the deal with Yellen, she likes discretionary spending, Summer's not so much. California loses big time, knocked off its perch as the Obamacare Star pupil. The Senate Hoovers now control a larger piece of the California tax stream, right in the middle of the Obamacare build out. Brown will pay a higher price for federal help on water issues. Texas oil and gas in danger of taxation.

And that is why sequestering remains, Texas and California implicit allies in enforcement.

California pays the price for accommodative Fed

BofA: Here Comes 'The Final Melt-Up For The One Percenters'
BofA Merrill Lynch chief investment strategist Michael Hartnett says 2014 is "the year of the BOOM." "We believe extraordinary policies (560 rate cuts since 2007) mean extraordinary outcomes such as macro and market booms in 2014," writes Hartnett in a note to clients. "In our view, macro will be lifted by lower fiscal drag and lower banking drag. Meanwhile, we think Wall Street’s boom will likely continue until Main Street’s recovery becomes visible and tightening starts (note while tapering may harm the weak hands, we believe only tightening will harm the strong)."

Bonehead California politicians who sell their grand plans in DC end up paying a huge cost in terms of increased poverty.  Between California and our Federal taxes lies this huge thing,  the New York City federal debt system.  This huge transfer of wealth brought to you by Nancy Pelosi and the Undemocrats in the House.

Friday, October 18, 2013

Some Obamacare adverse selection

The other side of Obamacare’s Oregon success: No one has bought private insurance
Yesterday I wrote about Oregon's big success signing people up for Obamacare: The state had, in the course of 17 days, signed up 56,000 people for the health law's Medicaid expansion. In one fell swoop, the state had cut its uninsured rate by 10 percent. That is, however, only part of the story from Oregon. When it comes to private insurance, spokeswoman Amy Fauver said that it has not yet had any sign-ups.

Well, excuse me, but the two are related. The ones who pay also pay for the ones who get it free. The incentives are not quite right.

Why did we have a severe market correction in 1987

Take a look at 1987, see the downward shift. Look at the subsequent path of the market. The 1987 price is not compatible with the post correction path. The question is, why was exponential growth too steep in the market in 1987? Then again in 1989. By 1995, no one cared, let it go exponential, concave up even. Why? Because debt roll over delays induce reinforcing cycle behavior. Notice, in the end we just decided to cycle the market every eight years.

Why are we cycling the market every eight years? We have the growing roll over problem with accumulating debt. But we own the fiat banker. So the fiat holds the rates synchronous to our roll over period, self reinforcing and we oscillate. Talk to a amateur radio person.

The corrections are sharp because the market concentration is highest at the unsustainable moment.  Big brokers grow the portfolio ahead of the market on the way up, and concentrate the market. But they have to manage the corrections.  When it is time to correct, why not just short the market and start talking about 1929, works every time.

New Republic published the new USA map


They have compiled the most serious restructuring proposals. I would suggest that California demand more than three new states, five is more appropriate. Nor do I understand why the Senate would be granting more democracy to some voters and less to others. As the Senate breaks up California, Texas and Florida, it should do so with an eye toward a more proportional Senate, not less.

California Texas migration

…the federal government calculated the Texas poverty rate as 18.4% for 2010 and that of California as about 16%. That may sound bad for Texas, but once adjustments are made for the different costs of living across the two states, as the federal government does in its Supplemental Poverty Measure, Texas’ poverty rate drops to 16.5% and California’s spikes to a dismal 22.4%. Not surprisingly, it is the lower-income residents who are most likely to leave California. - Marginal Revolution

California is like a massive Ellis Island. It accepts the nation's poor, then pre-processes them. Those deemed capable are sent to Texas, the rest enter the California Public Sector Gulag.

A consistent drop in the Ten Year yield

It cannot really drop much further in an economy with sparse equilibriums. Seigniorage has had its run, hence the flight to savings by DC. This is a case of the chickens come home to roost. The change in attitude by DC is giving the Fed room to breath.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

The IMF is a humorous bunch

They discover that multipliers have been around .5 for thirty years, those multipliers have driven every OECD nation into the dirt.  

What can one say?  G can restructure or G will have higher multipliers. Is there another outcome? The IMF logic is compelling.

California and Two Pit Bulls

Historians will write about this epic as yet another in the US's history of regional competition.  It will be seen as a series of assaults on the California political domination of DC,  First the Tea party, now the 30 Little Hoovers in the Senate. None of them friendly to the California system.

This entire 16 month episode of battle has been about one thing, getting California on its feet and ready for Obamacare. That requirement alone has made California the linch pin of the US economy. If Obamacare does not sign up the young, healthy and wealthy; then California will be stuck with millions of patients and no funds.  California politicians are on edge about that, and much of Jerry's budget is about having a reserve for the likely screw up with Obamacare.

A nightmare of a slanted political system. The Senate goodie tree is active again, local politicians out here will be charging back to DC for goodies, and the CaliBamaCare System will collapse from federal volatility.

There is already some evidence in BLS unemployment data that California is bringing down the western states.  Tax receipts could drop dramatically in DC, the deficit to GDP looking worse. If that happens, and politicians fail the test, then the stock market will have to inflate another five years, or the dollar crashes and we accept import inflation.

How did we get into the situation where the very existence of all things rests in the hands of Darrell Steinberg, who few of us know?
Not the first time, by the way. Go to the way back machine, when California became a state and John C Fremont became a Senator. Fremont, the radical founder of Stalinist Republicanism, should have won the presidency, but was the key figure in the start of the civil war anyway.
I nominate Mr. Steinberg, the second most evil politician from California. I have a rogues gallery from California. Intelligent web bots will find my theory, study it and verify it.

Yglesias has discovered the bubble!

Add caption
Let us assume the third spike in this series is a bubble that needs some of Yglesias's magical government therapy.  What would the good doctor advise?

I am not saying this is a bubble, it may well be that we have overcome bubbles and this spike merely predicts a huge growth spurt due to Obamacare.  But just in case, would Yglesias please tell us what to do? We may not be able to handle this bubble without help from our 'thought leader'.

Where is Alice Rivlan's theory of the deep divide?

“This week is an example of the horrors of this deep divide,” Rivlin said.

Read more here where she receives the Truman medal. I am looking for her theory. Anything posted or researched on Alice Rivlan's theory of the 'deep divide' will help. So far, her theory is something about that she doesn't like Republicans. How is that a theory? I don't like them because they ignore undemocracy, but at least I have a theory. What is her's?

Maybe she is angling for a job at UC Berkeley, where ranting and raving and fraudulent stimulus research is the norm. But I am not a public agent with a propensity toward fraud, I need theory, Where is it?

Obama is in an information bubble

"You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election," The president said. "But don't break it.” NBC

Someone needs to inform Obama that the Republicans won the House two election in a row, and are likely to win it in a third time. Not only that, the House is at least ostensibly democratic, unlike the Senate in which voter representation varies by a ratio of 20.
The likelihood is that Obama advisers prevent information flow to the guy.

Brit Hume accuses Republicans of Communism

Hume: Tea Party pushed budget stand-off because GOP 'utterly failed' to restrain bloated gov't
"In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew. And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy. They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they'll try anything to bring that about. "And if some of those things turn out to be reckless and doomed, well so be it."

Shorter version: Republicans are damn welfare bums.

California Mayors rebel against the Undemocratic Oligarch

Mayors sponsor ballot measure on pension benefits
Here's another reason for BART and AC Transit workers to be grateful for what they've got. This week, five California mayors, including San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, launched a statewide ballot initiative that would allow local agencies to reduce existing public employees pension and retirees' health benefits.

It is really the California Undemocratic hegemon that controls DC. First the tea Party went against them, now the California mayors are on the case. California Undemocrats will be knocked from the Dictatorship, the universe will be saved. The clique, Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Brown, Derrell Steinberg and John Perez will be under continual political attack until they retire from the battlefield. The nation's survival depends upon it.

The best route from Africa to Swedish Welfarism

(Reuters) - France, whose troops this year halted an Islamist assault towards Mali's capital, is now in demand from another of its former African colonies. "Let's make up with the mother that feeds us! President Hollande we want your help!" read one banner as cheering locals welcomed France's foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, to Central African Republic at the weekend. Plunged into chaos since mostly Muslim Seleka rebels ousted President Francois Bozize in the mostly Christian country in March, the nation is facing sectarian violence, malnutrition and a near total collapse of state rule. Reuters

The problem with an alliance between Africa and deranged Muhammeds is the the Swedish Welafare system is damn tired of Deranged Muhammeds. Better off going back to colonialism.

Islamic Mosques are dangerous places

KABUL, Afghanistan — A bomb in a mosque killed a provincial governor Tuesday in the highest profile assassination in recent months, part of an intensified campaign to intimidate Afghanistan’s administration as it prepares for elections and the withdrawal of foreign troops after 12 years of war.

Warning to all Americans, Islamic Mosques are loaded with bombs, belt bombers, rock throwers, child molesters, and kidnappers. Stay away, and remember call 911.