What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

[4est_4est_Gump]

His sudden fade is the great unexplained mystery of modern politics.

I'm sorry, but the man is a Mercury Bulb...

While the packaging claims 100w intensity at 60w rates, what you actually get is 40w light at 60w rates...



Economically, Ron Paul is the only one who "gets" it.

Romney is all talk and focus group.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I can give you three reasons why he faded...

He's from the South, where every one is "slow."

He looks and sounds like Bush, and

uh...,

.

.

.

Mitt? Can you help me out here...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Peering ahead at the worst possible outcomes of Obamacare five years from now, imagine that individuals were being fined by the Department of Health and Human Services for failing to buy health insurance -- even though insurance companies have withdrawn from the market and aren't offering it anymore! Would that be fair?

Well, it's exactly what's happening right now as the Environmental Protection Agency penalizes oil companies for failing to buy non-existent cellulosic ethanol.

Ah, ethanol. What market atrocity hasn't yet been committed in pursuit of the idea that we should power our cars from farmland rather than taking the fossilized stuff out of the ground?

In case you haven't noticed, the 30-year-old program for subsidizing ethanol production through tax credits has expired. Congress let it to happen over the Christmas holidays while hassling over how to fund the federal government for fiscal 2012. Republicans (minus a few farm state members) have long condemned the program while Democrats, who usually hail it as a triumph of the Carter Administration, finally decided it wasn't worth defending anymore. This means the tax credit for ethanol -- which started at 3 cents per gallon and eventually rose to 54 cents -- is now off the books. Also gone is the 46-cents-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol to protect the domestic industry.

Does that mean we're back to reality? Unfortunately, no. Still in place are the mandates adopted when the Bush Administration set phantasmagorical goals for ethanol production, particularly cellulosic ethanol, which brings us to our original subject.

The ethanol that we've been putting in our gas tanks for the last 20 years is made from corn seeds. The sugars and starches in the grain break down under heat and can be easily fermented into alcohol. We've been doing it since Neanderthal days (the Cave Men had a version of beer), so it's not too complicated. The problem is that the seeds make up only 15 percent of the corn plant. The rest is cellulose, the much tougher molecules that give the plant its structure and do not break down so easily. It can be accomplished with chemical enzymes or by evaporating everything and then combining it back to liquid ethanol, but both methods are far too expensive and energy intensive.

So the preferred techniques are biological. There are bacteria in the guts of cows and termites that break down cellulose but they are highly adapted and have trouble living outside their native environment. Only in 2010 did someone genetically engineer a strain of yeast that can do the same thing. But that is getting way ahead of the story.

Drawing on only 15 percent of the plant, we are now processing an incredible 40 percent of the 12 billion bushels grown on 400,000 farms into fuel ethanol. The entire world crop is only 25 billion bushels, which means that one out of five bushels worldwide is going into American automobiles. This has crimped the world food supply and set off riots in places as diverse as Mexico and Southeast Asia. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization regularly condemns ethanol as a "crime against humanity" but no one in this country pays much attention.

Always on the horizon of this effort, however, has been the vision that we will one day be able to process the remaining 85 percent of the plant -- the cellulose -- into a usable fuel as well. Then we wouldn't have to be taking food out of people's mouths.

Unfortunately, while it's been accomplished here and there in the laboratory, no one has ever been able to scale the process up to a commercial level. Nor is there any assurance that anyone ever will. People have been trying to domesticate morel mushrooms for centuries without any success. Somewhere around 2005, however, the environmental movement and its tagalongs in the Bush Administration came upon the perfect solution -- government mandates!

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/13/the-ultimate-individual-mandat

"If a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house."
Famous "Activist" Constitutional Law Professor Barack Hussein Obama, 2008

 

[RobDownSouth]

His sudden fade is the great unexplained mystery of modern politics.

I was reading a post-mortem analysis of Perry's death spiral. It seems he and his team took what worked for them in Texas races and attempted to apply it to a national campaign, with disasterous results:

• Ignore the media completely
• Rely on an "aw shucks" persona
• Ignore prepping for debates
• Avoid discussing issues as much as possible
• Rely completely on really big financial donors

Of the above, "ignoring the media" probably backfired most spectacularly. The Texas media was trained to give him a nice warm tongue bath in order to curry favor with him, the national pundits demanded HE fellate THEM.

 

[rosco rathbone]

I was reading a post-mortem analysis of Perry's death spiral. It seems he and his team took what worked for them in Texas races and attempted to apply it to a national campaign, with disasterous results:

• Ignore the media completely
• Rely on an "aw shucks" persona
• Ignore prepping for debates
• Avoid discussing issues as much as possible
• Rely completely on really big financial donors

Of the above, "ignoring the media" probably backfired most spectacularly. The Texas media was trained to give him a nice warm tongue bath in order to curry favor with him, the national pundits demanded HE fellate THEM.

Your remarks are cogent.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Investors next week will digest Friday’s announcement by Standard and Poor’s that the ratings firm downgraded several of Europe’s largest economies, including France and Italy.

U.S. stock markets are closed on Monday to observe the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Meanwhile, fourth quarter earnings season kicks into high gear with reports from such bellwether companies as Citigroup (C: 30.74, -0.86, -2.72%), Bank of America (BAC: 6.61, -0.18, -2.65%), Goldman Sachs (GS: 98.96, -2.25, -2.22%) and Morgan Stanley (MS: 16.63, -0.54, -3.14%).

Tech sector giants Apple (AAPL: 419.81, -1.58, -0.37%), International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM), Intel (INTC: 25.14, -0.61, -2.37%) and Google (GOOG: 624.99, -4.65, -0.74%) are all due to report next week as well.

An initial public offering from Renewable Energy Group Inc., a producer of biodiesel fuel, will mark the first IPO of 2012. The company plans to sell 7.2 million shares on Thursday at a price range of $13 to $15. The shares will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol REGI.

Also due next week are reports on December housing starts, due Thursday, and existing home sales, due Friday.

Housing starts jumped in November primarily in the area of multi-unit structures. The market for single family homes has been brutal for several years, leading many Americans to seek rental units. That demand is fueling the jump in new multi-unit structures.

Due Wednesday and Thursday, respectively, are government reports on the December producer price index and consumer price index. Despite rising food costs, the Federal Reserve has maintained for months that inflation is a long-term concern but not an immediate threat.

Reports on December and January factory activity are also due next week, and two regional Fed banks will report their January factory surveys.

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/...s-and-europe-downgrade-fallout/#ixzz1jXBpKrTL

 

[koalabear]

Markets are calm — too calm. Why pros are spooked

After wild price swings that left investors bewildered and not a cent richer last year, stocks are rising again, and calm has settled over the market like blue skies after a storm.

Or maybe eye of the storm is the better metaphor.

"It's a little too calm," says the usually unflappable Jim Paulsen of Wells Fargo Management, a bullish stock strategist not easily spooked. "Maybe we're setting up for a break."

Whether that break will bring a rise or fall in stocks, Paulsen is not sure. But he suspects it'll be big whichever direction.

http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=AP&date=20120116&id=14693645

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Civilization in Reverse
By Victor Davis Hanson
January 19, 2012 12:00 A.M.

In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount.

News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin — as Greece is squeezed to make interest payments to the supposedly euro-pinching German banks.

Such accounts may be exaggerations, but they should warn us that yearly progress is never assured. Instead, history offers plenty of examples of life becoming far worse than it had been centuries earlier. The biographer Plutarch, writing 500 years after the glories of classical Greece, lamented that in his time weeds grew amid the empty colonnades of the once-impressive Greek city-states. In America, most would prefer to live in the Detroit of 1941 than the Detroit of 2011. The quality of today’s air travel has regressed to the climate of yesterday’s bus service.

In 2000, Greeks apparently assumed that they had struck it rich with their newfound money-laden European Union lenders — even though they certainly had not earned their new riches through increased productivity, the discovery of more natural resources, or greater collective investment and savings.

The brief euro mirage has vanished. Life in Athens is zooming backward to the pre-EU days of the 1970s. Then, most imported goods were too expensive to buy, medical care was often premodern, and the city resembled more a Turkish Istanbul than a European Munich.

The United States should pay heed to the modern Greek Cassandra, since our own rendezvous with reality is rapidly approaching. The costs of servicing a growing national debt of more than $15 trillion are starting to squeeze out other budget expenditures. Americans are no longer affluent enough to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to import oil, while we snub our noses at vast new oil and gas deposits beneath our own soil and seas.

In my state, Californians for 40 years have hiked taxes; grown their government; vastly expanded entitlements; put farmland, timberland, and oil and gas lands off limits; and opened their borders to millions of illegal aliens. They apparently assumed that they had inherited so much wealth from prior generations and that their state was so naturally rich, that a continually better life was their natural birthright.

It wasn’t. Now, as in Greece, the veneer of civilization is proving pretty thin in California. Hospitals no longer have the money to offer sophisticated long-term medical care to the indigent. Cities no longer have the funds to self-insure themselves from the accustomed barrage of monthly lawsuits. When thieves rip copper wire out of street lights, the streets stay dark. Most state residents would rather go to the dentist these days than queue up and take a number at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Hospital emergency rooms neither have room nor act as if there’s much of an emergency.

Traffic flows no better on most of the state’s freeways than it did 40 years ago — and often much worse, given the crumbling infrastructure and increased traffic. Once-excellent K–12 public schools now score near the bottom in nationwide tests. The California state-university system keeps adding administrators to the point where they have almost matched the number of faculty, though half of the students who enter CSU need remedial reading and math. Despite millions of dollars in tutoring, half the students still don’t graduate. The taxpayer is blamed in constant harangues for not ponying up more money, rather than administrators being faulted for a lack of reform.

In 1960, there were far fewer government officials, far fewer prisons, far fewer laws, and far fewer lawyers — and yet the state was a far safer place than it is a half-century later. Technological progress — whether iPhones or Xboxes — can often accompany moral regress. There are not yet weeds in our cities, but those too may be coming.

The average Californian, like the average Greek, forgot that civilization is fragile. Its continuance requires respect for the law, tough-minded education, collective thrift, private investment, individual self-reliance, and common codes of behavior and civility — and exempts no one from those rules. Such knowledge and patterns of civilized behavior, slowly accrued over centuries, can be lost in a single generation.

A keen visitor to Athens — or Los Angeles — during the last decade not only could have seen that things were not quite right, but also could have concluded that they could not go on as they were. And so they are not.

Washington, please take heed.

 

[unregistered]

 

[RobDownSouth]

It's morning again in America!

Despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians to keep the economy weak in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential Election...

Dow, S&P 500 Close at Their Highest Since July
LINK

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Democrats will definitely reverse civilization.

They call it things like fairness and equality.

They really do mean the best when they ignore economics and replace it with social justice.

Good read: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/now_we_know_who_was_right_about_obama.html

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians to keep the economy weak in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential Election...

Dow, S&P 500 Close at Their Highest Since July
LINK

*chuckle*

We're back to the stock market as an important economic indicator...



lol - If we had ever been here before we probably would know just what to do, wouldn't you?

 

[RobDownSouth]

Still MORE Good News in America!

Despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians to keep the economy weak in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential Election...

Housing market picks up speed for 2012
LINK

 

[RobDownSouth]

Glibertarians Panic!

Despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians to keep the economy weak in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential Election...

Business Week:U.S. Factory Production Climbs by Most in a Year
LINK

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians to keep the economy weak in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential Election...

Housing market picks up speed for 2012
LINK

Still way below where it needs to be, but in Sept 2009, ALL the leading economic indicators were up!

Of course, at the time, I was saying things like, the Great Depression had peaks and valleys too and the pattern we will follow is that and Japan's Lost Decade, which, btw, they have yet to crawl out of.

Now, as we learned from 2009, the next thing will be the rising unemployment rate as people "rush" back into the job market excited at the economic miracle wrought by the stimulus and the multiplier effect of food stamps, and the, of course, speculator driven rise of gas-prices as evil Big Oil shoots for record profits and the price of energy spikes the economic spike and people again give up looking for jobs, and the rate improves, the government writes off some of the jobs and viola! we have recovery again...



Yeah, this thread is full of regular waves of excited hope for Obamanomics and denial of the underpinning reality of a man who wants expensive energy and proved again just yesterday...

A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States...,
John P. Holdren
White House Office of Science and Technology Director

 

[RobDownSouth]

Common sense returns!

Sales of anti-depressants to libertarians expected to reach record highs in 2012!

Economists ridicule idea of new US gold standard
LINK

 

[richard_daily]

Sales of anti-depressants to libertarians expected to reach record highs in 2012!

Economists ridicule idea of new US gold standard
LINK

Yes, but EVERYONE knows that University of Chicago economists are notoriously liberal... because, well... .ummm.... it's CHICAGO!

 

[RobDownSouth]

It's morning again in America!

Still more good news....

Jobless claims drop near four-year low
LINK

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Sales of anti-depressants to libertarians expected to reach record highs in 2012!

Economists ridicule idea of new US gold standard
LINK

I agree, The school of economics that brought us the miracle of the Stimulus and $16,000,000,000,000.00 in debt think the Gold Standard is a looney idea because they are rather fond of inflation for political gain even at the known cost of economic loss. As long as you continue to believe in them, you will harm your fellow citizens, but like Longshank's archers, it won't worry you one wit because your quivering polity will get Republicans too...

"We own the economy. We own the beginning of the turnaround and we want to make sure that we continue that pace of recovery, not go back to the policies of the past under the Bush administration that put us in the ditch in the first place."
Debbie Wasserman Schultz

If you ask me, I think what we're experiencing isn't in fact closer to a "growthless" recovery than to a jobless one. Because GDP started to grow more than a year and a half ago, but with the exception of just a couple of quarters, growth has not been noticeably above its trend rate of about 2-1/2 percent a year. I don't rejoice at the news that we added 216,000 jobs in March. About a hundred thousand of that 216,000 is needed every month just to keep up with the growth in the labor force. At this rate of job growth, it would take most of the decade to replace the eight 8-1/2 million jobs that were lost in the recession.
Christina Romer
Chairwoman of Obama's White House Council of Economic Advisors

... and you can always print and borrow from the Reserve.



The antithesis of their thesis can be found at Mises.org where economics becomes easy to understand.
"The more consistently Austrian an economist is, the better a writer he will be."
Murray N. Rothbard

 

[RobDownSouth]

But...but...what about OIL PRICES? Glad you asked...

Even more good news....

Oil prices lower on concerns about global demand
LINK

 

[RobDownSouth]

Let's review:

Stock Market prices? Up
Factory productivity? Up
Housing starts? Up
Jobless claims? Down
Oil prices? Down
Gold Standard? Dead

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Still more good news....

Jobless claims drop near four-year low
LINK

Yeah!

Obama is reelected!

Of course he will preside over a country where the universe of jobs and job seekers have shrunk. We have a smaller workforce than when the Food-Stamp President took office.

But, you know what? Most people are now educated by the government and they see the appearance of prosperity and while they know appearances can be deceiving, why would government lie to them? After all, the government increased the money supply, and presto, the markets went up flush with cash money!

And of course, as the likes of Throb and Richard will tell you, the amount of money made available by a Nation's Capitol is how you measure The Wealth of a Nation, not its Capital.

Fore more years of this and we'll be as Golden as Athens!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Let's review:

Stock Market prices? Up
Factory productivity? Up
Housing starts? Up
Jobless claims? Down
Oil prices? Down
Gold Standard? Dead

Inflation
Great! Fewer employees required.
Still at 1932 levels
People quit looking
Oil prices are supposed to go up when an economy heats up
Yeah! Inflation rules!

I "feel" richer already!

Of course, my feelings never fed a homeless child...

 

[Wrong Element]

I was reading a post-mortem analysis of Perry's death spiral. It seems he and his team took what worked for them in Texas races and attempted to apply it to a national campaign, with disasterous results:

• Ignore the media completely
• Rely on an "aw shucks" persona
• Ignore prepping for debates
• Avoid discussing issues as much as possible
• Rely completely on really big financial donors

Of the above, "ignoring the media" probably backfired most spectacularly. The Texas media was trained to give him a nice warm tongue bath in order to curry favor with him, the national pundits demanded HE fellate THEM.

The big problem is that he didn't have a burning desire to be the next president, which is obvious from how long it took him to get into the race.

But a related problem is that he's just lazy, and when you're not that smart to begin with, there's no way you can win--unless you're in Texas and there's a "R" after your name. I already knew Texas was a Republican state, but it wasn't until moving down here that I really came to appreciate what a monoculture it is, at least among white folks. Republican politicians here don't work hard because they aren't forced to. Perry has never had real competition before, and it's showed.

 

[richard_daily]

Inflation
Great! Fewer employees required.
Still at 1932 levels
People quit looking
Oil prices are supposed to go up when an economy heats up
Yeah! Inflation rules!

I "feel" richer already!

Of course, my feelings never fed a homeless child...

Perhaps you don't understand what 'inflation' is.

That would explain your post.