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

[unregistered]

 

[koalabear]

No market updates today?


(I think Johnny said last week, to watch this week when the market manipulators "buy low sell high")

((people could do a lot worse than listen to ole Johnny))

(((course you might as well just give your money to Vegas, unless you are sitting at the table when the decisions are made as to which direction to move the market)))

Optimism builds that Europe's banks may be fixed. The euro rises, pushing gold and oil higher. Banks and energy shares lead the rally.


Still no hope for the USA.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

Durbin says the GOp will pay a price for opposing Obama's jobs plan, will the twelve Senate Democrats reported to be against it also pay a price?

I don't know, Vette. Maybe you should ask Durbin?

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[mercury14]

DOW 330 to the upside!

I woke up $20k richer today, as a few of my selling triggers were hit while I slept.

 

[unregistered]

 

[mercury14]

Goody gumdrops for you.

Republican view: Volatile markets are horrible and we should blame Obama!

The view of investors: Volatile markets make us rich. More please.

 

[koalabear]

I think it's still a roller coaster ride for the foreseeable future.

The market is for idiots right now, that explains mercMORON. That and apparently he thinks 20 grand is hitting the jackpot.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[koalabear]

Market went up today based on news that a bailout was forthcoming in Europe. People better get a clue, crony capitalism isn't capitalism, and as fucked up as those Marxist protestors on Wall Street and the anarchists from Canada who organized then are, big bankers who thrive on being saved from the wrath of real capitalism by a taxpayer bailout, are just as dangerous.

Has gold went lower today instead of higher, it would have signaled a strong stock market.

 

[mercury14]

Yes, he's Tiny Town Ranch.

Woke up to +20k in capital gains in my USAA brokerage account. I think it's kind of cool, making money while I sleep.

People with money to invest know that volatility is great. There are a ton of amazing deals just hanging out in the breeze. A lot of stocks become way underpriced. Just look at the oil services stocks. I can't possibly put enough money in that sector right now.

 

[unregistered]

 

[vikker]

Has gold went lower today instead of higher, it would have signaled a strong stock market.

Or simply that the libertarians are once again investing heavily in gold because RON PAUL REVOLUTION.

 

[vikker]

Has gold went lower today instead of higher, it would have signaled a strong stock market.

Or that the libertarians are once again investing heavily in gold because RON PAUL REVOLUTION!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

DOW 330 to the upside!

ABC radio news was reporting this with gushing enthusiasm to the point that I could swear U_D and Merc were on the radio...



You would have thought that the Obama Fall had Sprung!



Then, with straight face (voice) they announced this:

http://www.businesscycle.com/reports_indexes/reportsummarydetails/1091
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/y...ecast-that-has-been-reliable-before.html?_r=1

HEY! U_D, FUCKTARD! what do youse two have to say? Still not a firm enough date?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Woke up to +20k in capital gains in my USAA brokerage account. I think it's kind of cool, making money while I sleep.

People with money to invest know that volatility is great. There are a ton of amazing deals just hanging out in the breeze. A lot of stocks become way underpriced. Just look at the oil services stocks. I can't possibly put enough money in that sector right now.

I still would like to recommend a book written by a fellow degenerate day trader who eventually got wiped out in the .com bust...

But why would you pay any attention?

But at least one organization with an exceptionally good track record says another recession may already be here. That is the Economic Cycle Research Institute, a private forecasting firm based in Manhattan. It was founded by Geoffrey H. Moore, an economist who helped originate the practice of using leading indicators to predict business cycles. Mr. Moore died in 2000, but the team he trained is still at work.

Relying on a series of proprietary indexes, the institute correctly predicted the beginning and the end of the last recession. Over the last 15 years, it has gotten all of its recession calls right, while issuing no false alarms.

That’s why it’s worth paying attention to its current forecast. It’s chilling: as bad as the economy has been, it’s about to get worse.

In the institute’s view, the United States, which is struggling to recover from the last downturn, is lurching into a new one. “If the United States isn’t already in a recession now it’s about to enter one,” says Lakshman Achuthan, the institute’s chief operations officer.

It’s just a forecast. But if it’s borne out, the timing will be brutal, and not just for portfolio managers and incumbent politicians. Millions of people who lost their jobs in the 2008-9 recession are still out of work. And the unemployment rate in the United States remained at 9.1 percent in September.

More pain is coming, says Mr. Achuthan. He thinks the unemployment rate will certainly go higher. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes back up into double digits,” he says.

I'm sorry that it is not as credible, as say, ZANDI!!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/y...ecast-that-has-been-reliable-before.html?_r=1



Then again, Zandi's only ever right when looking back and using other people's formulas, like the one that said the stimulus would keep us at 8% unemployment...

It was only off by 1% seeing that it has kept us at 9% for so long.

Whaddaya think? 2 Trillion dollars this time? To keep us at 9%?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Market went up today based on news that a bailout was forthcoming in Europe. People better get a clue, crony capitalism isn't capitalism, and as fucked up as those Marxist protestors on Wall Street and the anarchists from Canada who organized them are, big bankers who thrive on being saved from the wrath of real capitalism by a taxpayer bailout, are just as dangerous.

*chuckle*


Like that's going to work THIS TIME!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Merc, when did Zani get his Nobel Prize?

Interviewer: A January 2009 article quotes you as saying, “The calculations that I have seen supporting the stimulus package are back-of-the-envelope ones that ignore what we have learned in the last 60 years of macroeconomic research.” What calculations had you seen?

[Thomas] Sargent: I said something like that to a reporter. I had just read an Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers document e-mailed to me by my friend John Taylor. I agreed with John that the CEA calculations were surprisingly naive for 2009. They were not informed by what we learned after 1945….In early 2009, President Obama’s economic advisers seem to have understated the substantial professional uncertainty and disagreement about the wisdom of implementing a large fiscal stimulus. In early 2009, I recall President Obama as having said that while there was ample disagreement among economists about the appropriate monetary policy and regulatory responses to the financial crisis, there was widespread agreement in favor of a big fiscal stimulus among the vast majority of informed economists. His advisers surely knew that was not an accurate description of the full range of professional opinion. President Obama should have been told that there are respectable reasons for doubting that fiscal stimulus packages promote prosperity, and that there are serious economic researchers who remain unconvinced.

Reason.com

Obama must have ignored all the "rw" loons...

The way you do that ol' voodoo )economics_ that you do...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Solyndra’s $535 million failure was not an unlucky one-off. According to Environmental Protection Agency numbers cited by Investor’s Business Daily in August, the Recovery Act’s $7.2 billion in “clean tech” money had “created or retained” a pathetic 7,140 jobs, at a cost of about $1 million each. According to the Department of Energy’s inspector general, one reason for this paltry payoff is the wage and regulatory provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Buy American Act.

In sum: The government scooped up hundreds of billions from taxpayers, redistributed it in the name of creating jobs, then attached a series of requirements that made job creation much more expensive and therefore unlikely. The predictably miserable results (go to reason.com and conduct searches on “green jobs” and “multiplier” to see just how predictable they were) should have, but did not, shame a broad swath of the political class into a long-overdue facing of facts: Governments the world over are worse than no good at “creating jobs.”

That much is clear when we compare the job creationists’ rhetoric to their results. Every day on the campaign trail, then-candidate Obama promised to create 5 million “green jobs” during the next 10 years. In January 2009, the White House predicted that the stimulus it was finalizing would create up to 4.1 million jobs. (In a depressing bit of symmetry, the economy ended up losing 4.7 million nonfarm payroll jobs in 2009, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics, representing the greatest rate of decline since 1945.) In February 2010, then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vowed that the soon-to-pass Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would “create 4 million jobs, 400,000 jobs almost immediately.” The last time Washington, D.C., was in a frenzy to “create jobs,” while passing an already-forgotten jobs bill in the summer of 2010, Pelosi promised this latest dollop of $26 billion would create or save 300,000 more.

And these are just the job-focused bills. The general idea of using government spending to stimulate aggregate demand, particularly during economic down times, ruled official Washington for a solid decade, starting with George W. Bush’s inauguration and ending last summer with the Tea Party–influenced debt ceiling deal, which marked the first time in recent memory elected officials stood athwart spending and yelled “stop!” The results of this Keynesian stimulus (and anti-Keynesian profligate spending during good times) should speak for themselves: Fewer able-bodied Americans are employed as a percentage of the potential work force than at any time since 1983.

Such persistence in the face of repeated failure suggests that some powerful myths continue to hold sway among politicians and many of the people they represent. Among the most stubborn of these is the notion that passing a bill to fix a problem is the same as actually fixing the problem. This assumption—which reaches its illogical conclusion during times of national panic, when do-something busybodies like Michael Bloomberg will say that it doesn’t matter what Washington does, it just needs to do something—is oblivious to the law of unintended consequences, to the reality of corporatist lobbying, and to the limitations of government power.

That would be you merc, U_D, celb (merc's other alt)...,

The 2010 Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed in the name of ending “too big to fail,” actually paved the way for the next round of financial bailouts. Obama-Care, supposedly rammed down the throats of health care “special interests,” was actually rammed down the throats of Americans at the behest of those special interests. The Troubled Assets Relief Program, sold by then-President George W. Bush as a way to prevent bank failures, stock market losses, housing devaluations, home foreclosures, credit tightness, business failure, job losses, and recession, failed utterly at preventing anything on that list.

A curious flip side to the myth of government omnipotence is near-complete incuriosity about government side effects. That is, people remain convinced that the state can and should look a problem squarely in the eye and fix it, but they are rarely moved by daily examples of the harm caused by earlier fixes.

...

Overzealous enforcement of job-killing laws is the rule, not the exception, under Obama. His Department of Justice has shown much more enthusiasm than his predecessor’s in conducting workplace raids to enforce immigration, drug, and even milk pasteurization laws. Politicians and the public support such relentless meddling without pausing much to consider the deleterious effects on employment. As I write, the California Senate is on the verge of passing a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights that would, among many other onerous things, require parents to provide nannies with breaks every two hours and fill out ridiculously complicated time cards for the government to peruse.

In a sense, every bill is a jobs bill, except for the ones labeled as such. Every business regulation, every intrusion between employer and employee, dampens the incentives to create more jobs. Sucking up tax money and spitting it out at politically chosen recipients is another net drag on the economy.

Matt Welch
Reason.com

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

A little more Nobel for Merc and Zandi...

President Obama's mostly forgotten jobs package would reportedly create 1.9 million new jobs, a one-percentage-point drop in the unemployment rate, and goose GDP by two percentage points. That was the prediction of Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics. You see, he has a model. He did a simulation, and presto — 1.9 million jobs!

Zandi practices what one of my undergraduate economics professors told our class: "Predict often. That way, when you occasionally get lucky, you can take credit for it."

But the Moody's man is on a cold streak. Zandi has predicted the bottom of the housing market every year since 2006. And QE after QE was supposed to right the good ship USS Economy.

Zandi and Alan Blinder figure the 2009 fiscal stimulus created 2.7 million jobs and added $460 billion to gross domestic product. Unemployment would be 11 percent today if the stimulus hadn't been passed and 16.5 percent if neither the fiscal stimulus nor the banks' rescue had been enacted, according to Zandi and Blinder. "It's pretty hard to deny that it had a measurable impact," Zandi said.

What must be hard for Zandi is deciding what numbers he will pull out of the air to make such preposterous statements.

But math is the modern economist's stock in trade. Anyone wanting to be a PhD economist must endure semester after semester of high-level math. The late Larry Sechrest wrote that at the University of Texas Arlington,

There were four semesters of econometrics and two semesters of mathematical economics. Moreover, virtually every class in the Ph.D. program required that the student write an econometrically based term paper.

An economics PhD student at North Carolina State posted on reddit economics the courses in math he or she took to prepare: three semesters of calculus and differential equations, linear algebra, upper and lower real analysis, topology, optimization theory, probability theory and statistics theory.

A student needs that entire math training to build robust models that will produce quality predictions similar to those produced by those at the top of the profession, like Mr. Zandi.

Math dominates the economics field, as Murray Rothbard explains,

because of the pervading epistemology of positivism. Positivism is essentially an interpretation of the methodology of physics ballooned into a general theory of knowledge for all fields.

Physics is believed to be a real science, Rothbard continues, while

the "social sciences" are backward because they cannot measure, predict exactly, etc. Therefore, they must adopt the method of physics in order to become successful. And one of the keystones of physics, of course, is the use of mathematics.

...

In economics, Rothbard explains, we know that human action is motivated, while the "behavior" of stones is not. "Therefore, we may build economics on the basis of axioms — such as the existence of human action and the logical implications of action — which are originally known as true."

While from these axioms, laws can be deduced as true, there are no "facts" in human action that can be tested. Rothbard explains that mathematics is useful in physics "because of the axioms themselves, and the laws deduced from them, are unknown and in fact meaningless."

While cause is known in economics — human action using means to achieve ends — cause in physics tends to, in Rothbard's words, be "fragile." He explains that positivists replace cause with mutual determination, with mathematical equations suited for depicting "a state of mutual determination of factors, rather than singly determined cause and effect relations."

To judge the value of mathematical economics one must assess the assumptions embedded into the myriad of equations that these mainstream prognosticators manipulate to produce their forecasts.

Invariably these assumptions "are few in number, simple, and wrong," writes Rothbard.

In his 1974 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, entitled "The Pretense of Knowledge," F.A. Hayek said that monetary and fiscal policies like those championed by Mr. Zandi are the product of what he called the "scientistic attitude," but in fact is unscientific in that it "involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed."

Mises wrote in Human Action, "There is no such thing as quantitative economics" and unlike the particles in physics lab, Hayek believed,

such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process … will hardly ever be fully known or measurable.

http://mises.org/daily/5756/The-Folly-of-Forecasting

But, the successful day trader would not be in the least bit interested in the other side of the economic story.

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Predictable C&P Tsunami, hand wringing and foot stomping from all of the 'right' sources.

It's bad.. BAD.. The end is just around the corner.. Be afraid! be very afraid!

But the Market went up over 300 points yesterday based on all of this bad news.

[voice=Annie]
"Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya! Tomorrow! You're always a day away!"
[/voice]

 

[koalabear]

Stocks slip on European rescue fund vote

http://data.moneycentral.msn.com/scripts/chrtsrv.dll?symbol=%24US%3AINDU&width=298&height=160&c1=3&ce=0&cf=0&d2=0&d3=0&d4=1&d5=0&e8=1&legend=0&banner=5&af=2&palette=2​

 

[koalabear]

Indiana consumer counsel objects to speedy rate hike

.
http://www.wthr.com/story/15665594/indiana-consumer-counsel-objects-to-speedy-rate-hike