Recent comments

  • pretty dumb on my part for not noticing the revisions tab on the release...(i was using google)

    likewise, zero hedge. too often they think unusual data is some kind of conspiracy.

    Reply to: Consumer Credit Rises 5.4% on Student Loans Again for August 2013   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • I completely forgot about it over the infamous "auto loans" headline buzz. they announced the revision in April, see here. I missed this, my bad, but they added Perkins student loans which seemingly accounted for most of the revision.

    I wouldn't call this made up since it's seemingly tabulating student loans more completely.

    Reply to: Consumer Credit Rises 5.4% on Student Loans Again for August 2013   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • http://alfred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=140841&category_id=0

    zero hedge had post on it, but all they said was it's "merely the latest entrant in a long series of absolutely made up garbage" that Ben Bernanke slipped in to the data...

    i've been looking around & couldnt find anything on it..

    Reply to: Consumer Credit Rises 5.4% on Student Loans Again for August 2013   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • The #1 reason the United States is in the mess it is today is the tax code, biased towards the rich and is also the #1 cause of income inequality.

    Baby boomers are not to blame except for electing bad officials plus not screaming foul on the corporatization of government.

    the reality is single payer will be CHEAPER. By curtailing for profit health, the U.S. can get the costs down to what other nations pay.

    Social security ADDS to the economy and people do not realize without Medicare and social security, never mind the human suffering, the toil on the economy due to homeless old people will be enormous, way beyond current spending.

    It's not the young vs. the old. It is the rich vs. the rest of America and corporate lobbyists controlling government.

    Reply to: Real Care, Obamacare or No Care   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • Obamacare < Single Payer < Current System. Unfortunately, while the current system is horribly broken, having the deeply indebted government take on a program that's costs are growing exponentially faster than its revenues does nothing for our worsening financial dilemma. The greatest issue of our time is how we (children of the baby boomers) are going to be able to pay for our parents' irresponsible behavior and for the programs they've trusted to support them during retirement. Unfortunately, baby boomers are still in power and... still spending money they don't have!

    Reply to: Real Care, Obamacare or No Care   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • No surprise China is warning the U.S. for they hold the largest percentage of U.S. Treasuries and they must do that for their currency manipulation agenda.

    That said, having China on your ass is not a good thing, simply because they hold so much of U.S. debt.

    Reply to: Here Comes the Debt Ceiling   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • Switch on Bloomberg news and they claimed consumer credit was $3 billion in total. I'm not sure if they pay their reporters enough or they put people with backgrounds in economics on these stories or what goes on, but they all just "say something" and that "something" becomes their "fact" and this happens over and over again. Of any of the MSM who gets it right, probably MarketWatch and then often on the WSJ blog, but I cannot recall which blog at the moment.

    There is only one caveat with the claim on student loans here and that's it is not seasonally adjusted, but still we see this figure increase every month so when a statistic consistently increases month to month and it is not seasonally adjusted, it implies new student loans are issued year round, not that cyclical.

    It does appear auto loans have increased though, not to imply they are dropping.

    Hey, that's why we make the big bucks (sic), but seriously, Bloomberg should hire us to cover economic statistics, they are really weak in this area of financial reporting (great investigative!)

    Reply to: Consumer Credit Rises 5.4% on Student Loans Again for August 2013   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • here's their headline: Consumer Credit in U.S. Rises $13.6 Billion on Car Purchases

    and they also say: The boost to household wealth from improved home values and stock-market gains has put consumers in a position to take advantage of cheaper borrowing costs for major purchases such as automobiles.

    i hadn't looked at the G-19 till just now...you're right, of course: of the unadjusted $31.7 billion increase in non-revolving credit, 69%, or $21.9 billion of it, was student loans from federal agencies

    Reply to: Consumer Credit Rises 5.4% on Student Loans Again for August 2013   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • Sorry about that, I had the wrong figure in the title, it is now corrected. Amazing isn't it, how so much coverage in the financial press doesn't get the ISM inflection point?

    A change in percentage points in their index is not the same as say a percentage change in most economic reports. 54.4% is still expanding and if one looks at the history, this is better than June.

    Reply to: ISM Services Index Slows - NMI 54.4% for September 2013   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • Why are there so many people on food stamps? Because "they can" get it. I know people working full-time on food stamps. Why? Have you been to the supermarket lately? It's too damn expensive. 99 cent stores where I live are jam packed everyday, especially the ones with food sections and they get picked clean fast. This all started to get out of whack when my job was shipped overseas in 1999. Wait a minute, that was so long ago. NO. If you remember a certain fellow by the name of Ross Perot, who ran for President against Bill Clinton in the early 90's, he warned every politician that if the NAFTA laws were approved it wouldn't end there. Sure as hell didn't. Over an 8 year span they sucked our jobs away to India and I had to make a fast career change to eat in the meantime. Perot was right and no one in the government listened just as they are not listening today. This is a power set-up for themselves and they are bad at managing anything when business sense is required. Both parties are responsible, both are in cahoots and don't think any one of them stands up for you. They enrich their families too just to make sure their financial futures will remain secure. As for the rest of us? We are on our own. Just wait for the next round of price increases all across the board. I vote Independent and will until the rest of you get it. A new statesman representative is needed in this country. One who realizes that there is a Constitution and that the well being of Americans is to be protected and nurtured.

    Reply to: What Is It About the Hungry and Poor House Republicans Just Can't Stand?   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • It seems the RW / TP / Ev's are the real terrorists. Reps are now the bully in the schoolyard. If you give up the lunch money one day, the bully will be back everyday. One day you will say no, and the bully will break your nose. At that point, if the bully is a Rep in Congress, he will blame you.

    Reply to: Here Comes the Debt Ceiling   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • much of the media coverage on this report focused on the lower headline NMI, using expressions like "significantly slower", "downshifts" and "tumbles" to describe the month over month change; they should understand that a reading near 55 still means that a clear majority of purchasing managers reported that conditions in their industry were better than they were last month, when the index was at an all time high....

    which highlights my first caveat when considering this report; since ISM has only been producing this index since 2008, it really doesnt have a long enough track record to determine if it's a reliable indicator of service sector business cycles;

    my other complaint applies to the manufacturing index as well; as a simple diffusion index where purchasing managers responses in creating the indices are limited to answering whether conditions are "better", "worse", or "the same" as the previous month, no weighting is given for the different sizes of businesses polled, or whether conditions are a whole lot better, just marginally so, or a whole lot worse...

    Reply to: ISM Services Index Slows - NMI 54.4% for September 2013   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • Also window, 2010 is still a bad year for jobs and one can play a lot of games based on the time window.

    People stuck in part-time jobs for economic reasons has clearly ballooned and is really staying up there in levels, which both say at least.

    Reply to: Gallup Polling Finds No Growth in Percentage of Us Employed Full Time Since 2010   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • my thought was that there must be a significant difference in the way the census interviews those chosen for the CPS and the questions asked by Gallup when theyre polling for the same data...it would be interesting to see what the differences are, and that if someone who is not considered employed by Gallup would in some way be considered employed in the household survey..another question is how are the sample popuations for each survey chosen...is there a bias in the CPS methods that selects more employed, or is the bias with Gallup's methods?

    Reply to: Gallup Polling Finds No Growth in Percentage of Us Employed Full Time Since 2010   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • I think the answer must be with labor flows and duration of employment. On net, we're seeing 2 million jobs added per year, but that's barely enough to keep up with population growth. If duration of a job is short and these days employers fire people willy nilly, I think I read the tenure in Silicon valley was less than 8 months! That's a net job problem.

    I did a calculation direct from the data and new jobs were mainly full-time, not part-time, see here, although part-time has dramatically increased as noted.

    JOLTS shows about 2 million and the latest Census for 2012 saw no job growth at all in full time for women for the year.

    Reply to: Gallup Polling Finds No Growth in Percentage of Us Employed Full Time Since 2010   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • There has been no change, an impasse. The Atlantic posted a list of 32 House Republicans causing the shut down and we must say, haven't seen a group looking dumber than a box of rocks like this in a long time.

    Scary these people are pulling 6 figures, set for life when in the private sector it's questionable they could manage a fast food restaurant.

    Reply to: Shut Down!   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • Online Economists who also cover economic indicators are getting a sense of humor on how they are being denied macro-economic data from the shutdown.

    Reply to: ADP Employment Report Shows 166,000 Private Sector Job Gains for September 2013   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • Arnold: we elect people like this because we ARE people like this: smug, arrogant pieces of shit. We are afraid of being poor, so we evict the poor (not poverty). We are afraid of crime so we blame the victims (not the perpetrators). We don't like the message so we shoot the messengers. And all with superimposed cloudy pseudo-religious rhetoric about fairness and property rights and homeland security (what the heck does that mean anyway?). Are there no workhouses? Let them eat cake, etc.. We elect demagogues who parrot back exactly what we want to hear. The people are a ass, just like the law and its lawyers.

    Reply to: What Is It About the Hungry and Poor House Republicans Just Can't Stand?   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • While I don't cover much private data, I have in the past covered almost all of these releases and we have correlations to government stats we can use. On Manufacturing ISM, already there are correlation graphs displayed.

    Reply to: Shut Down!   11 years 2 months ago
    EPer:
  • if this continues, we'll miss the BLS jobs report and factory orders; but ADP has their jobs report,, ISM and Markit are releasing PMIs, Reis is releasing 3 quarterly reports on commercial real estate sectors, & the automakers are releasing car sales...

    Reply to: Shut Down!   11 years 2 months ago
    EPer:

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