Real GDP per Capita - Axis (Bold) As Allies

“Yeah! Yeah!”

“They're all bold as love”

Most Guys Are Stoopid

Yeah, I wanna be just like this tool.

It's not that I have anything against staying in shape ... apart from the fact that I still enjoy cigarettes and single malt. The problem I have is the overweening self regard that inevitably attaches to practitioners of extra-normal exercise. This is overcompensation writ extroverted and inflicted on every passing stranger, and I can spot these guys half a block away. There's a studied retardation to their stride that suggests a practiced need to avoid chafing.  It can't possibly be due to their large “package” (dream & enhance though they may) because I've seen women who – as far as I know – suffer from this same mental defect exhibiting what can only be described as their own “potato gait.”

Do what ever you want as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else, but looking at this dude makes my eyes ache. He's about to run out of skin.

Moody's Aaa/Baa, Unemployed, GDP, Dow Jones ...

click the image to open full size in a new window

... Utilities Over Trans., S&P, and “Spiky”

Having only a chimerical clue to what –  if anything – these charts might be saying to a seasoned trader or (un)ideologically compromised economist, it's still easy to vouch for their intriguing nature. The “Spiky” orange line recalls a “Treasury spreads' ratio” for the differences between 30-year and 2-year to 10-year and 2-year bills.

Catching Up With Brilliant

It's Charles P. Pierce's World ... We just live in it.

We can't have what our parents and grandparents had — limitless cheap gas, the space to build anything anywhere, the right to dump whatever we want wherever we please. The old ideas of American affluence seem a distant joke.
...
Last December, an uprising in Virginia derailed a local plan to prepare for a possible rise in the sea levels due to global warming. The community responded by losing its mind.
...
Almost every issue of the angry modern American right was engaged. A project to save the region's endangered oyster beds was attacked as adding to the national debt. But Agenda 21 provides a coherent narrative for inchoate anger and fear. People want someone to blame. Agenda 21 gives them a simple answer. It gives them a They, and life is always simpler with a They. It is a unified field of resistance to what seems to be the irresistible.
...

Spiking Ratios

“T Curving
GDP FF DEBT MORTG
30 10 2 1
spiky spreads”

Go play with the unvarnished chart. Cool links under the legend's series column. Cheers!

Sticky When Wet

The Flesh Is Willing, And The Spirit Has A Stiffie

Affiliate Cash Snipers All

I was poking around the blogger dashboard and following some of the links under traffic sources to this site. I can only dimly imagine why Loser's Review has shown up where it has, but some links are plainly and painfully just part of a larger marketing ploy. I listened to the tremendously slick pitch for one of them, initially in the forlorn hope of finding something if not quirky than at least brazenly disturbing.  No such luck.

Some Spreads

T Curving 30 10 7 3 2 1 6mo 3mo 2yr spreads

Curvaceous T's

or “My Lifetime In Federal Paper”

More fun with numbers!

wtf ?

Notification issued 02/13/12 at 6:50 AM. Due to a misplaced tractor-trailer, a short-term full closure is in effect for the southbound FDR Drive at E 96th St, Manhattan. Consider alternate routes.

The sender provided the following contact information.
   Sender's Name: Notify NYC
   Sender's Email: notifynyc@oem.nyc.gov

Exactly how do you misplace a fricken tractor-trailer? Something's not right there.

End Use: Metals Fuels Food VIX

ƒ∝δατα

“The Better Legend” is here ↓

“Operation Indigenous Liberation”

Or Not

Just like Tunisia and Egypt - and unlike Libya and Syria - the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain was indigenous, legitimate, non-violent and uncontaminated by Western or Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) infiltration.

The response was a major crackdown plus a Saudi Arabian invasion over the causeway to Manama. That was the tacit result of a deal struck between the House of Saud and Washington; we give you an Arab resolution allowing you to go to the UN and then launch the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's humanitarian bombing on Libya, you leave us alone to smash this Arab Spring nonsense (see Exposed: the US-Saudi Libya deal Asia Times Online, April 2, 2011.)

Why Bahrain is not Syria

Oil FF HOUST Personal-ie Unemployed ...

... GDP Fed DEBT CPI CMDEBT & A Little Bit Of Gold

Three time frames for one collection of data.

You can work with the charts at the FrED with these links: 1946 1985 2004

	Series		Oil Gold FF HS U/E Personal-ie gdp Fdebt cpi cmdebt	(Scale) Size ‡		Period	ƒ(x)
1	OILPRICE		Spot Oil Price: West Texas Intermediate	2	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
2	GVZCLS		CBOE Gold ETF Volatility Index	2	Solid	Bi-W (m)	% Chg fYA
3	FF		Effective Federal Funds Rate	1	Solid	W (w)	%
4	HOUST		New Privately Owned Housing Units Started	1	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
5	UNEMPLOY		Unemployed	1	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
6	DPIC96		Real Disposable Personal Income	2	Solid	Q	% Chg fYA
7	PCEC96		Real Personal Consumption Expenditures	2	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
8	GFDEBTN		Federal Government Debt: Total Public Debt	1	Dotted	Q(eop)	% Chg fYA
9	CPIAUCSL		Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items	2	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
10	CMDEBT		Household Credit Market Debt Outstanding	1	Dashed	Q(eop)	% Chg fYA
11	GDP		Gross Domestic Product, 1 Decimal	2	Solid	Q	% Chg fYA

^‡ Line sizes listed for 1946 chart. Line and marker weights increase through charts for 1985 and 2004.

The Mainstream Media Isn't Just Irrelevant

FAIL

It's Criminally Negligent

The last thing in the world this guy is going to tell you is anything about the world approaching important, germane or passably useful. Watching major news purveyors in this country, even to gauge how bad they've become, will eventually lead to thoughts of Lewis Black, Aerosmith performing at a Superbowl half-time ... and I'll have to go look for a spoon.*

RT may not be as seamlessly produced as the major media properties the herd pays attention to, but that actually works in their favor for me. The slicker the package the more suspect is the contents. I'm sure Lauren Lyster and Alyona Minkovski will cover wider angles in greater depth over what's been happening in Greece during the last 48 hours than all of this weeks “news” programming put together.

So go watch them tonight. (TYVM.)

*Shoving it where one shouldn't and thus distract myself from the pain.

Oh Yeah. The “Right” People Are In Control

BRICs flying in the PIIGS

Greece is burning in every sense of the word. It is both politically and economically bankrupt yet Europe attempts to extract blood from a dried up turnip.

Athens Burning:
Tens of Banks in Flames
After Athens Passes
Austerity Bill

Monetary Adventures

“You LOT! – (£ ¥ € $ ?) – Don't stop. Give it all you got.”

Makes The World Go Round

Only a moderate amount of transformation here. A simple “register” shift to four of the six currency pairs in this chart helps extricate them from the other busy squiggles.  Four of the data sets are making repeat appearances and will likely serve as a thematic backdrop for future work in varying degrees. They are: Spot Oil Price, Effective (ha! – that's rich) Federal Funds Rate, Gross Domestic Product and the Unemployment rate ... as measured by the Fed anyway.

There's a lot of noise in the Fed's data, and not just from the measurements. The Bureau Of Labor Statistics and The Federal Reserve have been working together for more than twenty years to over-analyze and under-report the inflation that anyone with a checkbook and a pulse confronts when dropping gelt. Seriously, they don't “shop” like the rest of us.

Advertising Makes Me Nauseous

& "want to fwow up... projectilishly" *

Consumer Degradation Trends

Even though I turned in by cable box nine months ago, I am still accosted by the professional descendants of Edward Bernays† and their illicit, ever less covert brainwashing.

This occurs whenever I happen into a bar for a quick Stout or watch what little television I allow through my broadband connection.

I find my self overwhelmed by how abjectly dreadful the purported entertainment and its attendant corporate wrappings are.

Yves Smith at naked capitalism ‡  had a post earlier this week shredding a recent Wired article that attempted to soften the reality – or soft peddle excuses regarding the self-destructing employees at Foxconn.

Data, Thou Art

the FrED chart

Bleedin' Nos.

These images, created at The St. Louis Federal Reserve's FRED, exist somewhere between data and art.



I'll be able to massage these lines into more numerically informative relationships once I start playing with the transformation capability that's been intelligently provided, but for now simple percentage differences from a year ago (fYA) will do.

	Series		GDP OIL Energ/Food/CPI Unemployed Cap.Util. Housing Starts	(Scale) Size		Period	ƒ(x)
1	GDP		Gross Domestic Product, 1 Decimal	2	Solid	Q	% Chg fYA
2	HOUST		Housing Starts: Total: New Privately Owned Housing Units Started	1	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
3	FF		Effective Federal Funds Rate	2	Solid	W (w)	%
4	MCUMFN		Cap Utilization: Manufacturing (NAICS)	2	Dashed	M	% of Cap
5	CPIUFDSL		Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Food	2	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
6	CPIAUCSL		Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items	2	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
7	UNEMPLOY		Unemployed	1	Solid	M	% Chg fYA
8	OILPRICE		Spot Oil Price: West Texas Intermediate	1	Solid	M	$/brl
9	CPIENGSL		Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Energy	2	Solid	M	% Chg fYA

Friday Noir

Wikipedia & IMDB

So I Worked On It...

..a little bit

02 Monetary Consumption LR @ St. Louis Fed

I've added defense spending to the original chart image from yesterday's post. Click the image to open a new window with a full sized view. The title in the caption is linked to this graph's page at Fred where you can play around with the data and formatting.

The "better legend" below has a variety of informational links under Series, and direct links to a chart of each individual series at The St. Louis Federal Reserve website under the charts name.

Having spent most of the day on putting all this together, it's time to watch "The Big Clock" for Friday Noir.

I'd Rather Be Working With These

Instead of jerking around with that POS Internet Explorer

FredGraph @ St. Louis Federal Reserve

For all you IE users out there:


get. a. fricken. clue.


I've just spent the last 36+ hours beating my now concave forebrain into the interminable intricacies and flighty nuances of conditional CSS statements in a vain attempt to make these pages not look like the tawdry bollocks that Internet Explorer turns them into.

These guys are way more interesting. N'est-ce pas? (Click each image for full size.)
It's an awful lot of data crammed into a small window, and all three charts run the same series of numbers over increasing time frames, so the information in the larger one above is also found at the right end of these two here. I'll have more to say about them ... eventually.

These images graphically represent how my brain feels trying to get blogger's widget festooned template to "scan" properly in Internet Explorer. Even though the majority of users over this past month nave been hip enough to eschew Microsoft's chronically lame and technologically invidious browser, the last few weeks have seen a rather disturbing increase in IE viewership. Seriously, what the fuck good are standards if everybody has their own. Anyone? Bueller...?