Central Perk: 23 oct. 2011

duminică, 23 octombrie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

China Still Fails to Participate in Two Week Global Rally

Posted: 23 Oct 2011 07:35 PM PDT

A quick look at the Asia Pacific Markets this evening shows Australia (AORD) up 1.89%, HSI Han Seng (Hong Kong) up 2.44%, the Nikkei (Japan) up 1.4%, Seoul (South Korea) up 2.18%, Taiwan up 2.36% and once again SSEC, the Shanghai composite is not participating.

$SSEC Shanghai Composite Daily

click on chart for sharper image

Europe is in recession, the US is headed there (or already in recession), and China is slowing far more than anyone thinks. This does not bode well for strong commodity demand looking ahead.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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EU is reporting "Progress" but None of it is Meaningful

Posted: 23 Oct 2011 01:04 PM PDT

EU leaders are announcing "progress" but there is little progress to be found. Banks have "volunteered" to 40% haircuts but EU leaders want 50% minimum. Is that progress?

Germany won a major arguments with France, the latter wanting unlimited bailout access (printing) by the ECB. Since no one expected France to win that argument, that is not much progress either, except from the point of view we no longer have to listen to asinine proposals from France.

Otherwise the bickering still continues as to how best to leverage the EFSF when the best thing to do is not use leverage at all. As soon as leverage is used France will likely lose its AAA rating.

Then again France will soon enough lose that AAA rating anyway as it attempts to bailout French banks.

Otherwise, here is the misleading headline from Bloomberg: EU Sees Progress on Banks

European leaders outlined plans to aid banks and ruled out tapping the European Central Bank's balance sheet to boost the rescue fund, inching toward a revamped strategy to contain the Greece-fueled debt crisis.

Europe's 13th crisis-management summit in 21 months also excluded a forced restructuring of Greece's debt, sticking with the policy of enticing bondholders to accept "voluntary" losses to help restore the country's finances.

Bank capital needs -- estimated at 100 billion euros by a person familiar with the deliberations -- will be met first by banks themselves, then by national governments, the European officials agreed.

Only when national efforts fail can governments tap the main rescue fund, the 440 billion-euro European Financial Stability Facility, for cash to channel to banks.

"What I can tell you is that this only will happen under strict conditions," Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said.

Germany pushed through one of its main summit aims, defeating French efforts to bulk up the rescue fund by enabling it to borrow potentially limitless sums from the independent central bank. Policy makers are headed toward using the EFSF to guarantee government bond sales as a way to extend its reach. A second option is to set up an EFSF-insured fund that would seek outside investment in troubled bonds.

The goal is to complete the technical details within 24 hours, a European official said. The next summit will consider the two options as well as ways of getting the International Monetary Fund to boost its rescue role, the official told reporters.

After a year of sparring with the ECB over burden sharing for bondholders, Merkel was on the central bank's side this time, sparing it from a role in financing state deficits.

What wasn't decided is the fate of bond purchases by the Frankfurt-based ECB. The central bank has bought 165 billion euros of bonds, justifying the purchases as a way of smoothing markets and helping transmit its interest-rate decisions through the economy.

Central bankers have expressed reluctance to step up the purchases, which started with Greece, Ireland and Portugal last year and widened to Italy and Spain in August as those markets came under attack.

"One shouldn't demand more from the ECB than it can achieve according to its statutes," Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said today.

Central bankers are at the center of the dispute over writedowns for Greek bondholders. A reminder came on Oct. 21 when the ECB put a dissenting footnote into an assessment of Greece's finances that envisioned writedowns as high as 60 percent.

The IMF wants haircuts of 60%, the bankers agreed to 40% voluntary cuts. Of course the haircuts are not voluntary and never were.

EU officials are still bickering over how to do a 100 billion euro bank recapitalization when four times that amount is needed.

Leveraged EFSF will not work, but EI officials are still arguing over how to do it.

Is this progress?

Odds are overwhelming there is not going to be progress. I'm on vacation, so I'm going golfing.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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SEOptimise

Redefining “SEO Copywriting”

Posted: 21 Oct 2011 03:45 AM PDT

Here at SEOptimise we've been thinking a lot about copywriting recently. More than usual, that is! As the person responsible for overseeing copywriting at SEOptimise, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the frankly quite lamentable state of what has become known as "SEO copywriting".

Any copywriter worth their salt will doubtless share my opinion that so-called "SEO copywriting" gives the world of copywriting a bad name. Despite using the name "copywriting", it couldn't be further from this highly skilled profession. As we all know, this lesser species of copywriting has evolved because once upon a time, it was considered acceptable to throw together a quick article on "the secret to cheap international calls" or whatever, and submit it to a dozen or so article directories for a few quick links. But Google quite rightly recognised that that kind of rubbish was not remotely helpful to its users, and has been banging on about high-quality content with renewed vigour ever since.

In the light of the Panda update we made the conscious decision, as an agency, that the content we produce for our clients during the course of routine link building activities would have to take a big step up from the typical article directory fodder which has unfortunately come to be associated with the SEO world. Moving away from devalued article directories, it becomes necessary to intensify link building efforts in other areas; guest blogging is one area which immediately springs to mind, and one in which we have been met with considerable success for most of, if not all, our clients. But for this strategy to be successful, and to gain good links from high-authority blogs which have a high readership, it's necessary to produce decent pieces of writing that bloggers will actually want to feature.

It's just a shame that a lot of professional copywriting services seem to be stuck in the past when it comes to churning out the kind of copy regularly to be seen gracing the spammier article directories. Haven't they heard of the Panda update? Don't they realise that this sort of crappy copy doesn't cut it anymore? In the past, we've been through a string of copywriting services and the blog posts we've had written have been very much of the article directory ilk – ill-thought-out, boring and, I might add, riddled with typos and fundamental grammatical errors. If you've read my previous posts or if you follow me on Twitter, you may remember that I take a dim view of poor grammar, so you can imagine my reaction to finding it in the work of professional copywriters. I also recently completed a Diploma in Copywriting, and the course material for that wasn't much better. A woeful state of affairs!

At SEOptimise our rationale is that investing more in copywriting ultimately pays dividends. An interesting, insightful piece of writing that takes an original look at a topic will quite simply do far better for your SEO efforts than the sort of lazily spun "how to" articles churned out by "content generation" companies. Not only will you have far greater success in publishing the work on decent sites, but you'll also find that it's far more likely to be shared in the social media networks and you'll reach a much bigger audience. And more exposure means more links! To use a buzzword that I'm not altogether fond of (I don't like buzzwords either), it's pretty much a win-win situation!

So I would argue that it's time for a rethink of how we – the SEO community – view copywriting. Rather than thinking of it as "SEO copywriting" or "content generation", our focus needs almost to shift back to a more traditional, journalistic approach to writing, with the emphasis on tackling new subjects, providing readers with meaningful insights and embracing the limitless possibilities of the English language beyond the narrow confines of article directory spam.

And on that note, if you'd like to write full time for SEOptimise, we're currently expanding our copywriting team: check out our copywriter job vacancy for more details.

Image credit: jjpacres on Flickr.

Seth's Blog : When is it okay to start worrying?

When is it okay to start worrying?

A friend was waiting to hear about the results of a job interview. He hadn't heard in a while and he asked me, "how long before I should start worrying?"

Of course, the answer is, "you should never start worrying."

Worrying is not a useful output. Worrying doesn't change outcomes. Worrying ruins your day. Worrying distracts you from the work at hand. You may have fooled yourself into thinking that it's useful or unavoidable, but it's not. Now you've got one more thing to worry about.