joi, 12 iulie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Demographic Time Bomb in Pictures and Dollar Amounts; Ratio of Social Security Beneficiaries to Private Employment Now Exceeds 50%
Car Maker Peugeot to Cut 8,000 Jobs, Close Plant; Shape of Things to Come
Mish on Capital Account: "Time for Krugman to Leave Ivory Tower for Real World"

Demographic Time Bomb in Pictures and Dollar Amounts; Ratio of Social Security Beneficiaries to Private Employment Now Exceeds 50%

Posted: 12 Jul 2012 01:04 PM PDT

Here is a chart from reader Tim Wallace showing social security and disability stats for June of 2012 compared to June in prior years.

click on chart for sharper image

Chart shows those receiving benefits. Those not in the labor force claiming a disability is much higher.

Not in Labor Force - With a Disability, 16 Years and Over

In terms of effect on unemployment stats, the above chart applies.

Beneficiary Data

Beneficiary Data in first chart is from Social Security Online. Here are additional charts from the site.

Number of Beneficiaries by Type

Number of Beneficiaries as of December 2011

A few more charts will put this in perspective.

Civilian Labor Force

Private Employment

Quick Stats

As of 2012-06 the civilian labor force was 155,163,000
As of 2012-06 there were 111,145,000 in the private workforce
As of 2012-06 there were 56,174,538 collecting some form of SS or disability benefit
Ratio of SS beneficiaries to private employment just passed the 50% mark (50.54%)

Here is one final chart to ponder.

Social Security Benefits in Dollars

As of May 2012, the outlays are $756.9 billion annualized. Fewer worker relatively speaking, support more and more recipients with exponentially growing payments. This is supposed to work?

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Car Maker Peugeot to Cut 8,000 Jobs, Close Plant; Shape of Things to Come

Posted: 12 Jul 2012 09:37 AM PDT

Citing a plunge in auto sales, Peugeot to Cut 8,000 Jobs, Close Plant

French carmaker Peugeot Citroen has set out plans to cut 8,000 jobs and close an assembly plant outside Paris as losses mount.

Last week, Peugeot said its first-half sales had fallen 13% amid a "profound crisis" in its eurozone markets. Peugeot's chairman, Phillipe Varin, said the situation was grave.

"I am fully aware of the seriousness of today's announcement, as well as of the shock and emotions they will arouse in the company," he said in a statement.

Unions described the announcement as a "declaration of war" and an "earthquake", the AFP press agency reported.

The carmaker said it expected to report a loss for the first half of this year and to return to break-even by the end of 2014.

Peugeot also this year entered into an alliance with GM of the US, under which GM takes a 7% stake in Peugeot, making GM the second-biggest shareholder in the French firm after the Peugeot family.

The company said the effects of that deal would not be felt until after 2014.

Closures and Firings

The Aulnay plant near Paris, which employs 3,000 workers, would stop production in 2014.
Another plant, at Rennes in western France, is set to shed 1,400 posts from the 5,600 it employs there.
Another 3,600 jobs would be lost across all facilities in France.

Press Release

Here is the official press release: Peugeot Citroën Presents a Project to Reorganise

Shape of Things to Come

This is a start of what I expect to happen. For further discussion, please see Global Collapse In Auto Sales Coming Up.

More importantly this may be the trigger for French president Francois Hollande to follow through with his Economically Insane Proposal: "Make Layoffs So Expensive For Companies That It's Not Worth It"

Alternatively, it may be an act by Peugeot to fire workers while they still can. This is how I described the proposal in the preceding link:

Four Things, All of Them Bad

Mass layoffs will occur before the law passes.
Companies will move any jobs they can overseas.
Ongoing, if it's difficult to fire people, companies will not hire them in the first place.
Corporate profits will collapse along with the stock market should the need to fire people arise.

The proposal to force companies to sell plants rather than fire workers as outlined by Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg and Labour Minister Michel Sapin is nothing short of economic insanity.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Mish on Capital Account: "Time for Krugman to Leave Ivory Tower for Real World"

Posted: 12 Jul 2012 12:54 AM PDT

I was on Capital Account once again on Wednesday with Lauren Lyster. The topics of discussion this time were the US and global recessions, auto sales, and Paul Krugman.

Here is a video clip:

Link if video does not play: Paul "King" Krugman knocked off his Ivory Tower as Fools Sack the Hill!

I regards to Krugman, I concluded with ...

"His Keynesian thesis simply does not add up. We saw endless Keynesian and monetarist stimulus in Japan. It got them nothing. He learned nothing from Japan. He learned nothing from the great depression. Yet, because he has a Nobel prize, he can write a book and tell everyone what they should be doing. Man, this guy needs to get out of his ivory tower, Lauren, and get into the real world."

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Seth's Blog : Two deadlines (and a read)

Two deadlines (and a read)

The application deadline for my free college student summer seminar is Friday morning. Please remind any college students you know that they're almost out of time...

The Kickstarter project I launched last month is almost over. The thing to get that's not yet sold out is the behemoth oversized best-of book, which is turning out to be really special, and this is going to be your best chance to get a copy.

I'm really enjoying Kurt Andersen's new book. It's always a treat when he publishes something.

• Email to a friend •

Were You Hit by Negative SEO?

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 08:00 PM PDT

Posted by Dr. Pete

Since Google’s “Penguin” update, hysteria over negative SEO has exploded, with people blaming it for every problem from falling rankings to their hands turning orange (Pro Tip: Check to see if you just ate a bag of Cheetos). I feel roughly the same way about post-Penguin negative SEO as I do about aliens. I’ve created the following graphic to illustrate my beliefs:

My take on aliens

Ok, maybe that sounded a little harsh, but here’s the point – while I believe negative SEO is possible – and I’ve seen a handful of cases where I’m pretty sure it was effective – it’s usually not the root cause of a ranking drop. In other words: most people who think they’ve been hit by negative SEO haven’t been. This post is an attempt to ease your fears and help you find out if you’re one of the 0.1% who really saw that UFO.

What Is Negative SEO?

Broadly defined, “negative SEO” can mean anything malicious someone does to harm your site’s rankings. Rand’s recent video on negative SEO covers many examples and is a great recap. Within the context of the Penguin update, though, negative SEO really only means one thing – that someone has launched an organized effort to make your link profile look bad. This usually means that they’ve hit you with a ton of low-quality or clearly black-hat links across a large number of domains.

I don’t want to downplay attacks on your site. If you’ve had a security breach, such as a DDoS that is taking down your site or an SQL-injection attack that has modified your content or added outbound links, take it seriously and handle it quickly. With link-based “attacks,” though, the situation can get a lot trickier, and the cures can sometimes be worse than the disease. If you just start hacking at links or throw all of your time and money into fighting a perceived threat that’s not the root cause of your problem, you could set back your SEO efforts months.

What Are The Signs?

Let’s say you wake up one morning to find that your cat’s gone missing and your rankings have dropped. Does that mean that your competitors are up to no good? It’s possible, but I think it’s critical in 2012 SEO to step back and assess the problem. Solving the wrong problem can be catastrophic – at best, it’s just a waste of time and energy.

Even if your competitors are trying to cause trouble, that doesn’t mean that what they’ve done has caused your problems. I’ve seen people do ridiculously ineffective “negative SEO” – one client’s competitor hired a low-rent firm to create a copy of the client’s site. That copy sat on a staging server in India with no links and all but the home-page blocked in Robots.txt. Was it malicious? Sure, but malicious idiots are still idiots. It wasn’t worth an international incident to take that one rogue site down. Real negative SEO takes a concerted effort and a fair amount of know-how.

When someone is really attacking your link profile, and if that attack is going to be effective, you’ll typically see unexplained, low-quality links from a variety of root domains. Just slapping your link in the footer of one bad site isn’t going to bring you down – low-quality links happen in the wild all the time. You need to see a large-scale pattern. Typically, you’ll also see a sudden spike in these links. An aggressive attempt at negative SEO isn’t going to happen over years – it’s going to be done in weeks. When you see massive, unexplained growth in low-quality links, then you may have a problem.

I’m not going to dive deep into the tools, but there are multiple good ones for getting different views of your link profile (and using more than one is generally a good idea):

The new Bing Link Explorer replaces Yahoo! Link Explorer and seems promising, but you’ll need to sign up for their webmaster tools. Both our paid campaign management tools here on SEOmoz and Majestic's tools will track historical data about your links. Keep in mind, though, that link counts can spike for a lot of reasons. You’re not just looking for a jump in the numbers – you’re looking for a clear pattern of malicious links.

Even if you do see a spike in malicious links, the impact of an attack is often temporary. Many times, people use methods that get quickly removed or discounted (such as injecting links on other sites). When the links go away, the problem often goes away. It’s not of much comfort in the short-term, I realize, but it’s easy to be so aggressive that Google spots the attack and devalues the links. Getting the balance just right isn’t easy – many attempts at negative SEO fail.

Are Aliens Among Us?

About 70-80% of the time someone comes to me having just spotted a bunch of unexplained low-quality links to their site, a little digging turns up that it was the result of bad SEO by either their own team or someone they hired. If it’s your own team, that’s good news (even if it doesn’t feel that way) – you might be able to undo those links more easily or even have a record of them. If you hire an outside link-building firm, make sure you get a record of what they’ve done. Once you realize they’ve trashed your link profile, it may be too late. Monitor new link builders closely and insist that they track links. If they refuse, fire them. It’s that simple.

Can You Prevent It?

If someone really is out to get you and wants to spend the time and money, there’s no doubt they can do a lot of damage. In most cases, though, it’s just not cost effective, and building up a wall of defenses and monitoring your links every hour isn’t cost effective for you, either. So, what can you do to prevent the most common forms of attack?

Probably your best defense is to have a clean, authoritative link profile. Google is looking at your entire pattern and history of links, and if your site is strong with generally high-quality links, it’s a lot harder to do you damage with a short-term attack. The most vulnerable sites are new sites or sites that already have engaged in too much low-quality link-building. If 80% of your links are junk, it’s not going to take that much for a competitor to push you over the edge.

At the risk of oversimplifying: do good SEO. I’m not trying to downplay the possibility of negative SEO – it does exist and it can do real damage. I’m trying to drive home the point that it’s still very rare, and most people are spending far too much time and money on tinfoil hats. In 99% of cases, the SEO problems of websites in 2012, even after Penguin, are self-inflicted. Start with what you control, and build a better mousetrap – it’s still your best protection from anything the competition can throw at you.

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Join a Live Conversation with the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, July 12, 2012

Join a Live Conversation with the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Later today, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan will sit down for a conversation with homeowners from across the country, and we wanted to make sure you got a reminder to tune in.