Central Perk: 21 sept. 2012

vineri, 21 septembrie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Christine Lagarde, IMF Chief, Warns US About Short, Medium, and Long-Term Problems; Like All Keynesian Clowns, Lagarde Does Not Want to Deal With the Present
Davidowitz on QE and the Economy: "Bernanke is Certifiably Nuts"
Spain's Fiscal Deficit 8.56% of GDP in First Half; Impossible Second Half Targets

Christine Lagarde, IMF Chief, Warns US About Short, Medium, and Long-Term Problems; Like All Keynesian Clowns, Lagarde Does Not Want to Deal With the Present

Posted: 21 Sep 2012 09:16 PM PDT

For a brief moment, I almost thought Christine Lagarde, head of IMF, gained control of her senses.

The Telegraph headline IMF chief Christine Lagarde says US needs to rein in its banks is the illusion that briefly (very briefly) led me astray.

Not to fear, in the end, Lagarde proved in spades that she is the same Keynesian clown as before. Let's take a look where she makes sense, and doesn't.

The opening paragraph (below) about "challenges everywhere" makes sense, although there is little substance.

Speaking ahead of key meetings for the IMF and the World Bank early next month, Ms Lagarde called on political leaders to "get beyond the crisis in the eurozone" as "we have challenges everywhere".

I am in 100% agreement with the following paragraph.

"The United States has short-term and medium-term challenges as well, none of which are really properly addressed at the moment," she said.

Then Lagarde immediately proved she is still a Keynesian clown.

"In the short term, there is the issue of the fiscal cliff, which is a combination of fiscal cuts that will stop early in 2013 and public spending that will be withdrawn in 2013, if nothing happens. That will be automatic, and it will create a major contraction of the deficit, yes, but also of growth, which would be a threat to the global economy. That's for the short term."

The only reasonable interpretation of that paragraph is that Lagarde does not want the US to address its fiscal problems "now".

Keynesian clowns are very good about pointing out the need to do something in the future. They never want to address the present.

The fact of the matter is US government spending is totally and completely out of control. Something needs to be done now.

Largarde then continues with complete hogwash, hoping to sound like some sort of fiscal conservative. "In the longer term, there has to be again anchoring of expectations about the fiscal policy of the United States in order to address the issue of the deficit and the debt as well."

Longer Term Never Arrives

Looking for expectations to anchor? Then anchor this: the "longer term" never comes to Keynesian clowns. They are perpetually worried about stopping growth (not that government spending ever creates growth in the first place). It doesn't.

All government stimulus can ever do is create artificial booms while increasing debt. Japan is proof enough. And the irony is Lagarde is now warning Japan to do something.

The Telegraph article concludes "In early October, thousands of policymakers and business leaders will meet in Tokyo to discuss the outlook for the world economy, and how to address the eurozone crisis."

If global policymakers really want to do something about the global economy, I suggest they all stay home and read my blog, that of Acting Man, and that of Michael Pettis at China Financial Market.

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

Davidowitz on QE and the Economy: "Bernanke is Certifiably Nuts"

Posted: 21 Sep 2012 12:04 PM PDT

Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates Inc., talks about the performance of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and the impact of Fed policy on consumer confidence. Davidowitz speaks with Tom Keene, Sara Eisen and Scarlet Fu on Bloomberg Television's "Surveillance."

Tom Keene: How will the American consumer react to the unlimited punch bowl?

Howard Davidowitz: Zero. This is not going to effect the American consumer. Bernanke has consistently been wrong. All the sugar bowls have consistently been wrong. GDP is going nowhere. Consumer wealth, median family income is down 10% over four years. Family wealth is down 40%. Unemployment is totally in the crapper. We've spent 5.4 trillion, we have nothing for it. .... The only way you fix anything is pain ... I've always thought Bernanke is certifiably nuts. His record speaks for itself.

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

Spain's Fiscal Deficit 8.56% of GDP in First Half; Impossible Second Half Targets

Posted: 21 Sep 2012 10:18 AM PDT

Spain's original deficit target for 2012 was 4.4%, then revised to 5% then 5.3%. The last revision brought the target all the way up to 6.3%. So how is Spain doing?

Via Google Translate Libre Mercado says Spain recorded a fiscal deficit of 8.56% of GDP in the first half

The government set the offset recorded 45.233 million euros to June, equivalent to 8.56% of GDP semester.

Now Available budget execution data of all public sector until the second quarter of the year, and the first assessment of the Government of Mariano Rajoy on the deficit is not exactly favorable. According to data from the State Comptroller (IGAE), Public Administration (AAPP) reported a gap between revenues and expenditures (deficit) 45,233,000 euros through June in terms of the excessive deficit procedure (EDP, the methodology valid for Eurostat).

This corresponds to 8.56% of GDP until the second quarter cumulative -528 161 000 euros, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE) -. Thus, Spain moves away from deficit target committed to Brussels for the full year, set at 6.3% of GDP.

Central Government, Regional Governments, Local Government and Social Security admitted 173,320 million during this period, but spent 218,553,000. That is, the overall public sector continued spending 26% more than they entered through fiscal. In fact, the cumulative deficit through June is just half the total phase shift recorded last year (91,344,000) so that, if not corrected this trend, Spain in 2012 recorded a deficit similar to 2011.

Impossible Second Half Targets

Rajoy is sticking to the 6.3% deficit target for the year.

Let's see how ridiculous that idea is with a calculation to figure out what the second half deficit must be to hit that target.

(8.56 + X) / 2 = 6.3
8.56 + X = 12.6
X = 12.6 - 8.56
X = 4.04

Assuming GDP stays constant (it won't, Spain's GDP will be worse in the second half, probably much worse), Spain would need a second half deficit of about 4% to reach its target.

No one can possibly think 4% is a credible second half target. Sure, numerous tax hikes will kick in (supposedly raising revenue). However, tax hikes will also suppress growth which in turn will suppress revenue.

Thus, VAT hikes will not bring in what the government anticipates. How can it with unemployment soaring?

Note that Spain's 2013 target was 3% (revised up to 4.5%). Spain will not hit that target either, and Brussels will be calling for still more tax hikes next year.

How long will Spanish citizens put up with this?

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

Damn Cool Pics

How to Observe the Moon [Infographic]
Billy the Human Billboard
The Cost of a Road Trip to the Top 10 U.S. Vacation Cities [Infographic]

How to Observe the Moon [Infographic]

Posted: 21 Sep 2012 11:09 AM PDT

The Earth's satellite is a spectacular sight even with the naked eye. With a small telescope or pair of binoculars, the view is even more amazing. Dark, flat plains called maria, deep craters and bright rays of ejected material pepper the rugged surface. Check out this infographic all about how to observe the moon from Space.com, and make the most of the night.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Source SPACE.com

Billy the Human Billboard

Posted: 20 Sep 2012 09:19 PM PDT

Billy Gibby, a boxer form Anchorage, Alaska, found the perfect solution to making some fast cash — he uses his body as a billboard. Billy has seen several prize fights where companies paid boxers for making temporary tattoos that advertised their brands. The man decided to go a bit farther and offered his body as an advertising area for permanent tattoo ads. Presently 16 websites have paid to place their advertisements on Billy's body, and "The Human Billboard" is ready to make at least 30 more tattoos. The prices of ads vary depending on their size and location and reach $20,000 for a forehead tattoo.

The Cost of a Road Trip to the Top 10 U.S. Vacation Cities [Infographic]

Posted: 20 Sep 2012 08:03 PM PDT

Wondering if you could afford to pack up and leave an awesome road trip to the best vacation cities in the US? This infographic breaks down the cost of a 25-day road trip including the price of gas, food and lodging. We've also included some tips for saving money on your trip. The top 10 U.S. vacation cities are based on 2012 a poll from U.S. News Travel and excludes cities not in the continental United States. Fun fact: 3 of the top 10 US vacations spots are in California: San Diego, Yosemite and San Francisco!

Click on Image to Enlarge.
Via: expresslane

Kind of amazing.

Friday, September 21, 2012

Kind of amazing.

You have to see this video.

Every White House has the privilege of hosting some world class athletes. Every President gets an opportunity to welcome Super Bowl champions, winners of the NBA Finals, and other professional and collegiate athletes at the top of their games.

But every once in a while, the White House hosts a group of champions who represent us all -- Team USA.

Last week, more than 400 Olympians and Paralympians gathered at the White House for an event to celebrate their success in this year's London Games.

We put together a video that takes you behind the scenes and lets you hear from the athletes as they describe their visit. Check it out here:

We also sat down with one extraordinary athlete -- Lieutenant Brad Snyder -- as he met with First Lady Michelle Obama.

Lieutenant Snyder is a veteran of the U.S. Navy. Exactly one year after he was blinded by an improvised explosive device while on duty in Afghanistan, he won gold in the 400-meter freestyle in the London Paralympics, finishing nearly six seconds ahead of the next closest competitor.

That video is pretty special, too.

Check them both out here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/team-usa

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Predicting Keyword Volume Before Data is in Adwords

Posted: 20 Sep 2012 07:59 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

Howdy Mozzers!

Being able to get in front of trending keywords can be a valuable but difficult task. Not only does the world of keywords move quickly, the Search Engines are doing their part to change things up so we don't get too comfortable.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we'll be talking about predicting keyword volume - before the data is even in AdWords! We'll show you how to use the resources at your disposal to perform predictive keyword research. This is an advanced technique, so you'll want to make sure you have the basics down.

As always, leave any thoughts, questions, declarations of love, or candy in the comments below!

Video Transcription

"Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to talk a little bit about keyword research, but predictive keyword research, keyword research that you can do before data even appears inside AdWords or Bing, wherever you are pulling your keyword data from.

It's a big challenging project. It's hard to do. It's hard to execute on. It's certainly what I'd call more of an advanced SEO technique. So, if you haven't got the basics set yet, I'd do those before tackling this. But it can be extremely powerful for two big reasons. Number one, trending keyword volume, keyword volume that happens in big spikes around events or around news items or around topic matter, is very exciting and interesting because it can produce a lot of volume, and it can turn what has been a content marketing strategy into a thought leadership strategy. And second, your competitors don't know about it. They don't know that these things are coming out. Now if you are, you know, political news or in headline type of news areas, yeah, everybody is writing about the same stories. Those things make headlines and they're sort of follow-up. So there's always going to be lots of competition. But in lots of business areas, especially local areas or industry niche areas, there's a lot of news that only gets covered briefly, doesn't get covered particularly well from a keyword targeting standpoint, and therefore you can do it very powerfully and very well.

Let me show you the process here. I'll start with an example actually. SEOmoz, years ago, I think it was 2006, 2005 maybe even, probably '06six, and Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land started writing about social media marketing. I saw this article from him. He was talking about it, about how, with the emergence of Twitter and with Facebook opening up to not just college students, and MySpace was still popular at the time, Digg was still popular at the time, Reddit was still growing in popularity, StumbleUpon was popular. Twitter I think had just started emerging or was just about to emerge. And so he wrote about this topic of social media marketing, and I thought, "Wow. Yeah, that's a really interesting one. I think social media marketing is going to be big." So we're going to do two things. We're going to write a guide to social media marketing, and before I even do that, I am going to write a blog post about social media marketing.

There's no search volume for it at the time. You know, if you went into Google AdWords at the time and you typed in "social media marketing,"
you're not going to see more than, say, 30 to 50 searches a month. It's just not a popular topic yet, but it's about to become one. What happened is I wrote this blog post, and that actually made it to number two in the search results for social media marketing for a long time in Google search results, which sent over the course of a few years - now it was both this article and the larger article that we eventually wrote - that was 20,000 plus visits to the SEOmoz site over about 2 or 3 years.

That's a lot of traffic. That's a lot of new people to capture. And, of course, since we are trying to make tools for SEOs and social media marketers, a little more social media marketers since last November when we released some of that in the Followerwonk acquisition and all that kind of stuff, now we can sort of say, "Wow. You know, this is a great channel for us. This has been a really valuable keyword. I'm really glad we got that thought leadership out there early, before it was even in the keyword tools."

Now, here's the process that you can use to do this repeatedly. So step 1, you've got to be on top of things. You have to be on top of what's happening in your industry, and I suggest three sources, these are unique sources. First off is news, so you could go to, for example, Google news or set up a news alert or those kinds of things. Or if you're in the technology industry, it might be Techmeme. If you're in a specific blogging field, maybe you're going to the Alltop section for that. You want to follow some social sources, who are the leading folks usually on Twitter and Facebook, Google+ can also be useful for this, and seeing what they're talking about and writing about, what's interesting to them.

And then, probably the best one that you can do here is verify that there's actually interest and questions around this by checking out Q&A sites. So, if I see that someone is talking about . . . I'll give a good example. There's a trend to start using the word "growth hacker" to describe marketers in Silicon Valley. So Silicon Valley has historically not particularly liked marketers, and so now they're embracing marketing and the practice of getting actual customers on their startups by calling it growth hacking. That's what they have chosen to call it. That's fine. Now, news sources are writing about this only a tiny bit. Social sources are talking about this a little bit more, and you can see plenty of activity on Q&A sites in the technology field, like on Quora, like on Formspring.

So what does this indicate to you? Well, it says to me, "Hey. This means there's an opportunity there." If I can rank well for growth hacker, get into these things, especially if I could do this, say, six or nine months ago, when the term first started becoming popular, that could be a lead to a lot of great traffic, especially if I'm, for example, let's say like many of you probably, an SEO consultant or an SEO agency or an in-house SEO who's trying to get well known in thought leadership on the topic of growth hacker, maybe to get new customers, maybe to help your reputation internally, those kinds of things.

Step two, once you've identified these things, is you need to make a decision. Are you going longtail, or are you going fat head? Are you going to write about growth hacker plus X and Y and Z and all these other keywords that you think might be attached to them? What about growth hacker for e-commerce sites? What about growth hacker for social communities? What about growth hacking for news sites or for mobile apps? Those things will probably all be in there, or you could go after and write the fat head, which is just going to be growth hacking and growth hacker.

Then you need to obviously create the content, and we talk about that in a lot of other Whiteboard Fridays and a lot of other blog posts on SEOmoz. So I'll skim over that. But it has to do two things. It's got to be relevant, hyper relevant to both the topic and the audience, both of these, simultaneously. The reason being that getting rankings for the topic is of no use to you unless you are also attracting and creating a reason for the audience to care about you and your brand and want to come back, take action, subscribe to you, follow you, maybe even take a free trial of whatever you've got, call you up, etc. So, attractive to the topic, attractive to the audience.

And in step three, you're going to obviously publish and promote the content itself. Check that off, and then you're going to need to make this a repeatable process, that turns into something you do consistently for SEO to get traffic. You've got to analyze the successes and the failures, meaning what worked, what didn't work. What was over here in the news sources, and it's like, , oh, that didn't really turn into something. Was that because there wasn't a lot of Q&A volume afterwards? Or maybe we did see a lot of Q&A volume, but there weren't any people talking about it on the social network. Whatever the trends and the patterns are that work well for you, you've got to identify those so that you can repeat the things that work again and again.

If you use this as part of your content marketing process, as part of a blog or of articles you issue or of guides you do, white papers, research, videos, whatever kind of content you're producing, this can lead to the same type of thing that we saw, which is taking over search results before anybody knows that it's going to become a popularly searched term. This is a wonderful way to jumpstart your keyword targeting, jumpstart your content marketing.

All right everyone, hope you have enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we will see you again next time. Take care."

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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