Central Perk: 30 dec. 2013

luni, 30 decembrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Joke Headline of the Day: "Pending Home Sales Rise"; Five Housing Headwinds

Posted: 30 Dec 2013 01:02 PM PST

I was perusing online stories about today's release of pending homes sales data from the National Association of Realtors. Here are a few sample headlines.

NAR: Pending Home Sales Edge Up in November
CNBC: US pending home sales rise 0.2 percent
Calculated Risk: Pending Home Sales Index increased 0.2% in November
Forbes: Pending Home Sales Tick Up In November, First Time In Five Months
Reuters: U.S. pending home sales end slide, hint at stabilization
Fox Business News: Pending Home Sales Rise Slightly, Miss Street View

One Headline Title Stood Out

Zero Hedge: Pending Home Sales Plunge At Fastest Pace Since April 2011

It took about one second to understand the discrepancy.

All but the ZeroHedge headline (not necessarily the articles) ignored the NAR statement (see first link) "The Pending Home Sales Index,* a forward-looking indicator based on contract signings, inched up 0.2 percent to 101.7 in November from a downwardly revised 101.5 in October, but is 1.6 percent below November 2012 when it was 103.3."

ZeroHedge has a chart that shows just that.

Pending Home Sales Year-Over-Year

It's kind of easy for sales to be up when the previous month was revised lower. But how much lower? The NAR did not even say. Let's take a look at monthly NAR reports to find out.

November 25 NAR: October Pending Home Sales Down Again, but Expected to Level Out: The Pending Home Sales Index,* a forward-looking indicator based on contract signings, slipped 0.6 percent to 102.1 in October from an upwardly revised 102.7 in September, and is 1.6 percent below October 2012 when it was 103.8. The index is at the lowest level since December 2012 when it was 101.3; the data reflect contracts but not closings.

October 28 NAR: Pending Home Sales Continue Slide in September: The Pending Home Sales Index,* a forward-looking indicator based on contract signings, fell 5.6 percent to 101.6 in September from a downwardly revised 107.6 in August, and is 1.2 percent below September 2012 when it was 102.8. The index is at the lowest level since December 2012 when it was 101.3; the data reflect contracts but not closings.

September 26 NAR: Pending Home Sales Decline in August: The Pending Home Sales Index,* a forward-looking indicator based on contract signings, eased 1.6 percent to 107.7 in August from a downwardly revised 109.4 in July, but remains 5.8 percent above August 2012 when it was 101.8; the data reflect contracts but not closings. Pending sales have been above year-ago levels for the past 28 months.

August 28 NAR: July Pending Home Sales Slip: The Pending Home Sales Index,* a forward-looking indicator based on contract signings, declined 1.3 percent to 109.5 in July from 110.9 in June, but is 6.7 percent above July 2012 when it was 102.6; the data reflect contracts but not closings. Pending sales have stayed above year-ago levels for the past 27 months.

Note the October data (released November 25) showed the pending home sales index slipped a reported 0.6 percent to 102.1.

"Pending Home Sales Rise"

Last Month: 102.1
This Month: 101.7
Result: Rise of 0.2

With all this revisionist history, these month-over-month comparisons seem rather meaningless. The chart posted by ZeroHedge shows the real story.

Lawrence Nun, the NAR cheerleader had this to say "We may have reached a cyclical low because the positive fundamentals of job creation and household formation are likely to foster a fairly stable level of contract activity in 2014".

Absolutely nothing suggests a cyclical low. The recovery has been fueled by excessively low rates, that are now rising sharply. Numerous headwinds blow strongly. I strongly disagree with Nun on jobs and household formation.

Five Housing Headwinds

Prices Up (Housing Less Affordable)
Interest Rates Up (Housing Less Affordable)
Insufficient Wage Growth (Housing Less Affordable)
Household Formation Poor (Lack of Buyers)
Poor Job Growth (Lack of Buyers)

For further discussion of headwinds, especially the rise in interest rates, please see Average 30-Year Mortgage Rate Hits 4.47% (Not Counting Fees); Affordability Check

For a report on Household Formation, please see Haircut Deficit: Kids Living in Basements a Drag on U.S. Services Spending.

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

Judge Bars San Jose from Imposing Voter-Approved Pension Cuts; Hollow Victory for Unions

Posted: 30 Dec 2013 10:32 AM PST

On December 24, a state court judge barred the city of San Jose, California, from imposing voter-approved pension cuts on current municipal worker.

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, a Democrat, encouraged voters in his city to back municipal pension cuts he proposed as part of last year's Measure B, which drew 70 percent support at the polls. The unions challenged the measure, leading to Judge Lucas' ruling in Santa Clara County Superior Court. Her decision is likely to be appealed.

In her "tentative" ruling, dated from last week but publicly released on Monday, Lucas said the city was entitled under the ballot measure to cut workers' pay to save money, but she held that vested pension benefits were protected by state law and thus off limits.

Reed is pressing for a statewide ballot initiative next year that would give cities across California the authority to reduce pension benefits.

In a statement, Reed welcomed the judge's ruling on pay cuts, but added: "Unfortunately, the judge's decision to invalidate certain portions of Measure B also highlights the fact that current California law provides cities, counties and other government agencies with very little flexibility in controlling their retirement costs."

Hollow Victory

The pension ruling was hailed by union advocates but not the wage cut ruling. Both sides are likely to appeal aspects of the ruling. Should the ruling stand as is, unions will come to regret their victory.

Voters Had Enough of Unions

Reed will press the matter further, in a statewide initiative. And sentiment suggests voters have finally had enough of unions.

However, one must expect the teachers' unions, the police and fire unions, and every other public union in the state to spend massive amounts of money hoping to defeat the proposition.

For California public-union sentiment details, please see Voters Take Negative View of Labor Unions; Liberals in Favor of Strikes (Until Strikes Happen); Aging Population an Anti-Union Force?

Should Reed's initiative pass and be struck down by the courts, Reed can shove it straight down the union's throats by declaring bankruptcy.

Unlike the mayoral economic illiterates in Vallejo and Stockton (who could have and should have slashed pension benefits in bankruptcy), it's pretty clear Reed would do just that.

100% Certain Pensions Not Sacrosanct

Given rulings in Detroit, Michigan; Central Falls, Rhode Island (see Central Falls Set to File Bankruptcy Exit Plan; 50% Pension Reductions, 40% Slash in Police and Fire Budgets Coming Up) and numerous cities in California, it is 100% certain that federal bankruptcy laws override state constitutions. In other words it is 100% certain that public union pensions are NOT sacrosanct.

One way or another pensions must be cut, and will be cut. But how?

Unions can help decide the nature of the cuts, or they can fight them every step of the way only to have cuts crammed down their throats in bankruptcy court. Unions being what they are, will no doubt choose to be force-fed cuts in numerous bankruptcies across the nation.

Unfortunately, force-fed across-the-board cuts in bankruptcy court are not the fairest thing to do. Nor is it fair to ask taxpayers to pick up the tab, given the threats, coercion, vote buying, and backroom deals under which politicians rewarded their friends and themselves jobs with ridiculous pensions.

For further consideration of the fairness aspect, please see Mish Template for Fair Public Union Pension Settlement.

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

Damn Cool Pics

McDonald's Restaurant in Taiwan

Posted: 30 Dec 2013 12:43 PM PST

Girls from a Taiwanese McDonald's wearing a strange uniform.

This Is How Much It Cost To Treat An Appendicitis In America

Posted: 30 Dec 2013 11:59 AM PST

One guy wrote:

I never truly understood how much healthcare in the US costs until I got Appendicitis in October. I'm a 20 year old guy. Thought other people should see this to get a real idea of how much an unpreventable illness costs in the US.

The cover page of sorts. You can see the original total up at the top. Thankfully I was still on my dad's insurance for another month or so. $55,029,.31 would have been way too much for me to pay on my own. Then again $11,119.53 is still a ton at this time in my life.

First page (back)

The services I received. I think you can see how outrageous some of these costs are. Such as the Recovery Room that I was in for maybe two hours. Or the Room and Board that I had for one night. Or maybe the $4,500 worth of anesthesia they supposedly used on me.

Second page

Our Favorite FLOTUS Moments in 2013

Featured

Our Favorite FLOTUS Moments in 2013

As the year draws to a close, it's time to take a look back at some of our favorite digital moments with First Lady Michelle Obama in 2013. It's been a big year: she started the first official First Lady Twitter (@FLOTUS) and Instagram (@MichelleObama) accounts and recorded her first Vine. She also celebrated the 3rd Anniversary of Let's Move! by "mom dancing" with Jimmy Fallon, hung out with Kelly Ripa, answered your questions during her first Twitter chat, and welcomed thousands of Americans to the White House for tours, the annual Easter Egg Roll, and the Kids' State Dinner.

Check out all of these moments and be sure to follow the First Lady on Twitter (@FLOTUS) and Instagram (@MichelleObama).

When 2 Become 1: How Merging Two Domains Made Us an SEO Killing

Posted: 29 Dec 2013 03:15 PM PST

Posted by WPMU DEV

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

This is a story of recovery, despondency, occasional despair, and a pretty big gamble that paid off. It's the why, the how, and the what of the things you might be able to gain from merging two significant domains into one unified site.

Regular Moz readers should recall WPMU.org from our fairly dramatic Penguin story from 2012 (tl;dr: the Penguin hit us hard, but then we recovered. It was pretty scary).

But all ended remarkably well. After our initial recovery, things went from good to, well, better:

Weekly organic traffic at WPMU.org took a nasty slug, and made a solid recovery.

Parties all round at Incsub HQ. Hell yeah. Let's go hire a bunch of new writers, let's go wild, let's double this next year, etc.

I imagine you can guess what happened next...

Dear Search Lord, Why Has Thou Forsaken Us So? Dear Search Lords, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us So?

Now, usually I'd be the first to see that and say something along the lines of, "well guys, you're clearly doing it wrong."

And in fact that's exactly what I thought, pretty much from day one, so we got bloody busy. Specifically, we:

Hired some absolutely awesome and highly qualified new writers who took our standards up an absolute ton;
Spent ages working out quality and style guidelines for copy and media, and followed them like subeditors who had tucked into wayyy too many cans of V;
Brought in the best guest writers and paid them the best rates in a systematised editorial process;
Dramatically increased our social and email presence and published stuff that generated it's own awesome links;
Tried every on-site SEO tactic we could, killed duplicate content, limited and focused our categories and tags, and essentially gave Google everything that she wanted: really quality, fresh, and engaging content.

And yet it was all for naught, we were, to put it mildly, in a hole. Going nowhere fast. We'd tried everything, pulled every string and ticked every box, we were doing stuff better than ever, but still we were failing.

So, we figured, let's do something dramatic. Let's kill WPMU.org and merge it with her sister site WPMU DEV.

This is where I get to insert the video, right? :)

Awesome. Happy now. Moving on.

Why on earth would you kill such a well-known site?

It's a good question, and it's not one we arrived at lightly. Essentially though we were ready to take the punt for a bunch of different reasons, not the least of which being that seven months of declining organic results are enough to make anyone more risk-friendly than averse. But, more specifically:

Latent penguin / penalty Issues

Let's face it, clearly Google had some pretty serious issues with us, and just because we recovered so well from Penguin, that didn't mean we went off their radar, or the strategies we'd been employing (all white-hat, incidentally) weren't falling close to the boundary line.

There was every reason to believe that a hex of some sort had been placed on wpmu.org. It was a monkey we just couldn't shift, and to stretch the metaphor a little, those kinda monkeys aren't in the trees, they're clinging firmly to you day after day.

I always knew I'd get to use this image in a post one day

We had to shake the chimpguin!

Dilution to concentration, juice-wise

Back in the day, I set up WPMU.org as an "independent" site, the main business being WPMU DEV (at the extraordinarily bad, and still bad, premium.wpmudev.org domain).

Same, but different, kinda, look, it's complicated

Same, but different, kinda, look. It's complicated.

And it has been that, we take no affiliate revenue, have no editorial agenda as regards any company outside of us and aim to give fair, balanced and decent coverage to all things WordPress. We're really trying to be the same as the Moz blog, for WordPress.

But let's face it, it's WPMU DEV's blog, and more to the point, we were generating organic links and engagement with a site that wasn't our main business, while at the same time trying to do the same with WPMU DEV. It was a little nuts; both sites had thousands of unique domains linking to them, so they were both moderately powerful. Why on earth didn't we just merge them together, and have one super-powerful site rather than two middling-to-strong ones.

Brand, brand, brand

And last, but certainly not least, there's the small matter of Google and our brand... and if there's a primary lesson in this piece, this could well be it.

Put simply, a search for 'wpmu' or 'wpmu.org' rendered a very different group of results to one for 'wpmu dev':

Somebody's got the SEO right for one of these grabs...

Somebody's got the SEO right for one of these grabs...

I wonder what the impact of all those high-quality and fresh posts could be along with the WPMU DEV brand? Hmmmmm.

Technical time: merging two domains into one

It's actually remarkably straightforward, here's how you go about it:

First up, download and print this Moz infographic, and keep it by you at all times.

Second, fire up Asana; this will be fabulously useful if you are on your own and even more so if there are a bunch of you.

If there are a bunch of you, sit very close, or jump into a hangout, and (here we go)...

Decide on the new URL. We moved wpmu.org to /blog/ on premium.wpmudev.org, so it was pretty easy to transfer our staging. (Oh yeah: Get a staging server too, or just set things up with a modified hosts file.)
Dynamically (or manually, yawn) 301 everything, here's your complete guide to redirection
Go through your dbase and theme files and replace every link via find and replace. (I.e. replace "wpmu.org" with "premium.wpmudev.org/blog".)
Test the heck out of it. Give yourself at least a few hours to try pretty much every page (and make some user personas, too).
Use Open Site Explorer to find the major links to your site, and email whoever wrote the articles or manages the site, asking them to change their links to the new site.
Test some more.
Go tell Google using Webmaster Tools (and Bing if you have some extra time). ;)
Keep a good eye on things, and also run a Moz Analytics campaign on the new setup to pick up Crawl Diagnostics.
Ask everyone you know to look at the new setup and find issues (they will). Fix them.
Sit back and wait to see how well it works.

So, how was it for us?

I was expecting that we'd take a hit.

Before the move I'd said that up to a 30% hit would be manageable; we could build back from that, and it was to be expected by the dilution of link juice coming from 301s. Anything more would be a big problem, but we'd battle through.

Here's how it actually went:

Before and after shots Before and after organic shots

On the Monday before we picked up 10,371 organic visits. On the Monday following, 14,627.

On the Tuesday prior, 10,458, and after, 14,546.

The two days taken together were almost exactly 40% up.

Not. Bad. :)

However, we did note that there was no significant change in organic visits for non /blog/* results at WPMU DEV, in fact over the two days (mostly Tuesday) we saw a slight decline of around ~1000 visits (around 2.5% of the overall traffic, but around a 6% variation in the original WPMU DEV traffic), which might indicate that the whole "concentrating juice on one domain" theory might not be the right one.

In conclusion

From this experience we've learnt a bunch of stuff, which I'm going to try to summarize in three main areas.

You can move and not lose, so move away

A well-managed and carefully executed move from one domain to another, or in this case from one domain onto another, can clearly work well.

This is super-important, because honestly, when I brought this up with most people prior to this venture they were very very dubious as to whether this could be pulled off without some serious collateral. When Google says that you can retain your ranking, it's true, you can. And then some.

This may be a successful tactic to escape domain toxicity

The lack of any positive organic bump in the root domain we moved to as /blog/ could indicate that the success of this domain move was not due to the amalgamation of link juice between the two sites, but could in fact be due to the content having escaped some negative/toxic algo penalties that wpmu.org had accrued as a root domain.

However, Google is not stupid. You would expect that they would happily pass along the bad with the good on a 301, and it's often recommended you don't redirect (another thing that was making me nervous).

Branding could be the single most important factor

You don't need to be a multinational; having a relatively established brand like WPMU DEV is enough.

Sure, we're no Moz, let alone a Pfizer, but it could be that moving content from a well-established site (but not brand) to our more-established position is literally worth a 40% bump.

If so, the importance of building and managing a brand alongside your content strategies could well be top of your agenda. At least that's my takeaway... what's yours?

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Seth's Blog : The geek chorus

The geek chorus

Every sub-topic has its geeks. There are geeks who are into pencils, Bob Dylan, futures pricing. There are geeks who obsess about Wikipedia edits, journalism and even geek culture.

When you do something that matters, it will probably matter to the geeks most of all, and the geeks will speak up, dissect, analyze and perhaps extol or criticize. It's a symptom of doing good work.

The question is this: will you spend a lot of time listening to them?

The more you listen to this audience, the more likely it is you will delight them.

On the other hand, if you want to reach a much larger audience, you have no choice but to figure out when to ignore them.