miercuri, 15 august 2012

SEOmoz PRO Member? You Now Get Followerwonk Free! (because we've joined forces)

SEOmoz PRO Member? You Now Get Followerwonk Free! (because we've joined forces)


SEOmoz PRO Member? You Now Get Followerwonk Free! (because we've joined forces)

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 09:57 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

Yes, you read that right. Today, I'm proud to say that the Followerwonk team is now part of SEOmoz and that a brand new version of Followerwonk has officially launched!

Followerwonk + SEOmoz PRO = Magic

If you've been in the SEO community for more than a few months, you've almost certainly heard of the remarkable tool for Twitter search, analysis and discovery called Followerwonk. We've loved and recommended their product for years and today, thanks to the merging of our companies, I'm excited to announce that Followerwonk is now included in SEOmoz PRO membership.

SEOmoz PRO Members Now Get Followerwonk Free!

If you need no more details, head over to Followerwonk.com and connect your SEOmoz account through the link shown above. You'll instantly get access to the PRO version of Wonk's featureset.

Details on the Acquisition

After our funding from Foundry earlier this year, I reached out to Peter Bray, Followerwonk's founder and CEO, to talk about a potential acquisition. Peter and his team, Marc & Galen, are awesome guys - the kind we'd want to work with even if they didn't have this amazing product. After many late night emails, a few great in-person meetings and a bunch of legal paperwork, Followerwonk joined the Moz family in early June. For the last couple months, we've been hard at work making a clean integration and upgrading Wonk's infrastructure to support our nearly 20K SEOmoz PRO users.

Normally, I like to be wholly transparent about everything we do here at SEOmoz, and that would include acquisitions. However, in this case, I can't reveal all the details around the transaction. In being empathetic to the Followerwonk crew's personal finances, the best I can say is that the total deal value is in the low 7 figures (between 1mm and 4mm) and that it includes three items - cash upfront, ongoing cash incentives for the years the Wonk crew stay at Moz, and SEOmoz stock.

This also means SEOmoz now has a permanent presence in Portland, Oregon, at Peter's home, where he and Galen often work (and go to lots of coffee shops, too). In the future, we may establish a full office in Portland, mostly because we all love their restaurant and bar scene, and also because maybe their hipster clothing stores are way cooler than what I can find in Seattle.

Technically, this isn't our first acquisition. Back in 2008, we purchased Chas Williams' personal project, Blogscape, for the tidy sum of ~$20K (if memory serves). Chas came to SEOmoz as part of that deal and worked on Linkscape (now Mozscape) for several years before moving on. However, Followerwonk is certainly our first major acquisition and we've had such a good experience so far that we'll be likely looking to make more, similar investments in the future.

If you've got questions about the details of the deal, feel free to ask in the comments below. Peter and I will do our best to answer, though we'll be slightly limited from our normal preference of vastly over-sharing.

What Does Followerwonk PRO Include?

Wonk has 5 primary functionalities around Twitter analysis separated into their top 5 tabs, along with loads of useful details and features inside.

Followerwonk's 5 Tabs

First is Twitter bio search. Technically, you can do this on Twitter itself, but you can't sort, filter, export or do all of the other cool advanced search stuff Wonk enables. Wonk also contains far, far fewer spam, non-active, and/or brand new accounts (~100mm accounts in Wonk vs. ~300mm in Twitter), so there's a lot more of the "quality" users a marketer might want to see and reach.

Followerwonk Bio Search
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e.g. I'm planning a trip to Belfast in September and hope to invite some SEOs like these to a bar meetup; ta da!
_

Second is Followerwonk's "Compare Users" tab, which allows you to plug in any two or three Twitter accounts and see the overlap in followers or following. This is particularly useful as a marketer to answer the age old question, "will it really help if both of us tweet this?" I compared three SEO folks and was surprised at the degree of non-overlap!

Followerwonk Compare Users
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Crazy that only 2,217 people follow both @WilReynolds and @WillCritchlow. I'd have expected far more overlap.
_

Third is Followerwonk's remarkable "Analyze Followers" Tab. Here you can get more details and stats than you can imagine about any Twitter user's followers (for very highly followed accounts, we use sampling). These features include:

  • The geographic concentrations/locations of followers mapped visually on a globe
  • Distribution of influence scores (so you can instantly see the most influential users who follow an account)
  • Inferred gender distribution of followers (based on profile analysis)
  • Distribution of follower counts, following counts, and account ages
  • Distribution of tweet recency (to get a sense of how recently the followers have been on Twitter)
  • Distribution of tweet quantity (to see total usage level)
  • Language distribution
  • Most active hours (as shown below, this one's hyper-useful for your own account)
  • Word clouds of bios and locations


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e.g. Wil Reynolds has 5 followers with 500K-1mm followers; whoa!
_

_
Clicking on that link, I can see that Gary Vaynerchuk is following Wil! Jealous!
_

_
How cool is that? Fascinating to note that even at the peak time, only 6.6% of Wil's followers are on Twitter.
_

Fourth is the "Track Followers" tab, where I can analyze my wins and losses over the last few months. Below, you'll see a nice graph of those who followed vs. unfollowed my account. In my experience, the spikes are tied to spam cleanup by Twitter and when I send contentious tweets (especially anything politically oriented).

Track Followers
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I want to have more days like June 27th! The cool part is that if you click a particular point on the graph, it brings up a list of folks who followed or unfollowed you that day.

Fifth, and finally, is the sort users tab, which lets you order followers by account age, number of tweets, followers, or following. You can also export this data to CSV/Excel (as with all Wonk tables) and build some very cool lists from there. For example, imagine choosing just your followers in a specific geography who have highly followed accounts and reaching out to them personally about an event you're holding/attending there. Good way to make Twitter friends into real friends!


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e.g. The oldest Twitter accounts following me, including the inimitable Dave McClure!

In terms of usage, Wonk's pretty straightforward:

The features of Followerwonk are, in my opinion, exceptionally complimentary to what we've got inside SEOmoz PRO, and I urge you to give them a spin. If you're not PRO, you can take a 30-day free trial and still use all the stuff inside Wonk.

How Followerwonk Can Help with SEO & Other Inbound Marketing Tasks?

I'm going to be writing more about this in the future, but in the meantime, I'd strongly suggest you check out these great posts and presentations on the topic:

Also, if you're a blogger and happen to write a post in the next day or two about using Wonk, please tweet at or email me and I'll be happy to include your stuff. I imagine there are dozens of tactical applications for Wonk that we've not even yet conceived of, but that could be highly useful.

Oh! And if you need more information or help, check out our Followerwonk video tutorial in the new help hub.

The Future of Followerwonk and SEOmoz

Needless to say, I'm extremely excited about this partnership. It's amazing to be able to wake up one morning and find my SEOmoz account suddenly gives me an entirely new product that I already love and use. Playing with Wonk, I don't think you'll have any trouble seeing why we fell in love, and if you meet the team, you'll get that same feeling.

As for the months ahead - Peter and his team will be working with us to spec out a roadmap for new features, upgrades, and data inside the product. That may even include expansion into networks like Google+ and/or Pinterest! We'll almost certainly be looking for feedback from you, and may launch a poll or survey to that effect in the very near future. For the next 6-9 months, expect to see Followerwonk exist as its own product, separate from SEOmoz (though connected to your PRO account). In the further future, we'll likely be doing more work to bake the products together and present a unified analytics experience.


p.s. You can read more about this news on PandoDaily, with whom we were excited to connect on the press announcement. I'd also like to offer my apologies to the team at Pando, who were originally scheduled to cover our funding announcement in May, but suffered a miscommunication on timing. I'm grateful to have a second chance to work together.


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Two Mozscape Updates in August! And More Info on Why PA/DA Fluctuate

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 08:09 AM PDT

Posted by randfish

Just 14 short days ago, I wrote about the August Mozscape index update. Today, as part of our efforts to create shorter deltas between indices, I'm excited to announce that we have our fastest ever time between updates. There's new data right now in the Mozscape API (for which we're still seeking beta testers on the new version), in Open Site Explorer, through the Mozbar, and in your PRO web app.

This current index has the following metrics:

  • 60,852,245,271 (60 billion) URLs
  • 657,072,652 (657 million) Subdomains
  • 153,355,227 (153 million) Root Domains
  • 610,557,978,730 (610 billion) Links
  • Followed vs. Nofollowed 2.26% of all links found were nofollowed
    • 54.95% of nofollowed links are internal
    • 45.05% are external
  • Rel Canonical - 13.46% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
  • The average page has 70 links on it
    • 59.91 internal links on average
    • 10.57 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google's US search results:

  • Page Authority - 0.34
  • Domain Authority - 0.24
  • MozRank - 0.20
  • Linking Root Domains - 0.24
  • Total Links - 0.20
  • External Links - 0.24

Below is a histogram showing this update's crawling pattern:

2nd August Mozscape Index Crawl Histogram

Basically, this is very good news. We had an outage of our crawler in early June, but the large amounts of crawling performed in late July mean a lot of this index is extremely fresh - in fact, parts of this index are the freshest we've ever had (launched ~20 days after crawling - that's some speedy processing).

Why do Domain Authority & Page Authority Fluctuate?

Every index, we get a lot of questions about why a site's/page's PA/DA goes up or down. The answer's not easy because the inputs vary quite a bit, but basically, four things can cause change in these metrics from index to index:

  1. The site/page received more or fewer links or more/fewer more/less powerful links. Your site's link profile may even remain completely unchanged and still see fluctuation in DA/PA because the sites pointing to you have been recalculated to have better or worse metrics.
  2. Google changed things in their ranking algorithm and thus our models for DA/PA, which measure and attempt to track to correlation with Google's rankings changed, too.
  3. The web's link graph changed, and what was "0" (the lowest possible score) is now lower/higher than before and/or what was "100" (the highest possibly score) is now higher/lower than before. Essentially, think of this as the goalposts moving because the field's gotten bigger or smaller.
  4. Our web index changed in size/structure as we toss our more spam/junk and crawl more/fewer webpages, potentially biasing against links we were counting or hadn't counted in prior indices.

Thus, it's very hard to know for sure whether an increase in DA/PA for a particular page is entirely tied to your efforts, Google's changes or changes to the web as a whole. This is why I strongly, strongly recommend tracking your metrics against your competition. For example, in July, I compared several sites to show the delta between their scores across the May vs. July index like so:

 

Mozscape Data for Seattle Startups from the May Index Update

Above: May's 165 Billion URL index data

July Mozscape Data

Above: July's 78 Billion URL index data

Comparison of August 1st update data

Above: August 1st's 69 Billion URL index
(please ignore the SEOmoz.org numbers in this one - we had an error that affected our own site in the last index)

Above: August 14th's 61 Billion URL index
(again, please ignore SEOmoz.org numbers. Index error on our part)

This comparative process is done for you inside the PRO web app if/when you set up competitors: 

Domain Authority Over Time

Using the comparison data is a great way to get a sense of whether you're gaining/losing vs. the competition and remove a lot of the bias from the other types of macro-index-level modifiers. More so than any other methodology, I recommend this technique to help get a sense for how your site's metrics perform vs. a raw historical perspective.

A Final Note on Index Size

As you can see, the past few indices have been falling in size. This is due to our efforts to make indices faster and more consistent. We hope to remain in the 60-70 billion URL range for the next few indices, and we're relatively close to having our first index produced on our new private cloud. It will take a while, possibly 6 months, to get back up to the 150 billion page indices we had this Spring (which were very, very slow and stale), but the goal is to have an index every 2 weeks that exceeds that size. Exciting stuff, but crazy hard. Luckily, we have a fantastic and growing team of engineers working on it. If you know great minds in the field, we still pay $12,000 referral and signing bonuses, so send 'em our way!

Thanks very much - looking forward to your feedback.


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Wind Power Has Lift

The White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, August 14, 2012

 

Wind Power Has Lift

Today, the Energy Department and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory released a new report highlighting America's strong growth in wind energy in 2011.

As President Obama has made clear, we need an all-of-the-above approach to American energy and the U.S. wind industry is a critical part of this strategy. That's why Department of Energy put together a graphic slideshow illustrating the progress we're making.

Check out the graphics, and find out how wind energy is powering America.

Graphic: A Banner Year for the Wind Industry

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:

More Help for Those Coping with the Drought
In Iowa, President Obama describes a new effort to help livestock producers coping with one of the worst droughts in a half century.

Celebrating the Soldier Athletes on Team USA
The Olympic and Paralympic teams include a record number of servicemen and women, both active duty and members of our reserves.

President Obama Congratulates the Curiosity Team
President Obama calls the team that landed the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

12:00 PM: The Vice President will deliver remarks at a campaign event

1:25 PM: The President and the First Lady deliver remarks at a campaign event

6:35 PM: The President and the First Lady deliver remarks at a campaign event

7:50 PM: The President and the First Lady depart Moline, Illinois en route Joint Base Andrews

9:50 PM: The President and the First Lady arrive Joint Base Andrews

10:05 PM: The President and the First Lady arrive the White House

Get Updates

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Seth's Blog : A figment

A figment

It seems like the only thing you can be a figment of is someone's imagination.

Andy Warhol wanted the word FIGMENT etched on his tombstone. He understood that the only place he actually existed (and will exist forever) is in the imagination of other people.

No, the falling tree in the empty forest makes no noise, and your project or your brand doesn't exist except as a figment in someone else's imagination. The challenge, then, isn't to worry so much about what's happening in the real world, outside, but to work overtime to be sure you exist in the figment world, inside.

You don't need proof. You need belief. (HT to Rick Hyman).



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marți, 14 august 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Syracuse New York Headed For Bankruptcy, 100% Certain

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 07:28 PM PDT

Without a doubt Syracuse, New York is headed for bankruptcy. Not only is there an "official denial" but the mayor of Syracuse is seeking legal guidance on municipal bankruptcy.

Once again, public union wages and benefits, especially police and firefighters' pensions are smack in the midst of it.

Please consider this news headline which I openly mock: Expert says bankruptcy for Syracuse is unlikely, but mayor should explore option
While the financial situation in the city of Syracuse hasn't been described as desperate yet, Mayor Stephanie Miner has asked for some legal expertise on municipal bankruptcy.

The signs of the city's financial problems have been evident for several years as city employees accept wage freezes and fire and police departments see staff reductions.

The city will use an early payment from Albany to help keep the budget from dipping into dwindling reserves. Skyrocketing pension and healthcare costs continue to be a problem for the city budget.

"Bankruptcy isn't the answer. It's not like we sort of restructure and become a different city," said Professor of Economics and Senior Associate Dean, Maxwell School at Syracuse University Michael Wasylenko.

The mayor's office says it is also learning about what a municipal bankruptcy would mean, following places like Stockton, Calif. who made that move.

The state has invoked a Financial Control Board before, currently in the city of Buffalo, twice previously in Yonkers, and once in New York City.

Mish Translation

  • Syracuse is doomed to bankruptcy
  • Skyrocketing pension and healthcare costs have sealed the city's fate.
  • Bankruptcy is the answer
  • There is no other means to rid the city of onerous public union wages and benefits

Professor of Economics and Senior Associate Dean, Maxwell School at Syracuse University Michael Wasylenko is so clueless that he deserved to be fired.

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that union contracts prohibit that option. In the union world, tenure rules. Gross incompetency is simply not grounds for dismissal, pay cuts, or pension benefit reductions.

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


Germany 6% Current Account Surplus a "Threat to the Continent" Says EU Commission; Solution is Gold Coupled With Eurozone Breakup

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 11:34 AM PDT

Germany's current account surplus has reached six percent, an amount that bureaucrats in Brussels have decided is a threat to the entire continent. The EU commission will likely issue a warning to Germany with threats of sanctions if Germany does nothing about it.

I picked up this story from Eurointelligence which writes "FT Deutschland reports that Germany's current account surplus is likely to exceed 6% of GDP this year, the threshold which triggers a European Commission warning. The German government maintained its position that there was no problem with current account surpluses. On the contrary, the German economics ministry sees this a "very positive" development. The German government spokesman said yesterday that the problem of imbalances was a problem for a countries with large current account deficits."

Mathematical Insanity

Got that? Allegedly, large deficits are a problem but large surpluses are not.

Given that surpluses and deficits must net to zero, the position that only deficits are a problem is ludicrous. Mathematically, both are problems or neither are problems, because you cannot have one without the other.

Bear in mind it was not Eurointelligence that took a mathematically ludicrous position, but rather articles they referenced.  

Germany's Surplus Could Trigger Collection Procedures

Let's take a look at the Financial Times Deutschland article referenced above (translated from German and further modified by me for ease in reading)
This year Germany recorded its highest trade surplus ever. This could crumble into the Federal Republic 2013 EU-collection procedures.

The new macro-economic early warning system in Europe provides that a current account surplus over 6.0 percent of gross domestic product is a threat to the economic stability of the continent.

The EU urges its members not to allow imports and exports fall apart too far. The early warning system developed Brussels to name mistakes and sanction if necessary. Since this year can be monitored in addition to the current account including private and public debt and the development of the real estate markets.

As part of the EU early warning system Luxembourg and Sweden also have excessive surpluses. In Luxembourg, the current account surplus in 2011 was 6.4 percent of economic output - approximately $4 billion. For the same year, Germany had a surplus of over $200 billion.
Only Deficits a Problem Says Frankfurter Allgemeine

An article in German Daily paper Frankfurter Allgemeine, by business editor Philip Plickert says Only Trade Deficits a Problem.
The very concept of "macroeconomic imbalances" is highly questionable.

If countries have permanently high current account deficits and foreign debts pile up higher and higher, things may not go well. So the Euro periphery has slipped into crisis. Trade deficits were and are an expression of lack of competitiveness. Germany's surpluses are high contrast to the special strength and structure of the local economy.

Germany produces high-quality (investment) goods that are used in emerging countries. This is no cause for concern.
Euro as Gold Standard

In one of the silliest articles ever written about European trade imbalances, Joe Weisenthal writes Actually, There Is A Gold Standard Today, And It's Causing An Economic Catastrophe.
While it's easy to talk about the endless crises under the gold standard days of the 1800s, the truth is that we don't have to go back that far at all.

Europe is a close analogue to a gold standard.

  • Remember, each European country lacks the ability to print their own money.
  • All the European countries have a fixed 1-to-1 exchange rate, with no ability to devalue their currencies to correct trade imbalances.
  • The currency is designed to keep governments accountable, acting as a check on uncontrollable spending.
  • Countries have to raise through taxation or the bond market a certain amount of Euros each year to spend.

Bottom line, [the euro] is a hard money scheme in sheep's clothing.
Notion the Euro Acts Like Gold Standard is Ridiculous

Equating the euro to a gold standard is ridiculous.

The ECB's (Emergency Liquidity Assistance) program acts exactly the opposite of a gold standard by allowing imbalances to accumulate to the point of crisis, a state the Euro is clearly in now.

For further discussion, please see Target2 and the ELA (Emergency Liquidity Assistance) program; Reader From Europe Asks "Can You Please Explain Target2?"

"The Trade Imbalance Dilemma and Soaring Chinese Debt"

Here are some comments from Michael Pettis that I wrote about in Hugo Salinas Price and Michael Pettis on the Trade Imbalance Dilemma; Gold's Honest Discipline Revisited
The strength of the German economy in recent years has largely to do with its export success. But for Germany to run a large current account surplus – the consequence I would argue of domestic policies aimed at suppressing consumption and subsidizing production – Spain and the other peripheral countries of Europe had to run large current account deficits.

Trade Imbalances Lead to Debt Imbalances

The funding by German banks of peripheral European borrowing, in other words, was a necessary part of deal, arrived at willingly or unwillingly, leading both to Germany's export success and to the debt problems of the deficit countries.

As long as Germany runs current account surpluses for many years and Spain the corresponding deficits, it is by definition true there must have been net capital flows from Germany to Spain as Germany bought Spanish assets (which includes debt obligations) to balance the current account imbalances. The capital and current accounts for any country, and for the world as a whole, must balance to zero.

In the old days of specie currency – gold and silver – this meant that specie would have flowed from Spain to Germany as the counterbalancing entry, and of course this flow created its own resolution. Less gold and silver in Spain relative to the size of its economy was deflationary in Spain and more gold and silver in Germany was inflationary there – until the point where the real exchange rate between the two countries had adjusted sufficiently because of changes in domestic prices to reverse the trade imbalances.

The Current Account Dilemma

In today's world things are different. There is no adjustment mechanism – specie flow or imperialism – that permits or prevents persistent current account imbalances.

This means that if Germany runs persistent trade surpluses with Spain, there are only three possible outcomes.

First, Spain can borrow forever to finance the deficit (of which the ability to sell off national assets is a subset). [Given the size of Spain], this clearly is not a possible outcome.

Second, Spain can take steps to erode the value of those claims in real terms. It can do this by devaluing its currency, by inflating away the value of its external debt, by defaulting on its debt and repaying only a fraction of its original value, by expropriating German assets, or by a combination of these steps.

[Third] Germany must accept a reversal of the current account imbalances or it must accept an erosion in the value of the Spanish assets it owns as a consequence of the current account imbalances. This is the important point.

Once you have excluded infinite borrowing capacity there are arithmetically no other options.

Given the limits, especially debt limits, it is irrational for anyone to expect that Germany can continue to run large current account surpluses while Spain does nothing to erode the value of Spanish assets held by Germans. I suspect that Germany is hoping and arguing that Spain can somehow reverse its current account deficit without the need for Germany to undermine current account surplus. But this won't work.
Problem in Europe is Arithmetic, Not Confidence

I wrote about European math again, just a few days ago, also referencing Michael Pettis. In case you missed it, please consider Problem in Europe is Arithmetic, Not Confidence; Why the Eurozone Cannot Possibly Survive Intact

The current problem most certainly is math, and mathematically "Germany must accept a reversal of the current account imbalances or it must accept an erosion in the value of the Spanish assets it owns as a consequence of the current account imbalances."

Everyone is looking for magic bullets but there are none. One way or another, much pain is coming to Europe, including Germany. Mathematically it must be so.

Root Cause of the Debt Crisis and Trade Imbalances

The root cause of this mess (including the USA's huge trade imbalance with the rest of the world) is twofold.

  • Fractional Reserve Lending
  • Lack of a Gold Standard (Or Other Enforcement Mechanism)

No Better Enforcement Mechanism than Gold

Rather than blaming this mess on the gold standard, one of the reasons for large trade imbalances is precisely because there is not a gold standard.

Most of the problems people assign to the gold standard are not problems with the standard at all, but rather problems associated with fractional reserve lending that allowed more gold to be lent out than there was actual gold.

Bear in mind that Pettis does not support a return to the gold standard. However, Pettis does believe an enforcement mechanism is needed.

For further discussion, please see Michael Pettis Warns of "Virulent Political Turn Against Euro", Adds Clarification to "Gold's Honest Discipline"

Certainly, lack of an enforcement mechanism regarding trade is an enormous problem. Debts pile up forever, with no way to pay them back.

From my point of view, history suggests there is no better enforcement mechanism than gold.

Unfortunately, Mitt Romney believes the solution to the US trade imbalance with China is labeling China a currency manipulator, to which he has promised massive tariffs.

Should Romney do that, a collapse in global trade is likely, just as happened during the Great Depression following passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.

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


France Beats Expectations With 0% Growth; Eurozone GDP Sank .2%

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 08:35 AM PDT

Eurozone GDP sunk .2% in the second quarter and is clearly back in recession as a whole. For that matter, the eurozone has been in recession all year if not starting in the final quarter of 2011. Thus I am amused by headlines such as this one from the Financial Times: Eurozone edges back towards recession
The eurozone edged closer towards its second recession in three years after a resilient economic performance from Germany and France failed to prevent the single currency bloc from contracting in the second quarter.

Gross domestic product in the euro area shrank 0.2 per cent in the three months to June, compared with the previous three months when there was no growth, as the economies of Greece, Italy, Spain and Finland contracted sharply.

Robust investment and domestic consumption helped the German economy expand 0.3 per cent in the second quarter, beating expectations of just 0.1 per cent growth, while French GDP remained unchanged avoiding a highly anticipated contraction. The Netherlands also outperformed forecasts, growing 0.2 per cent.

But a 1 per cent fall in economic output in Finland, a close ally of Germany in the battle for greater austerity in Europe, illustrated how the sovereign debt crisis that has been troubling southern Europe is spreading to the bloc's economically stronger core northern states.
The FT suggested the outperformance of Germany will not last, something I strongly agree with.

Italy, the third largest eurozone economy contracted at .7% quarter-on-quarter and Greece shrank at 6.2% annualized.

Even by a strict definition of two consecutive quarters of negative GDP, does this look like a recession or not?



That chart is going to look a lot worse when Germany and France both decline in a meaningful way next quarter.

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