luni, 15 octombrie 2012

What Is Tag Management?

What Is Tag Management?


What Is Tag Management?

Posted: 14 Oct 2012 07:56 PM PDT

Posted by Mike Pantoliano

On October 1st, Google announced Google Tag Manager, a free tool for managing marketing and tracking tags on your site. I've sensed a lot of confusion around its launch, so I'd like to discuss what tag management is and why it's so powerful.

There are a number of companies that have been providing tag management software as a paid service for years (I'm sure they're wild about Google making it free). I won't discuss the pros and cons of different tag management software offerings, rather, just the concept in general, and some directly actionable tips using Google's service. At the end of the post, I'll include links to some of the other, likely more robust, tag management services.

What and why?

Tags are snippets of code that usually placed in the <head> of a page which enable 3rd-party tracking, analysis, and reporting. Google Analytics and other analytics platforms are an obvious tag, but remarketing, conversion tracking, affiliates, and advanced customer insight services utilize tags as well.

Tag management is a concept that was born out of the increasing need for more agile marketing measurement and tracking ability. Managing and making changes to tags can be tedious and involve unnecessary red tape.

I hate talking conceptually with this sort of thing, so let's get right to a real-world example. Let's get all up in SEOmoz's business.

How SEOmoz could benefit from tag management

Let's take the homepage of SEOmoz. Within the source of the homepage, I can identify a number of tags that would work well with a tag manager. Feel free to take a look for yourself, but it seems like the team at Moz has included:

  1. Google Analytics - Natch
  2. Kiss Metrics - For more advanced customer insights
  3. AdRoll - For remarketing
  4. Simpli.fi - Also for remarketing
  5. Optimizely - For CRO testing *Google Tag Manager does not support A/B testing tags at launch, but it's apparently coming soon. For other tag managers, YMMV.
  6. I'm assuming they've got even more tags on conversion pages such as the AdWords conversion snippet and any affiliate marketing tracking pixels.

What do you suppose happens when someone on the marketing team wants to add to, subtract from, or alter one of the above tags?

Pick and choose for your company:

Emails get sent, changes are added to a massive work queue, meetings are scheduled, sprints are added to, excuses are made, staging servers are updated 3 weeks later with live roll-out scheduled for another 3 weeks, etc.

Not fun, not agile.

Tag managers allow marketing to have control over their own little space on a web page. The 6 or 7 tags on any given page are replaced by a single container. That container contains code that listens to rules dictated in the tag manager's backend as to when to fire what tags.

tag management example

If the Moz team wants to try out a new remarketing service, they can grab the snippet necessary, drop it into the tag manager, set some rules for when it gets fired, and publish live to the site - all in 10 minutes, all without ever getting IT involved.

Is it for you?

Keep in mind that there are plenty of sites on the web, especially eCommerce, that are far more complicated than SEOmoz.org by nature. The need for Tag Management is even greater in this situation.

In order to reap the rewards of agility and future simplicity, there are quite a few hurdles and complexities that have to be overcome upfront. For this reason, tag management is simply not worth the effort for everyone. If you...

  1. Rarely get push back on requested tag changes
  2. Don't change tags often
  3. Can get changes made to tags within a matter of hours

...then tag management probably isn't for you. For everyone else, tag management is a great tool in the agile marketer's toolbox. Let's take a deep look at Google Tag Manager.

Google Tag Manager

In case you haven't yet seen Google's 4 minute video explaining the utility and setup of GTM, give this video a look. Afterwards, we'll look at specific customizations that web marketers can make.

GTM offers some nice versioning and debugging features. Additionally, the container blog is an asynchronous JavaScript snippet so it will not effect page load or block other JavaScript. 

Macros

GTM uses macros and rules to decide when a tag is fired. Macros are just a name-value pair that can be used to build rules around. The value itself, in many cases, is populated in runtime. That is, at the moment the page itself is being built for the user.

Out of the box, GTM has three default macros that can take care of a lot on their own:

URL macro

This is an easy one. The name is URL, the value is whatever the current URL happens to be.

An example of a rule based around a URL: 

If URL = /confirmation.html send our 'Conversion' tags.

Your conversion pages likely have smorgasbord of conversion tracking tags like AdWords, eCommerce analytics snippets, ROI trackers from comparison shopping engines, etc.

HTTP Referrer macro

Another easy one. The name is HTTP Referrer, the value is the previous page that the user visited.

An example for this macro:

If referring page matches Twitter or Facebook, send the 'Referred by Social' tags.

Perhaps this is a visitor-scoped Google Analytics custom variable.

Event macro

A bit more complicated, especially if you're used to Google Analytics events. There are similarities, and you'll likely use them together, but it's best to forget that GA has something called an 'event' for now.

Events can be used to track interactions on a page after the page loads. As an example, if a user interacts with a form on your site, you can push an event. If there are any rules that depend on that event value, the specified tag will fire.

The code for pushing an event looks like this:

  dataLayer.push({'event': 'event_name'});  

So, for SEOmoz's purchase page, if we wanted to track a form submission as an event, we'd take the form code we had:

  <form id="user_data" class="ignore_dblclick" method="post"   action="https://www.seomoz.org/cart/purchase_checkout">  

and add:

  <form id="user_data" class="ignore_dblclick" method="post"   action="https://www.seomoz.org/cart/purchase_checkout"   onsubmit="dataLayer.push({'event': 'form_submitted'});">
Now, any tags that have a rule setup to fire when the event value's name is 'form_submitted' will do so.

Outside of form submission events, another example:

If event = 'abandonedFunnel' - send the 'Cart Abandoned' tags.

Perhaps you have a system in which you send shopping cart-saving emails to users that abandon their shopping carts.

Why are we doing this?

What if we already have a standard Google Analytics onSubmit event set up so that we can track form submissions as a goal? What's the benefit here?

We have to step back and think a bit high level here to understand. A form being submitted on our site is an important occurrence. No matter what services we're using to track our marketing efforts 10 years from now, it's a piece of information we want to track. By using a tag manager and setting this form submission as an event, we remain super flexible in the following scenarios:

  • Start working with a new affiliate that pays out on form submissions but wants their own pixel to fire? We already have the event setup, just need to setup a rule in the tag manager.
  • Want to try out the hot new web analytics platform? No need for additional markup on the page, just adjust the tag manager.
  • One of your services make an "improvement" to their snippet that requires updating? Piece of cake. We can get it published and live on the site in 5 minutes with a tag manager.

Custom macros

In addition to the above macros, we have the option of using custom macros to define rules. Our options include:

Constant string

Meh. This one has pretty limited utility. The Google documentation offers about the only use case I can imagine:

If you want to set a standard company name across your site, for example, you could define it as a Constant String type macro. This would allow you to easily update the string in Google Tag Manager and see it reflected across all the tags that use this macro.

JavaScript variable

Got a global JavaScript variable that prints out on the page that you'd like to build a rule around? That's what this one is for. To give you a real example:

On my Tumblr, I noticed that, by default, Tumblr prints the tags (as in blog post tags, not marketing tags) in a global variable on the page.

Take this post for example. In the <head>, we see the tags are passed into tumblr_meta_keyboards (Lord only know why the hell they chose to call this variable 'keyboards'. Typo?):

  <script>var tumblr_meta_keyboards = 'xoxo,xoxofest,texts';</script>  

Creating a macro for this allows me to set custom rules for tag firing based on the data in the macro. Pretty easy to write up a rule that fires a custom version of the GA snippet that passes the tags into custom variables when tags are detected. Notice I reference the macro we just created above using the {{macro_name}} syntax in the custom variable line.

custom variable tag management

Data layer

To explain a data layer in full opens up a whole can of worms. If you want the full story, Justin Cutroni described it in glorious detail in this post.

A data layer is a collection of data on a page that includes any important piece of information from that page in an easy to access format. Imagine the confirmation page on an eCommerce site: you've got transaction details, shipping details, quantities, product IDs, order numbers, etc. It's all scattered about on the page. A data layer stores all that info in a name-value pair in the source code (not printed on the page so the user can see), making it super simple to access by a tag manager.

data everywhere

 

Within the source of the above page, a data layer would neatly lay it all out.

var dataLayer = {
"pageTitle" : "Confirmation page",
"pageURL" : "/confirmation.html",
"tranID" : "239871",
"tranTotal" : "47.54",
"tranTax" : "1.54",
"tranShipping" : "5.00",
"tranShippingMethod" : "USPS",
"tranCurrency" : "USD",
"tranProds" : "11312|2335|44443",
"tranSKUs" : "23|3233|22",
"tranProdNames" : "Fake Product 1|Fake Product 2|Fake Product 3",
"tranCategories" : "Misc|Games|Hijinks",
"tranPayMethod" : "VISA",
"visitorType" : "Repeat Buyer",
"visitorFirstPurchDate" : "20121001",
"visitorFirstProds" : "13333"
}

Along with eCommerce data, the following types of data would work great in a data layer:

  • Page category
  • Page subcategory
  • Visitor ID
  • Member status
  • Login state
  • Many more examples at the bottom of this page

With tag management and a data layer working together, it's super simple to create a rule that sends your custom variables and segments to however many analytics platforms you use. Tracking logged in user behavior in GA, Mixpanel, and KissMetrics? Create a rule in GTM that pushes all three custom tags if the data layer name 'logged_in' = yes. Piece of cake.

It can be a hefty undertaking to implement a data layer, but the investment upfront can save tons of time in the long run. Most importantly, it allows IT to focus on fixing bugs and improving product, while the marketers don't have to worry about the IT time necessary to implement new tags ever again. 

For GTM specifically, the data layer should be in the code above the container. Read more at Google's developer documentation.

DOM text and DOM attribute

If you happen to have data that you'd like to access and store with macros marked up just right, you might be able to use them in your rules.

Let's go back to my Tumblr as an example. This page includes this code:

  <div id="title">  <h1 class="logo"><a href="/" title="Stars and Astral Cars - Home">  Stars and Astral Cars</a></h1>  </div>
  

If, for whatever reason, I wanted to pass my Tumblr's title into a rule, I could create a DOM text macro that accesses it like so:

saving a title macro

This looks for the "title" ID, grabs the text (Stars and Astral Cars), and stores it in a macro.

If you're lucky enough to have some useful data marked up just so, you might be able to make this work with some rules. This would be nice:

  <p id="transaction_amount">35.45</p>    <p id="transaction_tax">2.43</p>  

However, I'm not sure you'll be lucky enough to have all the data you need perfectly marked up in this manner.

Google Analytics

A quick note on Google Analytics installation through GTM:

The basic installation of Google Analytics through GTM is really straightforward. By default, you'll utilize an "All Pages" rule that Google provides for default. Simple enough.

If you plan to do funky stuff like send custom variables according to rules you've set, you'll need to use the 'Custom HTML' tag type, and make sure you set a rule to block the traditional snippet from firing:

rules for firing the google snippet

Rules here say: Fire the normal Google Analytics snippet on all pages UNLESS the url macro contains /post/

Apparently, there are further Google Analytics specific enhancements coming later to GTM, so the above methodology may be a lot of work for something that might be a cinch whenever Google gets around to releasing those enhancements.

Conclusion

Tag management is an agile marketers dream. Like Google Analytics did back in 2006, GTM has entered a paid market with a free offering that is a solid product from launch. If GTM follows the GA model, it will continue to improve. There are already a few features slated for future release, like the ability to manage A/B testing snippets. I also have a strong feeling that Google Analytics will be embracing GTM for their upcoming changes to cross-domain tracking, which is currently a very cumbersome process.

If you're interested in tag management but GTM doesn't get the job done, the following is a (hopefully) exhaustive list (credit, again to Justin Cutroni) of the other players in the tag management space. Though I don't have a terrible amount of experience with any, they've been at it for a while and are likely even more powerful than GTM:

Does tag management sound like it's for you? Have you already implemented GTM or another tag management solution? How'd it go?


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Your Fall #WHGarden Tour Photos

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, October 15, 2012
 
Your Fall #WHGarden Tour Photos

This month, the White House is continuing its tradition of opening its gardens and grounds to visitors from across the country. It's part of the First Family's commitment to ensuring that the White House remains the "People's House." 

Those taking the tour were encouraged to use the hashtag #WHGarden on Twitter to share photos of their experience. Check out some of the best photos.

In Washington, D.C. this weekend? Find out how to join a White House Garden Tour.

Check out a slideshow of some of the best #WHGarden photos

In Case You Missed It

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

Weekly Address: One Million American Jobs Saved and a Stronger American Auto Industry
President Obama talks about his choice to rescue the American auto industry from collapse and save more than one million American jobs.

Weekly Wrap Up: “Our Journey Is Never Hopeless, Our Work Is Never Done”
Here’s a quick glimpse at what happened last week on WhiteHouse.gov.

Catching up with the Curator: The White House Fire of 1814
White House Curator Bill Allman discusses the fire that nearly destroyed the White House in 1814.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

10:10 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

Get Updates


Stay Connected


This email was sent to e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com
Manage Subscriptions for e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com
Sign Up for Updates from the White House

Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy

Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House

The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111
 

Seth's Blog : Redefining productivity

Redefining productivity

According to the economics of the industrial age, it's simple: Money spent creates output. If you use less labor or your system creates more output, your factory is being more efficient.

Machines can be more productive than people because once they're set up, they create more output per dollar spent. Lowering labor costs is the goal of the competitive industrialist, because in the short run, cutting wages increases productivity.

This is a race to the bottom, with the goal of cutting costs as low as possible as your competitors work to do the same.

The new high productivity calculation, though, is very different:

Decide what you're going to do next, and then do it. Make good decisions about what's next and you thrive.

Innovation drives the connection economy, not low cost.

The decision about what to do next is even more important than the labor spent executing it. A modern productive worker is someone who does a great job in figuring out what to do next.

[Take a listen to Krista Tippett's fabulous interview with Bobby McFerrin: On Being. These conversations go to the heart of the sort of high-productivity work we create today, but would make no sense at all just a generation ago.]



More Recent Articles

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.




Your requested content delivery powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 9 Thoreau Way, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA. +1.978.776.9498

 

duminică, 14 octombrie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Secessionist Wave Sweeps Belgium Ending 90 Years of Socialist Rule in Antwerp

Posted: 14 Oct 2012 01:59 PM PDT

In a vote on Sunday that is likely to have serious repercussion down the road for the eurozone, a Secessionist wave sweeps Belgium
Flemish nationalists made sweeping gains across northern Belgium in local elections on Sunday, a success that will bolster separatists' hopes for a break-up of the country.

Bart De Wever, leader of the New Flemish Alliance (NVA), is set to become mayor of the northern city of Antwerp, Belgium's economic heartland, after his party emerged as the largest one ending about 90 years of socialist rule.

Soon after the ballot results emerged, Mr De Wever, who had turned the tough mayoral race into a referendum on Flander's independence for Belgium, demanded that the country's prime minister give greater independence to the Dutch-speaking north.

Flanders, which is the most economically prosperous region of Belgium, has long resented financing the ailing economy of French-speaking Wallonia, and Sunday's victory will strengthen their demand for self-rule.

"De Wever sent a strong signal to Brussels and he has put his party on course to send an even clearer one in 2014 ... they will try to go for an even bigger win in the federal elections," said Lex Moolenaar, a veteran political analyst for the Gazet Van Antwerpen, the city's daily.
Question of the Day

Here is the question of the day, even though the answer is easily discernible: If the New Flemish Alliance resents bailing out the rest of Belgium, how will they feel about bailing out Greece, Spain, and Italy?

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


Currency Wars: Bernanke Defends Fed Policy, Calls for Emerging Market Currency Appreciation

Posted: 14 Oct 2012 11:49 AM PDT

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is at odds with Brazil, China, and even the IMF over his policies. Please consider the BBC report Bernanke defends Federal Reserve stimulus measures
Brazil has said US monetary easing to keep interest rates low and weaken the dollar has hurt emerging economies.

And International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde warned on Sunday of consequent asset bubbles developing in emerging nations.

Speaking in Tokyo, where the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are holding annual meetings, Mr Bernanke said: "The linkage between advanced-economy monetary policies and international capital flows is looser than is sometimes asserted."

On Friday, Brazil's finance minister, Guido Mantega, warned that his country would take "whatever measures it deems necessary" to fight the problem.

"Emerging markets can't passively endure large and volatile capital flows and currency fluctuations caused by rich countries' policies," Mr Mantega said in Tokyo.

"Advanced countries cannot count on exporting their way out of the crisis at the expense of emerging-market economies," he said. "Currency wars will only compound the world's economic difficulties."

In a speech at the end of the IMF meeting, Ms Lagarde said: "We have seen several bold initiatives by major central banks certainly that the IMF highly praises and values as major contributing factors to stability."

But she acknowledged that "there are diverging views within and across countries about important issues including the management of capital flows".

She said monetary easing "could strain the capacity of those economies to absorb the potentially large flows and could lead to overheating asset price bubbles.
Bernanke's Speech

Let's take a closer look at Bernanke's speech that has Brazil clearly upset, and the IMF questioning what Bernanke is doing. Here are a few snips from "Challenges of the Global Financial System: Risks and Governance under Evolving Globalization," by Ben Bernanke in Tokyo, Japan.
Although the monetary accommodation we are providing is playing a critical role in supporting the U.S. economy, concerns have been raised about the spillover effects of our policies on our trading partners. In particular, some critics have argued that the Fed's asset purchases, and accommodative monetary policy more generally, encourage capital flows to emerging market economies. These capital flows are said to cause undesirable currency appreciation, too much liquidity leading to asset bubbles or inflation, or economic disruptions as capital inflows quickly give way to outflows.

I am sympathetic to the challenges faced by many economies in a world of volatile international capital flows. And, to be sure, highly accommodative monetary policies in the United States, as well as in other advanced economies, shift interest rate differentials in favor of emerging markets and thus probably contribute to private capital flows to these markets. I would argue, though, that it is not at all clear that accommodative policies in advanced economies impose net costs on emerging market economies, for several reasons.
Three Point Defense

Here is Bernanke's three point defense of Fed policy followed by my rebuttal.

Bernanke: First, the linkage between advanced-economy monetary policies and international capital flows is looser than is sometimes asserted.

Mish: That is a meaningless statement. Here is an equally true but also meaningless statement. The linkage between advanced-economy monetary policies and international capital flows is tighter than is sometimes asserted. The key word is "sometimes". It all depends on who is doing the assertion.

Bernanke: Second, the effects of capital inflows, whatever their cause, on emerging market economies are not predetermined, but instead depend greatly on the choices made by policymakers in those economies. In some emerging markets, policymakers have chosen to systematically resist currency appreciation as a means of promoting exports and domestic growth.

Mish: Of course it depends on how policymakers in those countries react. They can bend over and kiss Bernanke's ass or they can promote exports just like the Fed is attempting to do.

Bernanke
: Finally, any costs for emerging market economies of monetary easing in advanced economies should be set against the very real benefits of those policies. The slowing of growth in the emerging market economies this year in large part reflects their decelerating exports to the United States, Europe, and other advanced economies. Therefore, monetary easing that supports the recovery in the advanced economies should stimulate trade and boost growth in emerging market economies as well.

Mish: If monetary easing in the US was supposed to boost growth in emerging markets, then why didn't it? The fact is that all of this manipulation is undesirable, regardless of what county is doing it. Proper signals come from free market flows, not central-planner fools who have a track record of producing boom and bust cycles of ever-increasing amplitude.

In regards to the latter point, note that IMF chief Christine Lagarde speaks out of both sides of her mouth at once, each saying different things.

One side of her mouth praises the Fed, the other says "monetary easing could strain the capacity of those economies to absorb the potentially large flows and could lead to overheating asset price bubbles."

So which is it Christine?

Bernanke Calls for Emerging Market Currency Appreciation

The Wall Street Journal reports, Bernanke Calls for Emerging Market Currency Appreciation
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke encouraged policy makers in developing economies to let their currencies appreciate, delivering a strongly worded counterargument to their own critiques of the Fed.

"In some emerging markets, policy makers have chosen to systematically resist currency appreciation as a means of promoting exports and domestic growth," he argued. "However, the perceived benefits of currency management inevitably come with costs, including reduced monetary independence and the consequent susceptibility to imported inflation." Capital surges and inflation in these markets, in other words, are problems that policy makers in these markets could address themselves if they chose to, he argued.

The passage was an apparent shot at authorities in China, who intervene aggressively in foreign-exchange markets to keep their currency closely tied to the dollar, though Mr. Bernanke didn't mention any countries by name.

His comments come as other policy makers have been very critical of the Fed. Brazil's finance minister, Guido Mantega, has accused the Fed of starting a "currency war."

Mr. Bernanke has made similar arguments before, but these were especially pointed and come at a sensitive moment. The Fed in September launched a new bond-buying program that has sparked a new wave of global criticism.

Mr. Bernanke argued that central bankers in developing economies should "refrain from intervening in foreign-exchange markets, thereby allowing the currency to rise."

What's Good For the Goose

Bernanke has the gall to bitch about currency manipulation when his policies are designed to do the same thing. QE is designed to weaken the US dollar, and somehow that is OK, but not straight-up currency intervention.

Speaking of which, why is Bernanke and the entire rest of the world willing to sit back and say nothing about the biggest straight-up currency manipulation in history? I am talking of course about the Swiss National Bank and its unlimited measures to prevent the rise of the Swiss Franc vs. the Euro.

Quite frankly, they are all beggar-thy-neighbor hypocrites, which is what currency wars are all about.

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


Seth's Blog : The Acute Heptagram of Impact

The Acute Heptagram of Impact

Not as catchy a title as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, but I hope you'll walk through this with me:

I can outline a strategy for you, but if you don't have the tactics in place or you're not skilled enough to execute, it won't matter if the strategy is a good one.

Your project's success is going to be influenced in large measure by the reputation of the people who join in and the organization that brings it forward. That's nothing you can completely change in a day, but it's something that will change (like it or not) every day.

None of this matters if you and your team don't persist, and your persistence will largely be driven by the desire you have to succeed, which of course is relentlessly undermined by the fear we all wrestle with every day.

These seven elements: Strategy, Tactics, Execution, Reputation, Persistence, Desire and Fear, make up the seven points of the acute heptagram of impact. If your project isn't working, it's almost certainly because one or more of these elements aren't right. And in my experience, it's all of them. We generally pick the easiest and safest one to work on (probably tactics) without taking a deep breath and understanding where the real problem is.

Feel free to share the AHI, but please don't have it tatooed on your hip or anything.

Godinshierarchy




More Recent Articles

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.




Your requested content delivery powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 9 Thoreau Way, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA. +1.978.776.9498

 

sâmbătă, 13 octombrie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


US Runs 4th Straight $1 Trillion-Plus Budget Gap; More Stimulus? You Already Got It; Welcome to Slow Growth

Posted: 13 Oct 2012 10:31 AM PDT

If stimulus worked, then why isn't it? The US has $1 trillion deficits for four years in a row. If that's not stimulus, what is? Since it isn't working, the next question is how are we going to pay for it?

While pondering those questions, please note US runs a 4th straight $1 trillion-plus budget gap.
The United States has now spent $1 trillion more than it's taken in for four straight years.

The Treasury Department confirmed Friday what was widely expected: The deficit for the just-ended 2012 budget year — the gap between the government's tax revenue and its spending — totaled $1.1 trillion. Put simply, that's how much the government had to borrow.

It wasn't quite as ugly as last year.

Tax revenue rose 6.4 percent from 2011 to $2.45 trillion. And spending fell 1.7 percent to $3.5 trillion. As a result, the deficit shrank 16 percent, or $207 billion.

When Obama took office in January 2009, the Congressional Budget Office forecast that the deficit that year would total $1.2 trillion. It ended up at a record $1.41 trillion.

Debt piles up, year after year. It's reached $11.3 trillion — $16.2 trillion if you include money the government has borrowed from itself, mostly revenue from Social Security.

Unless something changes, the Congressional Budget Office warns, the federal debt would reach a level that is "unsustainable from both a budgetary and an economic perspective."

Over time, big government debts can damage the economy. The economists Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Carmen Reinhart of the Peterson Institute for International Economics have found that growth tends to slow sharply once national government debt reaches 90 percent of GDP.
Welcome to Slow Growth

Welcome to slow growth for as far as the eye can see. Unfavorable demographics coupled with a mountain of debt seals the fate.

Ironically, Keynesian clowns are begging for stimulus, as if we don't have it already. But no! $1 trillion in deficit spending is not enough for them. They want to spend still more as if they can overcome demographics, debt deflation, interest on the national debt, and the simple fact that the government can never spend money wisely.

Want proof? The $16 trillion in debt speaks for itself. What do we have to show for that debt other than an enormously well off 1% vs. everyone else?

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