vineri, 7 august 2015

Why Effective, Modern SEO Requires Technical, Creative, and Strategic Thinking - Whiteboard Friday - Moz Blog

Why Effective, Modern SEO Requires Technical, Creative, and Strategic Thinking - Whiteboard Friday

There's no doubt that quite a bit has changed about SEO, and that the field is far more integrated with other aspects of online marketing than it once was. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand pushes back against the idea that effective modern SEO doesn't require any technical expertise, outlining a fantastic list of technical elements that today's SEOs need to know about in order to be truly effective.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm going to do something unusual. I don't usually point out these inconsistencies or sort of take issue with other folks' content on the web, because I generally find that that's not all that valuable and useful. But I'm going to make an exception here.

There is an article by Jayson DeMers, who I think might actually be here in Seattle -- maybe he and I can hang out at some point -- called "Why Modern SEO Requires Almost No Technical Expertise." It was an article that got a shocking amount of traction and attention. On Facebook, it has thousands of shares. On LinkedIn, it did really well. On Twitter, it got a bunch of attention.

Some folks in the SEO world have already pointed out some issues around this. But because of the increasing popularity of this article, and because I think there's, like, this hopefulness from worlds outside of kind of the hardcore SEO world that are looking to this piece and going, "Look, this is great. We don't have to be technical. We don't have to worry about technical things in order to do SEO."

Look, I completely get the appeal of that. I did want to point out some of the reasons why this is not so accurate. At the same time, I don't want to rain on Jayson, because I think that it's very possible he's writing an article for Entrepreneur, maybe he has sort of a commitment to them. Maybe he had no idea that this article was going to spark so much attention and investment. He does make some good points. I think it's just really the title and then some of the messages inside there that I take strong issue with, and so I wanted to bring those up.

First off, some of the good points he did bring up.

One, he wisely says, "You don't need to know how to code or to write and read algorithms in order to do SEO." I totally agree with that. If today you're looking at SEO and you're thinking, "Well, am I going to get more into this subject? Am I going to try investing in SEO? But I don't even know HTML and CSS yet."

Those are good skills to have, and they will help you in SEO, but you don't need them. Jayson's totally right. You don't have to have them, and you can learn and pick up some of these things, and do searches, watch some Whiteboard Fridays, check out some guides, and pick up a lot of that stuff later on as you need it in your career. SEO doesn't have that hard requirement.

And secondly, he makes an intelligent point that we've made many times here at Moz, which is that, broadly speaking, a better user experience is well correlated with better rankings.

You make a great website that delivers great user experience, that provides the answers to searchers' questions and gives them extraordinarily good content, way better than what's out there already in the search results, generally speaking you're going to see happy searchers, and that's going to lead to higher rankings.

But not entirely. There are a lot of other elements that go in here. So I'll bring up some frustrating points around the piece as well.

First off, there's no acknowledgment -- and I find this a little disturbing -- that the ability to read and write code, or even HTML and CSS, which I think are the basic place to start, is helpful or can take your SEO efforts to the next level. I think both of those things are true.

So being able to look at a web page, view source on it, or pull up Firebug in Firefox or something and diagnose what's going on and then go, "Oh, that's why Google is not able to see this content. That's why we're not ranking for this keyword or term, or why even when I enter this exact sentence in quotes into Google, which is on our page, this is why it's not bringing it up. It's because it's loading it after the page from a remote file that Google can't access." These are technical things, and being able to see how that code is built, how it's structured, and what's going on there, very, very helpful.

Some coding knowledge also can take your SEO efforts even further. I mean, so many times, SEOs are stymied by the conversations that we have with our programmers and our developers and the technical staff on our teams. When we can have those conversations intelligently, because at least we understand the principles of how an if-then statement works, or what software engineering best practices are being used, or they can upload something into a GitHub repository, and we can take a look at it there, that kind of stuff is really helpful.

Secondly, I don't like that the article overly reduces all of this information that we have about what we've learned about Google. So he mentions two sources. One is things that Google tells us, and others are SEO experiments. I think both of those are true. Although I'd add that there's sort of a sixth sense of knowledge that we gain over time from looking at many, many search results and kind of having this feel for why things rank, and what might be wrong with a site, and getting really good at that using tools and data as well. There are people who can look at Open Site Explorer and then go, "Aha, I bet this is going to happen." They can look, and 90% of the time they're right.

So he boils this down to, one, write quality content, and two, reduce your bounce rate. Neither of those things are wrong. You should write quality content, although I'd argue there are lots of other forms of quality content that aren't necessarily written -- video, images and graphics, podcasts, lots of other stuff.

And secondly, that just doing those two things is not always enough. So you can see, like many, many folks look and go, "I have quality content. It has a low bounce rate. How come I don't rank better?" Well, your competitors, they're also going to have quality content with a low bounce rate. That's not a very high bar.

Also, frustratingly, this really gets in my craw. I don't think "write quality content" means anything. You tell me. When you hear that, to me that is a totally non-actionable, non-useful phrase that's a piece of advice that is so generic as to be discardable. So I really wish that there was more substance behind that.

The article also makes, in my opinion, the totally inaccurate claim that modern SEO really is reduced to "the happier your users are when they visit your site, the higher you're going to rank."

Wow. Okay. Again, I think broadly these things are correlated. User happiness and rank is broadly correlated, but it's not a one to one. This is not like a, "Oh, well, that's a 1.0 correlation."

I would guess that the correlation is probably closer to like the page authority range. I bet it's like 0.35 or something correlation. If you were to actually measure this broadly across the web and say like, "Hey, were you happier with result one, two, three, four, or five," the ordering would not be perfect at all. It probably wouldn't even be close.

There's a ton of reasons why sometimes someone who ranks on Page 2 or Page 3 or doesn't rank at all for a query is doing a better piece of content than the person who does rank well or ranks on Page 1, Position 1.

Then the article suggests five and sort of a half steps to successful modern SEO, which I think is a really incomplete list. So Jayson gives us;

Good on-site experience
Writing good content
Getting others to acknowledge you as an authority
Rising in social popularity
Earning local relevance
Dealing with modern CMS systems (which he notes most modern CMS systems are SEO-friendly)

The thing is there's nothing actually wrong with any of these. They're all, generally speaking, correct, either directly or indirectly related to SEO. The one about local relevance, I have some issue with, because he doesn't note that there's a separate algorithm for sort of how local SEO is done and how Google ranks local sites in maps and in their local search results. Also not noted is that rising in social popularity won't necessarily directly help your SEO, although it can have indirect and positive benefits.

I feel like this list is super incomplete. Okay, I brainstormed just off the top of my head in the 10 minutes before we filmed this video a list. The list was so long that, as you can see, I filled up the whole whiteboard and then didn't have any more room. I'm not going to bother to erase and go try and be absolutely complete.

But there's a huge, huge number of things that are important, critically important for technical SEO. If you don't know how to do these things, you are sunk in many cases. You can't be an effective SEO analyst, or consultant, or in-house team member, because you simply can't diagnose the potential problems, rectify those potential problems, identify strategies that your competitors are using, be able to diagnose a traffic gain or loss. You have to have these skills in order to do that.

I'll run through these quickly, but really the idea is just that this list is so huge and so long that I think it's very, very, very wrong to say technical SEO is behind us. I almost feel like the opposite is true.

We have to be able to understand things like;

Content rendering and indexability
Crawl structure, internal links, JavaScript, Ajax. If something's post-loading after the page and Google's not able to index it, or there are links that are accessible via JavaScript or Ajax, maybe Google can't necessarily see those or isn't crawling them as effectively, or is crawling them, but isn't assigning them as much link weight as they might be assigning other stuff, and you've made it tough to link to them externally, and so they can't crawl it.
Disabling crawling and/or indexing of thin or incomplete or non-search-targeted content. We have a bunch of search results pages. Should we use rel=prev/next? Should we robots.txt those out? Should we disallow from crawling with meta robots? Should we rel=canonical them to other pages? Should we exclude them via the protocols inside Google Webmaster Tools, which is now Google Search Console?
Managing redirects, domain migrations, content updates. A new piece of content comes out, replacing an old piece of content, what do we do with that old piece of content? What's the best practice? It varies by different things. We have a whole Whiteboard Friday about the different things that you could do with that. What about a big redirect or a domain migration? You buy another company and you're redirecting their site to your site. You have to understand things about subdomain structures versus subfolders, which, again, we've done another Whiteboard Friday about that.
Proper error codes, downtime procedures, and not found pages. If your 404 pages turn out to all be 200 pages, well, now you've made a big error there, and Google could be crawling tons of 404 pages that they think are real pages, because you've made it a status code 200, or you've used a 404 code when you should have used a 410, which is a permanently removed, to be able to get it completely out of the indexes, as opposed to having Google revisit it and keep it in the index.

Downtime procedures. So there's specifically a... I can't even remember. It's a 5xx code that you can use. Maybe it was a 503 or something that you can use that's like, "Revisit later. We're having some downtime right now." Google urges you to use that specific code rather than using a 404, which tells them, "This page is now an error."

Disney had that problem a while ago, if you guys remember, where they 404ed all their pages during an hour of downtime, and then their homepage, when you searched for Disney World, was, like, "Not found." Oh, jeez, Disney World, not so good.

International and multi-language targeting issues. I won't go into that. But you have to know the protocols there. Duplicate content, syndication, scrapers. How do we handle all that? Somebody else wants to take our content, put it on their site, what should we do? Someone's scraping our content. What can we do? We have duplicate content on our own site. What should we do?
Diagnosing traffic drops via analytics and metrics. Being able to look at a rankings report, being able to look at analytics connecting those up and trying to see: Why did we go up or down? Did we have less pages being indexed, more pages being indexed, more pages getting traffic less, more keywords less?
Understanding advanced search parameters. Today, just today, I was checking out the related parameter in Google, which is fascinating for most sites. Well, for Moz, weirdly, related:oursite.com shows nothing. But for virtually every other sit, well, most other sites on the web, it does show some really interesting data, and you can see how Google is connecting up, essentially, intentions and topics from different sites and pages, which can be fascinating, could expose opportunities for links, could expose understanding of how they view your site versus your competition or who they think your competition is.

Then there are tons of parameters, like in URL and in anchor, and da, da, da, da. In anchor doesn't work anymore, never mind about that one.

I have to go faster, because we're just going to run out of these. Like, come on. Interpreting and leveraging data in Google Search Console. If you don't know how to use that, Google could be telling you, you have all sorts of errors, and you don't know what they are.

Leveraging topic modeling and extraction. Using all these cool tools that are coming out for better keyword research and better on-page targeting. I talked about a couple of those at MozCon, like MonkeyLearn. There's the new Moz Context API, which will be coming out soon, around that. There's the Alchemy API, which a lot of folks really like and use.
Identifying and extracting opportunities based on site crawls. You run a Screaming Frog crawl on your site and you're going, "Oh, here's all these problems and issues." If you don't have these technical skills, you can't diagnose that. You can't figure out what's wrong. You can't figure out what needs fixing, what needs addressing.
Using rich snippet format to stand out in the SERPs. This is just getting a better click-through rate, which can seriously help your site and obviously your traffic.
Applying Google-supported protocols like rel=canonical, meta description, rel=prev/next, hreflang, robots.txt, meta robots, x robots, NOODP, XML sitemaps, rel=nofollow. The list goes on and on and on. If you're not technical, you don't know what those are, you think you just need to write good content and lower your bounce rate, it's not going to work.
Using APIs from services like AdWords or MozScape, or hrefs from Majestic, or SEM refs from SearchScape or Alchemy API. Those APIs can have powerful things that they can do for your site. There are some powerful problems they could help you solve if you know how to use them. It's actually not that hard to write something, even inside a Google Doc or Excel, to pull from an API and get some data in there. There's a bunch of good tutorials out there. Richard Baxter has one, Annie Cushing has one, I think Distilled has some. So really cool stuff there.
Diagnosing page load speed issues, which goes right to what Jayson was talking about. You need that fast-loading page. Well, if you don't have any technical skills, you can't figure out why your page might not be loading quickly.
Diagnosing mobile friendliness issues
Advising app developers on the new protocols around App deep linking, so that you can get the content from your mobile apps into the web search results on mobile devices. Awesome. Super powerful. Potentially crazy powerful, as mobile search is becoming bigger than desktop.

Okay, I'm going to take a deep breath and relax. I don't know Jayson's intention, and in fact, if he were in this room, he'd be like, "No, I totally agree with all those things. I wrote the article in a rush. I had no idea it was going to be big. I was just trying to make the broader points around you don't have to be a coder in order to do SEO." That's completely fine.

So I'm not going to try and rain criticism down on him. But I think if you're reading that article, or you're seeing it in your feed, or your clients are, or your boss is, or other folks are in your world, maybe you can point them to this Whiteboard Friday and let them know, no, that's not quite right. There's a ton of technical SEO that is required in 2015 and will be for years to come, I think, that SEOs have to have in order to be effective at their jobs.

All right, everyone. Look forward to some great comments, and we'll see you again next time for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Content marketing: how to create better content

Posted: 06 Aug 2015 01:25 AM PDT

Over the past few months I’ve had some hands on experience with content marketing and have spent time delving into articles and blogs around the topic. I have also had the benefit of attending a content marketing workshop with General Assembly London. The workshop was very beneficial and I have taken away new tips and techniques that I will definitely be using in the future.

Based on all of this, I wanted to share some of the processes and techniques I have learnt to help create better content. So, let's get started…

Where do I start?

Ever been sat at your desk with a blank screen in front of you wondering where on earth to begin?

You are not alone, it's a frustrating process creating relevant and engaging content for your readers. The content marketing workshop at General Assembly London has been particularly helpful in opening up my mind to a new way of thinking.

I have created a simple 3 step process developed from my key takeaways of the workshop displaying how I generate content ideas, beneficial for both work and my personal blog and hopefully for you too.

1) Source

Firstly you will need to decide on how your content will be sourced. You may want to recycle or curate your content, this is the easiest option if you are pushed for time. Creating original content can sometimes be time consuming but definitely worth the results. Here is a list of different sources you can use when generating content ideas:

2) Purpose

Before you begin writing your content you will need to define a clear purpose to make sure your content is targeted and reaches your ideal audience. You'll also want to determine your end goal, ask yourself what you want to achieve from developing content.

Are you wanting to build and sustain trust?
Do you want to attract new visitors/sales?
Are you looking to create customer loyalty?

All of these are great reasons to invest in content marketing, here are just a few more ideas you may want to consider when purposing your content:

Your content should provide answers

Your content should also aim to solve problems and offer solutions by providing answers that are of value to the user. Avoiding the hard product selling is all well and good but it's vital not to go off track, your story should always have a purpose and avoid becoming too general and bland. Provide answers and give your readers a reason to stay and to return in the future.

3) Format

Now that you have defined the source and purpose of your content you are ready to dive in to the next step. There are many different ways you can format your content, you will need to decide what fit is best for your business but also what is best for this particular piece of content.

To help you along here are just a few of many ideas that you can use for formatting next time you are creating a piece of content:

The power of storytelling

Storytelling is important when creating thought provoking content. It creates a relatable and engaging experience for the user, therefore having a higher likelihood of leaving a lasting impression on the reader. Connecting on a rational level is not enough, stories spark emotions and this allows brands to connect with their customers. The fact is everyone has a story to tell and all stories have a core message. By telling stories it allows for open interpretation enabling the reader to explore, learn and discover.

Focus on creating strong headlines

Headlines are the first thing that people see but are often neglected. Headlines are essentially what drive people to your content, increasing click-through rates. Your headlines will need to spark interest, to do this you can use trigger words such as 'what', 'why', 'how' or 'when'.

Numbers in headlines also work well to capture the reader's attention; e.g. '12 ways to create strong headlines'. Using strong adjectives such as 'essential' and ''creative' and other words that elicit an emotional response such as 'secrets', 'lessons' and 'principles' also work well to attract the user's attention.

Connecting your headline to your content is just as important. If the user cannot find what they are looking for, they will simply leave your page.

Tip: Create your headline after you have created your piece of content to ensure your content and headline are aligned with one another.

Summary

Overall, creating good content can be a challenge but with the right strategy in place it can ease the process. Content creation is definitely something that takes time, you also won't see results immediately. However, if you are consistent you will definitely start to see traffic increase over time.

Do you any specific techniques that you use to help you when creating content? I'd love to hear from you.

The post Content marketing: how to create better content appeared first on White.net.

The Science Behind PPC – A Chemist’s Introduction to Digital Marketing

Posted: 04 Aug 2015 12:00 AM PDT

Three weeks ago, I joined the PPC team at White. Let me be the first to put my hand up and say I never expected to end up in digital marketing. I recently graduated from Oxford University with a Masters in Chemistry. But, having hung up my lab coat and specs, I began my foray into the world of digital. Now, three weeks in, having passed my AdWords qualifications and already been given the opportunity to do some hands-on work with a number of our clients, I'm loving it.

A question I've recently been asked is "Why digital marketing? Isn't that a strange choice for a chemist?"

Well, No.

Whilst the beauty of PPC is that it lends itself as a great career for people from a number of different backgrounds, for me PPC is a science. But instead of turning up to a lab on Monday morning, I'm logging into an AdWords account. From there, however, the thought process is much the same…

Here's my take on the science behind PPC.

Step 1: Understanding your Goals

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Before beginning any science experiment it's important to have thought about what you are trying to achieve. The same is true with PPC. What is the goal of my campaign?

Am I trying to increase brand awareness, drive conversions or traffic to my website? Which Google network does my campaign best lend itself to? Will a text ad suffice or will a visual display have a greater impact?

More importantly, how will this goal effect what I put into and take from the experiment? In the same way the product of a chemical reaction affects the type of spectra you are going to collect, the goal of your PPC campaign will determine the way you will bid and also how you'll monitor its progress. You will receive a lot of data from AdWords so it's important to think ahead of time about which statistics define your progress towards your goals.

With the goal decided, next comes…

Step 2: Background Research

We used to use a motto in the lab – "A negative result is still a result" (normally as an antidote to a particularly bad day!) – but, as anyone who has worked any length of time in a lab will tell you, getting it wrong costs money. Whilst inevitable at times, it's something you're going to want to minimise in the long run.

The same applies to PPC. Every time someone clicks on your ad you are going to be charged, so you want to ensure that the majority of those clicks are producing positive results for your campaign. How can we ensure this? Well it begins with careful background research.

It helps to consider the what, where and how of your target audience.

What? What is my target audience interested in? What terms are my customers using to describe the product or service in my campaign? What's the search volume and competition for related keywords?

Where? Where are my target audience? Both geographically and online? Are they spending a lot of their time on search engines or browsing blogs and other websites related to certain topics?

How? How are my audience accessing this content online? What devices are they using?

It's likely you won't know the answer to a lot of these questions yet, but stopping to consider the answers you do know can help get your campaign off to a good start.

In the lab you also need to consider the cost and availability of your raw materials. For PPC your raw materials are your keywords. For each keyword we need to consider the relevance (to both your campaign and your audience), popularity and cost, and then weight each factor with the keywords likelihood of delivering a good ROI.

Finally, like combining your raw materials with your catalyst, solvent and conditions, how will I combine my keywords with my bids and ad creatives to create that winning combination?

Step 3: Setting Up the Experiment and Analysing the Results

With your goals decided and your background research completed it's time to set up your experiments and start collecting data.

It's helpful to use a systematic approach to setting up campaigns – grouping your products (landing pages on your website) and keywords into categories or 'ad groups' and then writing individual ads and ad extensions with those keywords in mind. Along with improving overall tidiness, this also gives you a good shot at securing that all important good quality score straight off the bat.

When monitoring your results, pay careful attention to those areas that are related to the goals you've previously decided. As your campaign progresses you'll also be able to piece more information together about your target audience answering the what, where and how questions in more detail.

Step 4: Optimising – Testing Variables

If I can pass on just one thing gleaned from the world of science it would be this: When optimising your experiments be careful not to change too many variables at once.

You're going to want to use the data you've collected from step three to improve your campaigns performance. This is best achieved through a measured temperament and a series of small changes.

There is no point going all out and adding some more keywords, changing match types, altering your bids, placements, ad text, landing pages and targeting options. With this method, you'll be unable to determine the cause of any subsequent change to your performance, good or bad, and as a result any future optimising, will be guess work.

And there you have it. Four steps straight from the lab applied to the world of PPC. Not such a strange place for a chemist after all!

The post The Science Behind PPC – A Chemist's Introduction to Digital Marketing appeared first on White.net.

Seth's Blog : Make three lists

Make three lists

When considering a new project, it might help to make three lists:

A list of everything that has to be true for this to be a good project (things you can look up, research or otherwise prove).

A list of all the skills you don't have that would be important for this project to work (things you can learn, or hire).

And a list of everything you're afraid of, or things that are essential and that are out of your control….

On paper, it's a lot easier to find the real truth.

• Email to a friend •

joi, 6 august 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Still No Illinois Budget; S&P Downgrades Chicago Convention Center Bonds by 7 Notches; Will Schools Open?
Mish for President: Officially Throwing My Hat Into the Ring; 11 Questions, 11 Answers
Reader Question: Is Gold Manipulated?

Still No Illinois Budget; S&P Downgrades Chicago Convention Center Bonds by 7 Notches; Will Schools Open?

Posted: 06 Aug 2015 01:11 PM PDT

Still No Illinois Budget Deal

The NFIB reports Still No Illinois Budget Deal.

No budget deal. Not even a one-month budget deal. Could a long summer turn into a long fall?

While Illinois has certainly had its share of extended sessions over the years, this one feels different. Normally the legislative leaders would be meeting daily, or at least weekly, to determine where they could find common ground with the governor.

Unfortunately, this time the "meetings" seem to be conducted in front of the press, with both sides unwilling to step across the proverbial line in the sand.

And, at the sake of over simplifying, Gov. Bruce Rauner has said he will "deal" with the Democrats on a tax hike if he gets his economic reform package. Democrats have said "no way" to his reforms and are now challenging him to hit the restart button and send them a new, balanced budget.

NFIB/Illinois is solidly in Rauner's corner because he is fighting for many of the issues our members have been clamoring for: real workers' compensation reform, changes in the prevailing wage laws, lawsuit reform and others. Illinois can't, once again, increase costs for small businesses without giving them some relief.

S&P Downgrades Chicago Convention Center Bonds by 7 Notches

Thanks to the budget impasse in Illinois, debt repayments on convention center bonds were not made, placing the bonds in technical default. As a result, S&P Downgrades Chicago Convention Center Bonds by 7 Notches.

Illinois' ongoing budget battle led Standard & Poor's Ratings Services and Fitch Ratings on Wednesday to drop the rating on more than $3 billion of bonds issued for an expansion of Chicago's McCormick Place convention center.

Without a state budget for the fiscal year that started July 1, the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which issued the bonds, informed bondholders on Monday that no tax revenue has been appropriated and that a $20.8 million monthly debt service deposit was not sent to the bond trustee last month.

S&P downgraded the bonds by seven notches to BBB-plus from AAA. Analyst John Sugden said the rating will remain at BBB-plus and on a watch list for another possible downgrade despite the legislation. Fitch said it downgraded the bonds to BBB-plus, from AA-minus.

In secondary market trading on Wednesday, the spread for some of the authority's bonds over Municipal Market Data's benchmark triple-A yield scale jumped to 136 basis points from 88 basis points on July 28. That involved $5 million of bonds due in 2028, according to MMD.

One Step Above Junk

BBB- is one step above junk, quite the downgrade from AAA.

The hot summer continues and both sides seem unwilling to bend. Thanks to a bill passed last year, legislators still get paid. But what about schools?

Schools Will Open

On June 24, Rauner signed HB 3763 which provides funding for elementary and secondary schools. However, the Sun Times reports Democrats warn 'Bigger Fights are Still on the Table'.

By assuring schools remain open during an ongoing budget clash, Rauner took off the table a potential political deathtrap for himself and instead turned the tables on Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago. Madigan has accused Rauner of holding the state budget hostage to Rauner's proposed reform bills. After signing the legislation, it was Rauner who said he refused to allow Madigan to hold schoolchildren hostage over the speaker's refusal to sign off on Rauner's pro-business, anti-union reforms.

Lawmakers passed a series of budget bills before May 31, but in total, it remains some $3 billion to $4 billion out of balance. The state's budget hole widened significantly in January, with the sunset of a statewide income tax increase. Rauner has said he would not sign off on a tax increase for FY2016 unless lawmakers approved changes to the workers' compensation laws and freeze property taxes.

Pressure Off

By signing a measure to fund schools, Rauner took the pressure to "do something" off himself, but also off the legislature.

Net-net I take that trade.

So we sit. And I support Rauner not working out a tax hike deal with House leader Michael Madigan unless it involves significant reforms.

Reform Wish List

Allowing Illinois municipal bankruptcies
End of collective bargaining of public unions
Scrapping prevailing wage laws
Passage of right-to-work laws
Workers' compensation legislation
End of defined benefit pension plans for new hires

Rauner needs to hold out for far more than a workers' compensation trade. And I encourage the governor to hold out until he gets most of that list, however long that takes.

Someone needs to break the hold Madigan has over Illinois, and Rauner is the only one with that chance.

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

Mish for President: Officially Throwing My Hat Into the Ring; 11 Questions, 11 Answers

Posted: 06 Aug 2015 10:32 AM PDT

The American public has questions. And unlike others running for president, I have frank answers.

And with my answers to major questions presented below, I officially throw my hat into the GOP presidential sweepstakes ring.

11 Questions US Public Wants to Ask Candidates

Gallup has an interesting article based on the premise If the American People Were Running the GOP Debate what would they ask?

Gallup claims the questions are based on issues that people say are the most important problems facing the country today.

Gallup says there are "No gotcha questions or efforts to stump the candidates or push them off their talking points, just sincere questions from the people to help them understand how these individuals who want to take over as the people's chief executive would handle the issues the people deem most important."

Gallup Questions, Mish Answers

Here are the questions, along with my answers. I believe I am the only candidate willing to answer truthfully.

First question: How do you propose to fix the U.S. economy?

Mish answer: The economy is in mess precisely because we have too many government bureaucrats as well as the Fed attempting to fix it. We do not have a failure to regulate, we have failure by regulation. Every affordable housing program failed. Obamacare failed. The Fed and the government bailed out the banks while taxpayers took the risk. The number one sponsor of income inequality that Fed chair Janet Yellen rails against is the Fed itself. The number two sponsor of income inequality is Congress. The Fed has blown bubble after bubble for the primary benefit of the already wealthy. And everywhere Congress has meddled has been a disaster. The primary examples are health care, education, and housing. None of them are affordable. We need a simpler tax code and more free market economics, because every time the government steps in, government makes things worse. And every time the Fed steps in, the Fed blows bubbles.

Second question: How do you propose to deal with the people's record-low confidence in Congress and the elected representatives they send to Washington?

Mish answer: The supreme court decision that corporations are people makes no sense. We need another challenge. Campaign finance reform is certainly needed. Gerrymandering by both political parties has to stop. That the vast majority of Congress gets reelected every election even though Congressional ratings are at record lows says volumes about how the system is rigged for incumbents.

Third question: What do you propose to do about race relations in this country?

Mish Answer: We need more prosecutors like Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters who brought murder and manslaughter charges against University of Cincinnati police Officer Ray Tensing for the traffic stop shooting death of motorist Samuel DuBose. Deters had the courage to stand up to the police unions. In addition, Deters wants to decriminalize marijuana and so do I. Most of those in prison for minor drug violations are black. When they get out, they cannot get a job because of their prison record. The system of hate and crime feeds on itself, for the benefit of prison unions, drug lords, and those allegedly seeking to stop the spread of drugs.

Fourth question: What do you propose to do about immigration and individuals living in this country illegally?

Mish answer: The first thing we need to do is close the door. The way to do that is not build a wall on the border, but instead build an economic wall: Be willing to decline free education, free medical care, and housing assistance to those who are here illegally. Once we stop the flow, we can then have an honest debate about long-time illegals. Positive factors for amnesty include those who have a steady job, speak English, own property, or have US citizen children. Negative factors include those with criminal records. Joint discussions with Mexico on border controls and repatriation issues would be wise.

Fifth question: What do you propose to do about jobs?

Mish answer: Set the corporate income tax rate to zero on income produced and held in the US. Jobs would return. Instead, US corporations stockpile money and jobs overseas in foreign tax havens. In addition, and as addressed in question one, we need more free market reforms including the elimination of the much beloved but very damaging minimum wage. The problem is not one of wages, rather the problem is Fed and government policies are such that wages people earn do not go far enough. It's important to understand the real source of the income inequality problem rather than pile on counterproductive regulations to "fix" it. In addition, we need national right-to-work legislation, the end of collective bargaining of public unions, and we need to scrap all prevailing wage laws. We also need to eliminate all tariffs. The first country that truly embraces free trade, regardless of what any other country does will be a huge winner. Jobs will flourish if the US does what I suggest.

Sixth question: How do you propose to deal with declining moral, family and ethical values in this country?

Mish answer: Get government out of the bedroom and get religion out of government. It's none of my business, or anyone else's business whether someone is gay or straight. In regards to ethics, it's a travesty of justice that not a single high-profile executive of a major corporation had to pay a dime for their role in the great financial crisis. More criminal prosecution was warranted and would occur under my administration.

Seventh question: How do you propose to deal with the federal budget deficit?

Mish answer: Slash spending across the board. Both military and entitlement spending have to share the pain. It's high time we, as a nation, have a heart-to-heart talk about what we can afford and cannot. We clearly cannot afford to be the world's policeman and at the same time keep other entitlement promises we have made. Candidates unwilling to admit this obvious fact are liars.

Eighth question: What do you propose to do about poverty?

Mish answer: My answers to the first and fifth questions explain essential parts of my program. In addition, I would create a much-needed incentive for people to get out of poverty. Right now, many would rather take free benefits than seek a job. To those, I would limit what food stamps can buy. I would add soap and detergent to the list of eligible items in order to promote cleanliness, but I would take away snacks, pop, frozen pizza, etc., and other items. Food stamps should buy very basic items, and nothing more. We need to make it uncomfortable to stay on welfare, while still providing minimum nutritional needs. We also need a big investigation of medicare fraud and disability fraud. Such proposals would be the true enactment of "compassionate conservatism".

Ninth question: How do you propose to deal with crime and violence?

Mish answer: I partially addressed this question number three. Drugs are a key item. The primary beneficiary of drug laws is the drug lords. Criminalization of drugs increases prices while creating a huge incentive for pushers to get people hooked on drugs. Take away the profit and the pushers go away. So does crime. And prisons won't overflow at enormous cost to taxpayers.

Tenth question: How do you propose to improve the education our children receive?

Mish answer: End collective bargaining of public unions. Put the kids first, not the unions. Make it easier to dismiss poor teachers.

Eleventh question: How do you propose to make healthcare more accessible and affordable?

Mish answer: Scrap Obamacare and start all over. In addition, I would scrap all tariffs on prescription drugs coming into the country. While on the subject of tariffs, I would scrap all tariffs period. Back to healthcare, the US pays the highest costs in the world for legal drugs. We need more free market capitalism and less regulation. Charging $100 per aspirin in hospital stays to smooth out the costs is not an answer. Published rates for services should be welcome. It costs $20,000 for heart operations in India that cost as much as $250,000 in the US. I would like to see health care plans that require people healthy enough to travel elsewhere for major medical procedures. Anything that genuinely promotes competition is fair game. Obamacare failed because it does nothing to reduce costs. When we start over, the focus must be on competition, not free benefits. Floating foreign hospitals on boats offshore? Why not? The more competition the better. And finally, we need a serious heart-to-heart discussion on the "right to die" instead of the existing "keep people alive at all costs" mentality.

Mish for President

With that set of answers, I officially throw my hat into the ring.

Why not? Everyone else is running.

And the prospect of Jeb Bush, Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, etc. running against Hillary Clinton is downright nauseating.

I did not give either Republicans or Democrats everything they want. In fact, I proposed many things one side or the other would have huge problems with.

Yet, I did give the middle lots of things to think about.

I believe someone could get elected on my set of answers ... IF ... one could survive the nomination process. Therein lay the problem.

One cannot be nominated by the GOP if they take on the industrial-military complex.
One cannot be nominated by the Democrats by taking on public unions.

Therefore we stew with the worst of both worlds: warmongering coupled with untenable benefit promises and slow stagnation until the next crisis.

Debate Tonight

The GOP debate is tonight at 9:00PM Eastern. I wasn't invited. But you have my answers. Let's see how the others stack up.

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

Reader Question: Is Gold Manipulated?

Posted: 06 Aug 2015 01:45 AM PDT

Reader Matt writes ...

Hello Mish,

I love your blog. I read it every day. You are my non-conspiratorial viewpoint on the economy. Your work keeping an eye on and analysis of Greece lately has been very helpful to me in understanding the way of the world.

One thing I seem to recall with your previous posts is that in general you don't think gold is manipulated like all the conspiracy advocates say it is. I was recently reading this article that makes me question your viewpoint on that. Perhaps you could comment on this article.

Thanks for your time and for your blog. I appreciate it.

Matt

Supply and Demand in the Gold and Silver Futures Markets

Matt writes in regards to Supply and Demand in the Gold and Silver Futures Markets by Paul Craig Roberts and Dave Kranzler and in general about the theory of physical gold demand vs. paper gold.

This article establishes that the price of gold and silver in the futures markets in which cash is the predominant means of settlement is inconsistent with the conditions of supply and demand in the actual physical or current market where physical bullion is bought and sold as opposed to transactions in uncovered paper claims to bullion in the futures markets. The supply of bullion in the futures markets is increased by printing uncovered contracts representing claims to gold. This artificial, indeed fraudulent, increase in the supply of paper bullion contracts drives down the price in the futures market despite high demand for bullion in the physical market and constrained supply. We will demonstrate with economic analysis and empirical evidence that the bear market in bullion is an artificial creation.

My Reply

Any time you see articles promoting the difference between physical gold and paper gold you are most likely reading a pile of crap.

I have debunked such theories many times. In fact, one can easily prove such talk is complete nonsense.

In spite of claims of shortages and price discrepancies, one can get physical gold near spot rather easily.

GoldMoney is a means.
BitGold is a new means.

One can use BitGold to accumulate "physical gold" in small amounts at 1% over spot price, up to $50,000 worth. One can use GoldMoney to acquire larger amounts at far less markup.

So, please don't tell me there is a difference in price between physical gold and paper gold. Right now, there isn't any.

Rather, there is a shortage of coins and other small denomination forms of precious metals. There is also a huge number of suppliers that depend on hype to make a living.

Here's my Reader Q&A On Bitgold.

Purposeful Lies

Claims that physical gold sells for huge percentage markups over "paper gold" are purposeful lies or blatant ignorance. There are no other options.

Such statements don't imply there is no manipulation. In fact, manipulation is everywhere in my opinion, just not in all the ways the conspiracy nutcases proclaim.

For example, there is no reason to believe the Fed is directly manipulating gold. Indirectly, however, the Fed certainly is. By suppressing interest rates and supporting the stock market, the Fed has indeed changed sentiment towards gold.

In regards to dumping futures, the Fed is certainly not directly behind that process either. But what about the market makers?

They could be, but I still suggest they do not care one way or another which way something goes as long as they make a profit. With that thinking, it would not surprise me one bit if the MMs manipulated gold to its previous high with the GATA advocates screaming all the way that the MMs were holding the price down.

It's tiring to hear the exact same manipulation charges no matter what gold is doing. And such screaming has gone on for years, even though gold has quadrupled since 2000 (certainly far more than the major stock market indices).

That said, someone sure benefits from these the middle of the night plunges at illiquid times.

So put me in the group wondering who that is, and what if any laws were violated in doing so. And if laws were violated, let's have an accounting, as well as a look at the laws.

I pinged my thoughts off Pater Tenebrarium at the Acting Man blog. He is one of my teachers on Austrian economics. He responded ...

"I agree completely. It is a waste of time to chase after the conspiracy theories. The overnight market dumps of futures definitely represent short term manipulation, but I don't believe it's illegal."

To that, let me ask, if it's illegal, should it be illegal?

To answer that, we need to know who did it and why. If it was a hedge fund seeking profits the answer may be different than if it was a mutual fund betting against the interests of those for whom it has a fiduciary conflict of interest.

We Waz Robbed

What isn't manipulated?

If the manipulation is illegal, let's see the case. And if there is a case, we then need to discuss if such actions should be illegal.

Purposely betting against clients you are supposed to be representing would cross the line.

Admission

Even though I was on the right side of the inflation/deflation debate, with hyperinflationists and death-to-the-dollar advocates looking extremely foolish along the way, I failed to see what "QE manipulation" would mean for gold.

And let's not pull punches: QE is blatant manipulation. To get rid of that kind of manipulation, one would need to get rid of the Fed.

Questions of the Day

Did anyone blaming "manipulation" fail to know the Fed existed? That the Fed supports the markets with QE? With talk? With suppressed interest rates?

The "we waz robbed" claim primarily comes from people who simply do not want to admit they analyzed the market poorly over the past two years.

I prefer to admit that I failed to see the complete implications of QE rather than make self-serving conspiratorial claims or plow into assets that I know are ridiculously overpriced.

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

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vineri, 7 august 2015