sâmbătă, 11 aprilie 2015

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Pablo Picasso's Art Through The Ages

Posted: 10 Apr 2015 09:15 PM PDT

Pablo Picasso was just never satisfied with staying the same because he knew that in order to create great art, you have to evolve as an artist.






















Seth's Blog : Five steps to digital hygiene

Five steps to digital hygiene

Washing your hands helps you avoid getting sick.

Putting fattening foods out of your reach helps you stay slim.

And the provocations and habits you encounter in the digital world keep you productive (or drive you crazy):

  1. Turn off mail and social media alerts on your phone.
  2. Don't read the comments. Not on your posts or on the posts of other people. Not the reviews and not the trolls.
  3. De-escalate the anger in every email exchange.
  4. Put your phone in the glove compartment while driving.
  5. Spend the most creative hour of your day creating, not responding.

Each habit is hard to swallow and easy to maintain. Worth it.

       

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vineri, 10 aprilie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Incredible Tornado Footage from Illinois, Yesterday

Posted: 10 Apr 2015 04:05 PM PDT

A tornado touched down yesterday in McHenry Illinois, less than 10 miles from where Liz and I live. Tornadoes hit multiple locations.

Here is some incredible footage of a tornado tipping a truck over and debris flying everywhere. This footage is near Rochelle, Illinois.



"Tornado developed west of I-39 and widened as it moved toward the highway. The tornado entered it's wedge stage while crossing the highway and doing significant damage. The tornado then moved away toward the Fairdale community where at least one fatality has taken place and destruction took place. This large tornado churned across a long track and the National Weather Service will survey the damage starting tomorrow. Footage shot by Tyler Olson of Live Storms Media."

Link if video does not play: 4-9-15 Rochelle, Illinois Tornado.

More Tornado Footage



"Around 7pm, we began documenting a tornado forming near the Rochelle, IL area. We briefly lost visual while positioning closer to the tornado, but began filming again when we had visual of the massive tornado. We continued to follow and document the tornado the northeast until it dissipated south of Belvidere, IL at ~7:40pm CDT."

Link if video does not play: Rochelle to Kirkland, IL Complete Tornado Footage

Footage of Homes Being Demolished



Watch a huge tornado directly hit huge grain bins. I am surprised they survived the hit. With debris flying everywhere, some nearby homes didn't.

Link if video does not play: Rochelle, Illinois Tornado April 9 2015

Thanks to reader Mark for the links.

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

Phone Tax Scam by "Officer Melvin" Allegedly with IRS

Posted: 10 Apr 2015 12:31 PM PDT

It is tax season and that means it's time for tax fraud and tax fraud scams. Today I received a voice mail allegedly from "officer Melvin" with the IRS.

"We have received a legal petition notice against you concerning a tax division. So before we file a case against you, and before you get arrested, kindly call us back on our callback number. The number to reach me is 202-684-6608. I repeat 202-684-6608. Do not disregard this message. Do return the call. Again, this is officer Melvyn Betchett with the Internal Revenue service. Thank you and have a great day."

Here is the WAV file if you wish to hear the short 33 second fraud scheme:
Tax Fraud WAV File.

The file may or may not play automatically. It did not for me. Instead I saw this box when I hit the forward arrow to attempt to play.



The download did work, and Windows Media Player played it automatically just fine. Here is the sharable link if you wish to download the file:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4QF4MBBMA0kT2diSnFZOXM1Tjg/view?usp=sharing

The IRS sends bills. The IRS does not make phone calls threatening arrest, or ask for your bank account number or debit card number.

I notified the authorities. You can do so at the Treasury Inspector General IRS Impersonation Site.

Hopefully, the audio will allow the authorities to catch crook "Melvin" soon enough.

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

France vs. Sydney Australia Property: What Will $600k to $1M Buy?

Posted: 10 Apr 2015 10:49 AM PDT

Here's an article that came my way from reader Robert who lives in Australia.

The article compares the price of entire "castles" in various cities in France to 1-3 bedroom units in or near Sydney, Australia.

The term castle appears to be somewhat of a misnomer, but certainly the French properties are "castles" compared to the single units.

The US word would more likely be estate or mansion rather than castle.

Please consider 10 French Castles are Cheaper than Sydney Units.

Notes 

  1. I show text and images of 4 of the 10 comparisons in the article.
  2. The first image in each set is the price of the entire building in France. 
  3. The second image in each set is the price for a single unit in Australia.
  4. The prices appear to be Australian dollars, not US dollars. 
  5. The conversion rates from euros in each French listing is inaccurate

For example the first image below says €422,940 or $597,184. My calculation says AU $654,070 or $502,060 US dollars. The rest of the images are similarly wrong.

Picardie France — $597,184 (€422,940)



This picture-perfect five-bedroom mansion in Picardie near the town of Abbeville is less than 200kms from Paris. It is on more than 6000sq m of land and features a billiard room and grand cellar.

Cronulla Australia — $620,000+



Poitou France — $667,146 (€472,500)



There are nine bedrooms in this grand chateau in the Poitou Charentes region of south western France. It has 1610sq m of landscaped gardens, ceiling medallions, a rotunda dining room, a conservatory and a circular kitchen.

Campsie Australia — $689,000+



In the heart of Campsie on Sixth Ave, a three-bedroom unit in this plain Jane unit block has parking, built-in wardrobes and two balconies.

Vienne France — $732,801 (€519,000)



This elaborate chateau near Vienne has 14 bedrooms, seven reception rooms, a pool, a chapel, a kitchen garden a double-length drawing room and library all on a 1.4ha estate.

Zetland Australia — $760,000+



Picardie France — $972,833 (€689,000)



Just 138kms from Paris, this manor house in La Fere has nine bedrooms, a wine bar, disco, cinema, library and cellar inside, and out the back there is a pool, pool house, sauna, nine-hole golf course and petanque area.

Elizabeth Bay Australia — $999,000+



With a million-dollar price tag, this one-bedroom apartment, has no parking and no balcony, but the Elizabeth Bay apartment on Onslow Ave is all about location, location, location.

Mish Comments

$1,000,000 for one bedroom, no parking, and no balcony vs. a 9 bedroom manor house with a pool, pool house, sauna, nine-hole golf course and petanque area.

I had to look that up. Pétanque (French pronunciation: ​[petɑ̃k] is a form of boules where the goal is to throw hollow metal balls as close as possible to a small wooden ball called a cochonnet (literally "piglet") or jack, while standing inside a starting circle with both feet on the ground. The current form of the game originated in 1907 in La Ciotat, in Provence, France.

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

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Full Camel In A Giant Oven

Posted: 10 Apr 2015 12:06 PM PDT

In Xinjiang in northwest China, a 450kg (990lb) camel was coated in a lurid yellow marinade before it was lowered by crane into a 6m-tall tandoor kiln.
















via people.com

The Rock's Insane Diet Has Him Eating 10 Pounds Of Food A Day

Posted: 10 Apr 2015 11:43 AM PDT

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson takes everything to the next level even his diet. It's recently been revealed that he consumes up to 10 pounds of food a day in order to maintain his physique.





Meal 1:

10 oz cod
2 whole eggs
2 cups oatmeal

Meal 2:

8 oz cod
12 oz sweet potato
1 cup veggies

Meal 3:

8 oz chicken
2 cups white rice
1 cup veggies

Meal 4:

8 oz cod
2 cups rice
1 cup veggies
1 tbsp fish oil

Meal 5:

8 oz steak
12 oz baked potato Spinach salad

Meal 6:

10 oz cod
2 cups rice Salad

Meal 7:

30 grams casein protein
10 egg-white omelet
1 cup veggies
1 tbsp omega-3 fish oil

Notes:

► "I do cardio 4–5 a.m., then take 4–6 scoops of Optimum's Amino Energy."
► "After cardio I eat breakfast [Meal no. 1]."
► "After breakfast I hit the iron for 90 minutes."
► "Post-workout I have 60 grams Optimum Nutrition's Platinum Hydrowhey with 15 grams of glutamine."
► "Thiry minutes later I consume 32 oz of Gatorade.


Elements of Personalization & How to Perform Better in Personalized Search - Whiteboard Friday - Moz Blog


Elements of Personalization & How to Perform Better in Personalized Search - Whiteboard Friday

Posted on: Friday 10 April 2015 — 02:15

Posted by randfish

From information about your location and device to searches you've performed in the past, Google now has a great deal of information it can use to personalize your search results. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains to what extent they're likely using that information and offers five ways in which you can improve your performance in personalized search.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard.

Elements of Personalization 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 we're going to chat personalization, talking about the elements that can influence personalization as well as some of the tactical things that web marketers and SEOs specifically can do to help make their sites and their content more personalized friendly.

How personalization works

So, what are we talking about when we're talking about personalization? Well, Google is actually personalizing by a large number of things and probably even a few things I have not listed here that they have not been totally transparent or forthcoming about.

Logged-in visitors

The things that we know about include things like:

  • Location. Where is the searcher?
  • Device. What type of device and operating system is the searcher using?
  • Browser. We have seen some browser specific and operating specific forms of searches. Search history, things that you have searched for before and potentially what you've clicked on in the results.
  • Your email calendar. So if you're using Gmail and you're using Google Calendar, Google will pull in things that they find on your calendar and data from your email and potentially show that to you inside of search results when you search for very particular things. For example, if you have an upcoming plane flight and you search for that flight number or search around that airline, they may show you, you have an upcoming flight tomorrow at 2:07 p.m. with Delta airlines.
  • Google+. A lot of folks are thinking of it as dead, but it's not particularly dead, in fact no more so than the last year and a half or so. Google+ results will still appear at the bottom of your search results very frequently if you're logged in and anyone in your Google+ stream that you follow has shared any link or any post in Google+ with the keywords that you've searched for. That's a very broad matching still. Those results can appear higher if Google determines that there's more relevancy behind that. You'll also see Google+ data for people you're connected to when you search for them, that kind of thing.
  • Visit history. If you have visited a domain while logged into an account many times in the past, I'm not exactly sure how many times or what sort of engagement they look at precisely, but they may bias those results higher. So they might say, "Gosh, you know, you really seem to like eBay when you do shopping. We're going to show eBay's results for you higher than we would normally show them in an incognito window or for someone who's not logged in or someone who isn't as big an eBay fan as you are."
  • Bookmarks. It's unclear whether they're using just the bookmarks from Google Chrome or the personalization that carries over from Chrome instances or the fact that bookmarks are also things that people visit frequency. There's some discussion about what the overlap is there. Not too important for our purposes.

Logged-out visitors

If you are logged out, they still have a number of ways of personalizing, and you can still observe plenty of personalization. Your results may be very different from what you see in a totally new browser with no location applied to it, on a different device with different search and visit history.

Now, remember when I say "Logged out," I'm not talking about an incognito window. An incognito window would bias against showing anything based on search history or visit history. However, location and device appear to still remain intact. So a mobile device is going to get sometimes different results than a desktop device. Different locations will get different results than other locations. All that kind of stuff.

Now you might ask, "Quantify this for me, Rand." Like let's say we took a sample set of 500 keywords and we ran them through personalized versus non-personalized kinds of searches. What's the real delta in the results ordering and the difference of the results that we see?

Well, we actually did this. It's almost 18 months old at this point, but Doctor Pete did this in late 2013. Using the MozCast data set, he checked crawlers, Google Webmaster Tools, personalized logged in and incognito. You know what? The delta was very small for personalized versus incognito. I suspect that number's probably gone up, which means this correlation number -- 1.0 would be perfect correlation -- 0.977 very, very high correlation. So we're seeing really similar results for personalized versus incognito at least 18 months ago.

I suspect that's probably changed. It'll probably continue to change a little bit. However, I would also say that it probably won't drop that low. I would not expect that you would ever find that it'll be lower than 0.8, maybe even 0.9, just because so much of search is intentional navigation and so much of it is also not fully capable to be personalized in truly intelligent ways. The results are the best results already. There's not a whole lot of personalization that might be added in besides potentially showing your Google+ follows or something at the bottom and things based on your visit history.

Performing better in personalized search

So let's say you want to perform better in personalized search. You have a belief that, hey, a lot of people are getting personalized bias in my particular SERP sets. We're very local focused, or we're very biased by social kinds of data, or we're seeing a lot of people are getting biased in their results to our competitors because of their search history and visit history. What are things that I need to think about?

Get potential searchers to know and love your brand before the query

The answer is you can perform better in personalized search in general, overall by thinking about things like getting potential searchers to know and love your brand and your domain before they ever make the query. It turns out that if you've gotten people to your site previously through other forms of navigation and through searches, you may very well find yourself higher up in people's personalized results as a consequence of the fact that they visited you in the past. We don't know all the metrics that go into that or what precisely Google uses, but we could surmise that there are probably some bars around engagement, visit history, how many times, how frequently in a certain time frame, all that kind of stuff that goes into that search and visit history.

Likewise, if you can bias people here and rank higher, you may be getting more and more benefit. It can be a snowball effect. So if you keep showing up higher in their rankings, they keep clicking you, they keep finding information that's useful, they don't need to go back to the search results and click somebody else. You're just going to keep ranking in more and more of their queries as they investigate things. For those of you who are full funnel types of content servers, you're thinking about people as they're doing research and educating themselves all the way down to the transaction level with their searches, this is a very exciting opportunity.

Be visible in all the relevant locations for your business

For location bias, you want to make sure that you are relevant in all the locations for your business or your service. A lot of times that means getting registered with Google Maps and Google+ local business for maps -- I can't remember what it's called exactly. I think it's Google+ Local for Business -- and making sure that you are not only registered with those places but then also that your content is helping to serve the areas that you serve. Sometimes that can even mean a larger radius than what Google Maps might give you. You can rank well outside of your specific geographies with content that serves those regions, even if Google is not perfectly location connecting you via your address or your Maps registration, those kinds of things.

Get those keyword targets dialed in

Getting keyword targeting dialed in, this is important all the time. Where a lot of people fall down in this is they think, "Hey, I only need to worry about keyword targeting on the pages that are specifically intended to be search landing pages. I'm trying to get search traffic to these pages." But personalization bias means that if you can get keyword targeting dialed in even on pages that are not necessarily search landing pages, Google might say, "Hey, this wouldn't normally rank for someone, but because you've already earned that traffic, because that person is already biased to your brand, your domain, we're going to surface that higher than we ordinarily would." That is a powerful potential tool in your arsenal, hence it's useful to think about keyword targeting on a page specific level even for pages that you might not think would earn search traffic normally.

Share content on Google+ and connect with your potential customers

Google+ still, in my opinion, a very valuable place to earn personalized traffic for two reasons. One, of course you can get people actually over to your site. You may be able to get potential traffic through Google+. You can appear in those search results right at the bottom for anyone who follows you or anyone who's connected to you via email and other kinds of Google apps. You may have also noticed that when you email with someone, if they're using Gmail and their Google+ account is connected, you see in the little right-hand corner there that they'll show their last post or their last few posts sometimes on Google+. Again, also a powerful way to connect with folks and to share the content as you're emailing back and forth with them.

For brands, that also shows up in search results sometimes. There's the brand box on the right-hand side, kind of like Knowledge Graph, and it'll show your last few posts from Google+. So again, more and more opportunities to be visible if you're doing Google+.

I am also going to surmise that, in the future, Google might do stuff with this around Twitter. They just finished re-inking that deal where Twitter gives their full fire hose access to Google and Google starts displaying more and more of that stuff in search results. So I think probably still valuable to think about how that connection might form. Definitely still valuable directly to do it in Google+ even if you're not getting any traffic from Google+.

Be multi-device friendly and usable

Then the last one, of course, being multi-device friendly and usable. This is something where Moz has historically fallen down, and obviously we're going to be fixing that in the months ahead. I actually hope we fix it after April 21st so we can see whether we really take a hit when they do that mobile thing. I think that would be a noble sacrifice, and then we can see how we perform thereafter and then fix it and see if we can get back in Google's good graces after that.

So given these tactics and some of this knowledge about how personalized search works, hopefully you can take advantage of personalized search and help inform your teams, your bosses, your clients about personalization and the potential impacts. Hopefully we'll be redoing some of those studies, too, to be able to tell you, hey, how much more is personalization affecting SEO over the last 18 months and in the years ahead.

All right, everyone. Thanks again for joining us, 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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Seth's Blog : Why not?

Why not?

If technology gives you the chance to speak up, build a platform and help show the way, why not use it?

If someone offers you a project or a job with more leverage and the chance to both learn and teach, why not take it?

If you can learn something new, more efficiently than ever before, if the opportunity to leap presents itself, why not?

Now is a good time.

       

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joi, 9 aprilie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Milestones in Bond Insanity: Negative 10-Year Yield on Swiss Bonds, Mexico Sell 100-Year Bonds Denominated in Euros; Are 1000-Year Bonds Next?

Posted: 09 Apr 2015 10:47 PM PDT

Milestones in Bond Insanity

Two events happened this week for the first time: negative yield on 10-year government bonds and 100-year bonds by Mexico denominated in euros.

Please consider Swiss, Mexican Bond Deals Represent Milestones for Debt.
Until Wednesday, no country had ever sold 10-year debt that gives investors a yield of below 0%. And no country had ever issued a 100-year bond denominated in euros.

But in the latest stark sign of how easy the era of easy money has become, Switzerland on Wednesday sold 10-year bonds that investors are actually paying to hold, while Mexico lined up a rare transaction to borrow euros it promised to repay a century from now—at a yield of 4.2%

The two extraordinary milestones reflect Europe's extraordinary environment.

Reserve prepares to raise interest rates, the European Central Bank is forcefully driving them down. The Swiss National Bank, eager to keep its currency from soaring too far above its eurozone neighbors', has itself shoved interest rates below zero.

The consequence is a strange collection of monetary phenomena: The ECB has begun charging commercial banks to keep money on deposit. Denmark's central bank has furiously printed kroner to mitigate a flood of capital into the country. Even Spain, which once looked on the cusp of fiscal collapse, is able to sell short-term Treasury bills that give investors back less principal than they started with.

In January, Switzerland's central bank, worried about the consequences of buying huge volumes of euros to keep the franc suppressed, scrapped its upper limit on the franc and cut deposit rates to minus 0.75%. Foreign-exchange markets were thrown into turmoil. Given that putting cash on deposit costs money, the very modestly negative yield of the new 10-year bond is marginally attractive. A similar story is playing out in the eurozone, where the ECB has set its deposit rate at minus 0.2% and aggressively bought bonds.

Mexico's interest in selling the bond at 100 years was partly to extend the maturity of its debt stock, but also to expand its presence in the euro bond market, said Alejandro Díaz de León, head of public credit at the Mexican Finance Ministry. "By placing debt at an exceptionally long maturity, it helps to consolidate Mexico as a widely accepted issuer," he said.

The sale wrapped up Mexico's foreign capital-market financing needs for 2015, and comes as the government moves to reduce spending this year and next because of lower oil prices and expectations of tougher financing conditions in the future—particularly when the Fed begins raising interest rates.

Jim Esposito, co-head of global financing at Goldman Sachs, who worked on the deal, said demand was "driven by European money managers" but also saw some U.S. buyers.
Huge Risks

Will the euro even be around in 100 years?

Even if the euro is around in 100 years, what countries will be in it? The value of the euro will vary widely if the answer is peripheral Europe vs. Germany, Austria, etc. Mexico is taking a gamble on this.

Of course, if the peso rises vs. euro, Mexico comes out ahead.

Euros vs. Mexican Pesos



Analyzing the Risk

In April of 2001 one euro bought 7.7 pesos. Today, one euro buys 16.1 pesos. That is a decline of 52%. Had Mexico done this transaction in 2001, it would be 52% in the hole on the currency move alone. And given that yields are lower now, no doubt it would be hugely underwater on interest as well.

Issuing debt or taking on debt in foreign countries is risky business. Just ask all those in Poland, Hungary, or the Czech Republic who took out mortgages in Swiss Francs. Many will lose their homes because debt payments have skyrocketed along with the soaring Swiss Franc.

As recently as 2009, one euro bought 20 Mexican pesos. Looking ahead, is it so hard to believe the Peso will not sink to that level or even a bit further, say to 25. A move to 25 pesos per euro would put Mexico 36% in the hole on currency fluctuations, and it would only collect 4.2% in interest.

I have no particular insight into which way the move will go, at least in a stated timeframe. I am simply highlighting the currency risk. There is interest rate risk as well, but at least that is defined.

Whether this deal works out well and for whom, depends on currency fluctuations.

The big risk in a eurozone breakup. If Germany exits the euro (which I think it should do, but probably won't), Mexico wins big as the euro would sink vs. the peso. If Greece, Spain, and Portugal leave the eurozone, the euro could easily strengthen by a lot, perhaps after a bit of volatility.

Are 1000-Year Bonds Next?

Given that countries are issuing bonds in foreign currencies for 100 years, why not 1000 years, or perpetual bonds?

After all, no country really ever intends to pay back this debt in the first place. Debt just grows, and grows, and grows.

A currency crisis is on deck, but few see it coming.

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

Rauner Seeks Insurance Program Changes for Illinois Retirees; Michigan Changes Upheld in 6-0 State Supreme Court Decision

Posted: 09 Apr 2015 02:21 PM PDT

Illinois state pension and retirement plans are in dire straits. The only way to fix the problems is with plan changes.

Michigan did that in 2012. And in a 6-0 decision yesterday, the Detroit Free Press reported the Michigan Supreme Court, rejected arguments from unions, and upheld the 2012 state law requiring teachers to put more of their pay toward their pension plans or face cuts to benefits.
The Michigan Supreme Court, rejecting arguments from unions, has upheld a 2012 state law requiring teachers and other school employees to put more of their pay toward their pension plans or face cuts to benefits such as post-retirement health care.

The law, backed by Gov. Rick Snyder and the Republican-controlled Legislature, was intended to cut an estimated $45-billion unfunded liability in the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System by more than $15 billion.

The American Federation of Teachers and the Michigan Education Association unions argued the law impaired contracts and amounted to uncompensated takings of pension benefits.

But both the Michigan Supreme Court and the appeals court said the law doesn't violate a Michigan constitutional provision protecting earned pension benefits, because only future benefits are affected. Also, unlike an earlier law that mandated 3% contributions toward health care, the 2012 law provides an opt-out provision, the court said.
Good News For Illinois

What passes constitutional muster in Michigan may not do so in Illinois, but the unanimous ruling provides a model for what may work elsewhere. This is good news for all cash-strapped states.

In Illinois, Gov. Bruce Rauner Wants Changes to Insurance Programs for State Workers, Retirees.
Health insurance for active state workers and retirees is being targeted for big savings in Gov. Bruce Rauner's budget plan.

"By bringing health care benefits more in line with those received by the taxpayers who pay for them, we save an additional $700 million," Rauner said Wednesday in his budget speech.

His budget also calls for an end to state subsidies to the health insurance programs for retired downstate teachers and community college workers.
Right Path

Governor Rauner is on the right path. Benefits must be cut. For starters, Illinois needs to move all employees going forward into 410K type plans. Next, Illinois needs to address spiraling costs for those in defined benefit plans.

Michigan passed one law the Michigan Supreme Court rejected, and a second one in 2012 law that was upheld unanimously. Illinois would be wise to pursue changes that are likely to be upheld in court. We now have at least one model that works.

For more on problems in Illinois and what to do about them, please see ...


Illinois desperately needs to address the root of its fiscal problems: untenable pension benefits and promises.

Massive proposed tax hikes are not the answer. Tax hikes will do nothing but make already uncompetitive Illinois even more uncompetitive.

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

Russia Forced to Do Right Thing? Buy Russia?

Posted: 09 Apr 2015 12:55 PM PDT

Here's an interesting opinion article on MarketWatch: Sanctions, drop in oil price best things that ever happened to Russia.
A round of punitive sanctions designed to cripple the economy. A collapse in the price of its key commodity. A currency in freefall and a central bank hiking rates to emergency levels while a corrupt, authoritarian government embarks on foreign adventures at potentially huge expense. For the whole of 2014, the Russian economy was the most toxic in the world, with one calamity coming hard after another.

But here is something nobody expected. In the first quarter of this year, Russia was doing a bit better than anyone could have forecast. We learned last week that the economy managed to grow by 0.4% in the latest quarter, compared to the zero growth or the outright recession that most economists had penciled in. The ruble is the best-performing currency of the last three months. Even the Moscow stock index has started to recover.

In reality, sanctions and a fall in the oil price might have been the best thing to have happened to Russia since the invention of double-glazing. Why? Because the problem for a country rich in resources and well-educated, creative people has been an over-reliance on energy, and a tight-knit kleptocracy that distributes the wealth it generates. It has failed to create its own industrial economy.

The predictions of collapse have turned out to be wide of the mark.

Putin is still in power, and still in possession of Crimea. Nor is there much sign of anything more than short-term damage. A 0.4% quarterly growth rate is not fantastic, but it is better than France, and roughly the same as Germany or Japan.

True, the forecasts are for gross domestic product to fall for this year — the IMF suggest it will contract by more than 3% — but those may well turn out to wrong as well. What is certainly true is that the economy has not been devastated.

The interesting question, however, is whether it might actually be strengthened. That might sound odd. But the main problem for the Russian economy over the past decade was an over-reliance on oil revenues, and a state-led kleptocracy, which stifled the emergence of a productive domestic economy.

the big reason might well be what plenty of analysts over the years have described as "the curse of oil." The black stuff generates lots of easy money, and by filling the state coffers with cash, it makes it relatively easy for a corrupt, authoritarian regime to entrench itself in power. That has been seen in countries ranging from Saudi Arabia, to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. Putin's Russia was no different.

Without oil, Russia will have to develop its own industries. And with sanctions slowing down imports, there will be space for entrepreneurs to move into. The state will become less powerful, because it will have lower oil revenues, and so will the oligarchs. Russia will have the opportunity to gradually replace crony capitalism with competitive capitalism. In the medium term, that can only be for the better.

Of course, just because it might happen does not mean that it will.

Keep in mind as well that this is one of the cheapest markets in the world. The Moscow index trades on a price-to-earnings ratio of 6.7, less even than Greece. For an economy that is solvent, and growing at 0.4%, that is a bargain. Sanctions and a collapsing oil price were meant to torpedo Russia — but they may end up doing it a favor.
I sent the article to Pater Tenebrarum at Acting Man. He replied:
It seems Medvedev and his free-market economic advisors have convinced Putin to do just that. It was not reported in the Western press, but a few months ago Putin announced that all inspections of companies will be suspended for at least three years and that company start-ups will be free of taxation for their first two years. Add to that the 13% flat tax, and there could be quite an effect. According to Medvedev's advisors, Russian GDP could improve by $200 billion per year by curbing corruption alone. Since the inspections were the main avenue of corruption, their suspension is a very significant step. Admittedly, the jury is still out on the success of these measures, but they have been taken, and it was in reaction to the sanctions. Also, the author is correct: industry surveys in Russia show that companies see import substitution as a huge growth area over the coming year and have accordingly already increased investment and production.
I bought into Russia near the peak of the panic, but not enough. I have plans to add more.

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

Readers Question Free Trade; Does Nonreciprocal Free Trade Cost Jobs? Paul Krugman "Was" Right!

Posted: 09 Apr 2015 01:00 AM PDT

I received many questions and comments regarding Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership Fiasco vs. Mish's Proposed Free Trade Alternative.

While most do see Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a fiasco, many question my alternative proposal:

An excellent free trade agreement would consist of precisely one line of text: All tariffs and all government subsidies on all goods and services will be eliminated effective June 1, 2015".

Even some "free trade" advocates disagree with my follow-up statement "I firmly believe the first country that fully embraces free trade would come out ahead, regardless of whether or not any other country reciprocates."

Worry Over Loss of Manufacturing Jobs

Reader Pina is worried over the loss of jobs. He writes ...
I realize that most economists advocate tariff free trade but how is this in the interests of workers who had careers in the rust belt who have watched their jobs migrate to China, India and other countries. Yes, American multinational corporations like the cheap labor and modest regulation in the third world but is this really best for the American worker?
Seen and Unseen

For starters, employment in manufacturing and some service industries is down everywhere due to hardware and software robotics. Tariffs or not, many manufacturing jobs have vanished and are never coming back.

Initially, those jobs left the US because of wage differentials, now they are simply gone.

Moreover, and more importantly, it is a mistake to look at manufacturing (or any trade) in a vacuum. We lost manufacturing jobs, but cheap goods from China provided millions of trucking and shipping jobs and allowed the expansion of massive numbers of retail jobs and construction jobs to build all the stores and malls everywhere.

Standards of living have soared. Even the poorest of families tend to have cell phones, internet services, and huge digital TVs.

Were the price of goods to double to save manufacturing jobs how many could afford to buy such things?

Productivity and Free Trade

The Library of Economics and Free Trade has an excellent article on the subject. It's title is simply Free Trade.

Here are a few snips, emphasis in italics is mine. I encourage you to read the entire article.
In running our personal affairs, virtually all of us exploit the advantages of free trade and comparative advantage without thinking twice. For example, many of us have our shirts laundered at professional cleaners rather than wash and iron them ourselves. Anyone who advised us to "protect" ourselves from the "unfair competition" of low-paid laundry workers by doing our own wash would be thought looney. Common sense tells us to make use of companies that specialize in such work, paying them with money we earn doing something we do better. We understand intuitively that cutting ourselves off from specialists can only lower our standard of living.

Adam Smith's insight was that precisely the same logic applies to nations. Here is how he put it in 1776: "It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy.. . . If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage."

Spain, South Korea, and a variety of other countries manufacture shoes more cheaply than America can. They offer them for sale to us. Shall we buy them, as we buy the services of laundry workers, with money we earn doing things we do well—like writing computer software and growing wheat? Or shall we keep "cheap foreign shoes" out and purchase more expensive American shoes instead? It is pretty clear that the nation as a whole must be worse off if foreign shoes are kept out—even though the American shoe industry will be better off.

If cheap Chinese labor was stealing American jobs, why did the theft intensify as the wage gap fell? The answer, of course, is that Chinese productivity was growing at enormous rates. The remarkable upward march of Chinese productivity both raised Chinese wages relative to American wages and turned China into a world competitor. To think that we can forestall the inevitable by closing our borders is to participate in a cruel self-deception. Nor should there be any worry about failing to forestall the inevitable. The fact that another country becomes wealthier does not mean that Americans must become poorer.

A slogan occasionally seen on bumper stickers argues, "Buy American, save your job." This is grossly misleading for two main reasons. First, the costs of saving jobs in this particular way are enormous. Second, it is doubtful that any jobs are actually saved in the long run.

Many estimates have been made of the cost of "saving jobs" by protectionism. While the estimates differ widely across industries, they are almost always much larger than the wages of the protected workers. For example, one study in the early 1990s estimated that U.S. consumers paid $1,285,000 annually for each job in the luggage industry that was preserved by barriers to imports, a sum that greatly exceeded the average earnings of a luggage worker. That same study estimated that restricting foreign imports cost $199,000 annually for each textile worker's job that was saved, $1,044,000 for each softwood lumber job saved, and $1,376,000 for every job saved in the benzenoid chemical industry. Yes, $1,376,000 a year!

While Americans may be willing to pay a price to save jobs, spending such enormous sums is plainly irrational. If you doubt that, imagine making the following offer to any benzenoid chemical worker who lost his job to foreign competition: we will give you severance pay of $1,376,000—not annually, but just once—in return for a promise never to seek work in the industry again. Can you imagine any worker turning down the offer? Is that not sufficient evidence that our present method of saving jobs is mad?

But the situation is actually worse, for a little deeper thought leads us to question whether any jobs are really saved overall. It is more likely that protectionist policies save some jobs by jeopardizing others. Why? First, protecting one American industry from foreign competition imposes higher costs on others. For example, quotas on imports of semiconductors sent the prices of memory chips skyrocketing in the 1980s, thereby damaging the computer industry. Steel quotas force U.S. automakers to pay more for materials, making them less competitive.

On balance the conclusion seems clear and compelling: while protectionism is sold as job saving, it probably really amounts to job swapping. It protects jobs in some industries only by destroying jobs in others.
China Dumps Solar Panels

Let's investigate an amusing EU point of view in regards to "clean energy" tariffs. In May of 2013, Spiegel Online reported the European Commission approved tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels in response to complaints of price-dumping.

In my article Paul Krugman "Was" Right I commented on the solar panel boondoggle ....
Please note the irony in these tariffs. The EU is hell bent on promoting "clean energy" but does not want clean energy if the cost is too cheap. Obama's position is similar.

Supposedly China is dumping solar panels below cost? So what? If the EU and US were really interested in clean energy and reducing emissions, the only thing better than cheap solar panels would be free solar panels.

Step back for a second and think of the benefits of free panels. On one side of the equation, the EU and US would lose a few hundred solar panel making jobs. However, hundreds if not thousands of businesses and individuals would employ solar panels if they were free.

Think of all the trucking jobs, dock unloading jobs, and installation jobs, that would result from free solar panels. Whatever jobs were lost in manufacturing (if any), would come back 100 times over in other jobs.
Here is a second irony.

The first sentence in the Spiegel article reads "Back in 2008, the German solar manufacturing industry was riding the crest of a wave of growth fueled by generous subsidies and high demand."

Without generous subsidies, the European solar panel manufacturers were not profitable in the first place. Yet, the EU imposed tariffs to prevent Chinese "dumping".

Paul Krugman "Was" Right

In Paul Krugman "Was" Right, I also discussed a shockingly accurate revelation from Krugman.

In 1997 Krugman wrote a brilliant article "In Praise of Cheap Labor", stating "Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all".

I wrote about Krugman's position in Fair Trade is Unfair; In Praise of Cheap Labor; Are Bad Jobs at Bad Wages Better than No Jobs at All?

Please check it out. Krugman "Was" Right. However, the definition of "was" requires one to go back to 1997 to see just that.
Why Does Free Trade Seemingly Not Work?

The above examples show free trade only fails to work from the self-serving point of view of the industry demanding protections.

Amusingly, auto manufacturers want to use cheaper steel, but the steel industry wants protection. And whether or not the auto manufacturers get steel imports at cheap prices, they want protection from alleged subsidies of Toyota.

It's hypocritical madness its finest.

Role of Nixon

There is another facet to the free trade debate and that is in regards to huge trade imbalances between the US and China.

I have written about this so many times it is disheartening to have to point out once again the root cause. Please read, and make an attempt to understand Hugo Salinas Price and Michael Pettis on the Trade Imbalance Dilemma; Gold's Honest Discipline Revisited.

Pettis: "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."

Hugo: "The gold standard imposed order and harmony. If President Nixon had not 'closed the gold window' in 1971, the world would be radically different today. China sells vast quantities of goods to the rest of the world, without the rest of the world having any chance of selling similar quantities to China. China can do so, because today trade deficits are "paid" not in gold, but in dollars or euros or pounds sterling or yen, which will never be scarce: they are created at will by the USA, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, or the Bank of Japan. It is no coincidence that some analysts have observed that in real terms, American workers have had no real increase in their income since 1970. The best and brightest of today's accredited economists attempt in vain to find a solution to a problem that cannot be solved except by the renewed use of gold as the international medium of commerce."

Enforcement Mechanism

Those are small snips from an article I wish everyone would read in entirety to fully understand where the problem is.

Pettis admits that a gold standard would address the issue, but that is not his preferred solution (which to the best of my knowledge he has never stated).

What both Michael Pettis and Hugo Salinas Price refer to is that ever since Nixon stopped paying for US trade deficits in gold, monetary expansion has been exponential. The result has been massive trade imbalances and extreme income inequality.

Problems in "Speece"

The lack of an enforcement policy also explains the problems of Greece and Spain vs. Germany.  Collectively, I  refer to (Spain, Greece, and peripheral Europe in General) as "Speece"

To properly understand the trade mess in Europe please read From ZIRP to NIRP: Virtues of Germany vs. the Vices of Greece; What About "Speece" and Gold?

Here is a key paragraph on "Speece", but to understand the ripple effect of no enforcement mechanism I suggest re-reading the entire article.
Still No Enforcement Mechanism, Anywhere

Because there were no trade imbalance enforcement mechanisms, Speece imbalances grew until they blew up. And until they blew up, the IMF had nothing but praise for Spain! And every step of the way, the IMF underestimated the problems Greece faced.

We are headed into the third Greek bailout, and the IMF remains clueless about Greece's ability to pay back "bailout" money.

Worse yet, there still is no "enforcement" mechanism anywhere in the world, and the structure of the euro is such that imbalances in Europe are even harder to fix than elsewhere.
Excellent Trade Agreement

Lack of a gold standard is a key reason "free trade" seems not to work. But the problem is not "free trade", the problem is elsewhere.

I repeat the assertion I made in Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership Fiasco vs. Mish's Proposed Free Trade Alternative; How Will TPP Function in Practice?

An excellent free trade agreement would consist of precisely one line of text: "All tariffs and all government subsidies on all goods and services will be eliminated effective June 1, 2015."

Moreover, the first country that fully embraces free trade would come out ahead, regardless of whether or not any other country did so as well.

The logic behind those statements is impeccable.

Free Trade Never Causes Net Job Loss

Free trade is always beneficial. Lack of an enforcement mechanism, unsustainable union agreements, a loss of jobs to robotics, and incessant self-serving whining from industry groups demanding favors makes it hard for many to see the benefits.

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