vineri, 8 martie 2013

SEO Blog

SEO Blog


How Social Media Is Influencing Web Design

Posted: 08 Mar 2013 10:47 AM PST

The evolution of web design has not been linear as of late, especially with the advent of Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, and others. In its early years, websites were essentially one page introductions to companies. Then products and services were added. Soon, buying through a website became a key aspect for...
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Three Steps To Take Advantage Of Social Media

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 09:13 PM PST

Social media is here and many people are already using one, two even more social media platforms. Let me surprise you; many of your customers are members of these sites already, and thus many companies have discovered the wealth of integrating social media strategies into their marketing campaigns. Social media...
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6 Ways to Use Fresh Links & Mentions to Improve Your Marketing Efforts - Whiteboard Friday

6 Ways to Use Fresh Links & Mentions to Improve Your Marketing Efforts - Whiteboard Friday


6 Ways to Use Fresh Links & Mentions to Improve Your Marketing Efforts - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 05:17 PM PST

Posted by randfish

This week, we announced the release of our newest tool, Fresh Web Explorer. We're so excited to give marketers incredibly recent data in a tool to keep track of their mentions and links in a scalable way.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks us through improving our marketing through fresh links and mentions, and he explains how you can use Fresh Web Explorer to achieve the best results. 

Excited about Fresh Web Explorer? Have questions you'd like answered? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!



Video Transcription

"Howdy SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, as you may know, we've been very excited to release Fresh Web Explorer. It's one of our latest tools. We've been working on it for a long time. A lot of work and effort goes into that project. Huge congrats and thank you to Dan Lecocq and Tamara Hubble and to the entire team who has been working on that project. Kelsey and Carin and everyone.

So I wanted to take some time and talk through the value that marketers can get from Fresh Web Explorer and not just from Fresh Web Explorer, because I realize it's one in a set of tools, but also from things like doing regular Google 24 hour searches to look for brand mentions and links, using other tools like Radian6 or an uberVU, which is inside empowering, Raven Tools fresh links and fresh mentions section. You can do a lot of these things with any of those tools.

I'm going to focus on Fresh Web Explorer for this part, but you can extrapolate out some ways to use this stuff in other tools too.

So number one, one of the most obvious ones is trying to find opportunities for your brand, for your site to get coverage and press, and that often will lead to links that can help with SEO, lead to co-occurrence citations of your brand name next to industry terms, which can help with SEO, could help with local for those of you who are doing local and have local businesses mentioned. It certainly can help with branding and brand growth, and a lot of times helps with direct traffic too.

So, when I perform a search inside Fresh Web Explorer, I'm getting a list of the URLs and the domains that they're on, along with a feed authority score, and I can see then that I can get all sorts of information. I can plug in my competitors and see links, who's pointing to my competitor's sites. Perhaps those are opportunities for me to get a press mention or a link. I can see links to industry sites. So, for example, it may not be a competitor, but anyone who's doing coverage in my space is probably interesting for me to potentially reach out to build a relationship with.

Mentions of industry terms. If I find, you know whatever it is, print magazines that are on the web, or blogs, or forums, or news sites, feeds that are coming from places that are indicative of, wow, they're talking about a lot of things that are relevant to my industry, relevant to my brand and to what our company's doing, that's probably an opportunity for a potential press mention.

Mentions of competitors brands. If a press outlet is covering, or a blog or whoever, is covering one of your competitors, chances are good that you have an opportunity to get coverage from that source as well, particularly if they try to be editorially balanced.

Mentions of industry brands. It could be that you're in an industry that, and you're not necessarily competitive with someone, but you want to find those people who are relevant to your brand. So for example, for us this could include things like a brand like Gnip or a brand like HubSpot. We're not competitive with these brands, SEOmoz is not. But they are industry brands and places who cover Gnip and HubSpot may indeed cover Moz as well.

Number two, I can find some content opportunities, opportunities to create content based on what I'm discovering from Fresh Web Explorer. So I plugged in "HTC One," the new phone from HTC, and I'm looking at maybe I can curate and aggregate some of the best of the content that's been produced around the HTC One. I can aggregate reviews, get really interesting information about what's coming out about the phone. I might even be able to discover information to share with my audience.

So, for example, we focus on SEO topics and on local topics. If we expect the HTC One to be big and we want to cover several different phones and how that's affecting the mobile search space, we can look at their default search providers, what sorts of things they do in terms of voice search versus web search, whether they have special contracts and deals with any providers to be tracking that data and who that might be going to, all those kinds of things, and we can relate it back to what we're doing in our industry.

You can also Fresh Web Explorer to find the best time to share this type of information. So, for example, the HTC One comes out and maybe you're working for a mobile review site and you're like, "Oh, you know what? This has already been covered to death. Let's do something else this week, or let's cover some other stuff. Maybe we'll hit up the HTC One." Or, "Boy, you know what? This is just starting to get hot. Now is a great time to share. We can get on Techmeme and get the link from there. We can be mentioned in some of the other press coverages. We still have a chance, a shot to cover this new technology, new trend early on in its life cycle."

Number three, we can track fresh brand and link growth versus our competitors. So a lot of the time one of the things that marketers are asking themselves, especially in the inbound field is, "How am I doing against my competition?" So I might be Fitbit, which is a Foundry cousin of ours. They're also funded by Foundry Group. They compete with the Nike FuelBand, and they might be curious about who's getting more press this week. We released a new version of the Fitbit, or we're about to, or whatever it is, and let's see how we're doing against the Nike FuelBand. Then when we have our press release, our launch, let's see how that compares to the coverage we're getting. Where are they getting covered that we are not getting covered? Where are we getting coverage where they are not?

We can then use things like the CSV Export feature, which is in the top right-hand corner of the Fresh Web Explorer, and we can look at CSV Export to do things like, "Oh, I want to filter out these types of sites. Or I only want a report on the high feed authority sites versus the low feed authority one. So I want to see only the places where my coverage is high."

A note on feed authority though. Be very careful here because remember that a great page on a great site might be discovered through a low quality feed. It could be that a relatively junky feed is linking to some high quality stuff. We'll discover it and report on the feed authority of the source where we discovered it. So you may want to try using metrics like page authority and domain authority to figure out where are you being mentioned and is that a high quality site, not just feed authority.

All right. Number four. Find fresh sources that link to or mention two or more of your competitors, but don't mention you. Now, this has been a classic tool. We've had a tool in our library at Moz, which is similar to SEO Book's HubFinder. Ours is called the Link Intersect tool, and what you can do here is you can plug in something like some ice cream brands and see how it writes. So "Full Tilt" and "Molly Moons" ice cream, and I actually want to put quotes around those brand names so that I can get mentions every time someone mentions the Moon and the name Molly that would pop in there, that wouldn't be ideal, minus D'Ambrosio, which is the best Seattle ice cream shop obviously. It's a gelateria. It's fantastic. Side note, it's possible that maybe owned by my cousin-in-law, but shh, let's not tell anybody.

Okay, and then if I'm Marco over at D'Ambrosio Gelato, I can see where are Full Tilt and Molly Moons getting mentioned that aren't mentioning me. If it's, "Hey, there was an article in The Stranger about ice cream and they didn't cover us." And, "Hey the Capitol Hill blog didn't cover us." Maybe they don't know that we also have a Capitol Hill location. We should get in there and talk to those folks. We should mention, maybe leave a comment, maybe just tweet at the author of the post, whatever it is and tell them, "Hey, next time you cover ice cream, you should also write about us."

Number five. Compare sources coverage. So this is actually a bit of a teaser, and I apologize for that. So the operator site colon will not be available at lunch. So when you're watching this video, you probably can't use the site colon operator to see different sources and to run a search like the CRO site colon SEOmoz. However, it will be coming soon.

When it is, you'll be able to compare, hey is SEOmoz or is HubSpot more active in covering the CRO topic? Are there different sources out there that maybe don't have coverage of a topic and I could go and pitch them for a guest post? I could find those content opportunities. I could know if a topic is saturated or if it hasn't been covered enough. Maybe I find sites or blogs that might be interested in covering a topic that I would like them to write about. I can see who's covered and who hasn't using this site colon operator to figure out the source and the level of coverage that they might have or not.

The last one, number six, is really about reporting. Fresh Web Explorer is going to show you these great sort of trends about how is a particular term or phrase or link doing, links to a site, mentions of a brand name, mentions of a phrase or an industry term, whatever it is. So I can plug in things like my brand, SD, which is our link operator for just seeing links to anything on the sub-domain. I can plug in my sub-domain, and then I can see, here's how that's gone over the past 7 days or 30 days. I can screen shot that and put it in a report. I can download using the export functionality. I can download the CSV and then filter or scrub.

A lot of times, for example, PR companies, companies that help you with your press will do this type of work. They'll assemble this kind of reporting. In fact, at Moz we use a firm called Barokas here in Seattle. Every week they send us a report of here are all the places that you were mentioned, and here are places that mentioned industry terms and that kind of stuff, which is really nice, but you're oftentimes paying a lot of money to get that reporting. You can actually do that yourself if you don't have a PR company that you're already using for this type of work. Of course, if you are a PR company, this might be an option for you to do that type of reporting.

These six, they are only scratching the surface of what you can do with Fresh Web Explorer, and I don't doubt that I haven't thought of hundreds of uses yet for the data that's inside Fresh Web Explorer. I really look forward to seeing some cool creative uses from you guys out there, and I hope that you are enjoying the product. If you would like, please give us feedback. I know the team would love to hear from you on this, and they're constantly working and iterating and updating and adding in things like the site colon operator. So very cool.

Thank you very much, and we will join you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care."

 

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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West Wing Week: "Jedi Mind-Meld"

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, March 8, 2013
 

West Wing Week: "Jedi Mind-Meld"

This week, the President urged Congress to resolve harmful budget cuts and reduce the deficit in a way that helps grow the economy and strengthen the middle class -- invoking both Star Wars and Star Trek while he did it. President Obama also held his first Cabinet meeting of the second term, announced three key Cabinet nominations, and signed the Violence Against Women Act.

Watch this week's West Wing Week.

West Wing Week: 03/08/13

In Case You Missed It

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

The Employment Situation in February
Today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that private sector businesses added 246,000 jobs in February. The economy has now added private sector jobs every month for three straight years, and a total of 6.35 million jobs have been added over that period.

No One Should Have to Live in Fear of Violence
Thanks to the bipartisan Violence Against Women Act, which President Obama signed yesterday, thousands of women and men across the country who are victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence and stalking will be able to access resources they need in their communities to help heal from their trauma.

White House Office Hours: The Violence Against Women Act 
Do you have questions about the Violence Against Women Act? Today at 3:45 p.m. ET, we're holding a session of White House Office Hours on Twitter with Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to the President and Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, and Lynn Rosenthal, White House Advisor on Violence Against Women, to answer your questions.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Standard Time (EST).

9:30 AM: The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing

10:00 AM: The President meets with senior advisors

10:00 AM: The Vice President swears in John Brennan as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

11:15 AM: The President meets with faith leaders to discuss the need for commonsense immigration reform

12:30 PM: Press Briefing by Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest WhiteHouse.gov/live 

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates that the event will be live-streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

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Seth's Blog : Macro trends don't matter so much

 

Macro trends don't matter so much

How many people will be using the internet in 2016?

Are woman more likely than men to choose the brand of potato chip the family buys?

What percentage of the world's population will speak Spanish in a decade?

Everyone's talking about mobile, it's the next big thing...

If you're General Electric or Yahoo or a presidential candidate, long term trends might matter. If you need not just a majority but a plurality to make your numbers, then by all means, pay attention to these tectonic shifts.

But most organizations need a dozen or a hundred or a thousand new customers, not thirty million. Most non-profits don't need every new foundation or big donor, they just need a few.

When you pay attention to the big trends, you're playing a numbers game and treating the market as an amorphous mass of interchangeable parts. But that's not what your market is. The trend, for example, is for people to buy and read virtually no books each year. As an author, that doesn't matter one bit to you, of course. What matters are the 100,000 people who might make your book one of the most popular of the year (that's only one out of every 3,000 people in the country).

Micro trends matter more than macro ones, but most of all, people matter. Individual human beings with names and wants and interests.


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joi, 7 martie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


63% Think Congress Can Always Make Things Worse (the Other 37% are Wrong)

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 10:04 PM PST

An amusing poll by Rasmussen shows 63% Think Congress Can Always Make Things Worse.

Poll Questions

  1. Generally speaking how do you rate the way that Congress is doing its job? Excellent good fair or poor?
  2. Over the past year, has Congress passed any legislation that will significantly improve life in America?
  3. What is a more important role for Congress – passing good legislation or preventing bad legislation from becoming law?
  4. Who does the average congressman listen to the most — the voters they represent or party leaders in Congress?
  5. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: No matter how bad things are, Congress can always find a way to make them worse?

Results

  1. 9% of Likely U.S. Voters think the average member of Congress listens to the voters he or she represents more than to congressional party leaders. 81% believe the average member listens most to his or her party's leaders in Congress. 10% are not sure.
  2. 63% Think Congress Can Always Make Things Worse. [The rest are obviously wrong - Mish]

The article did not give the answers to the first three questions. A related article shows 8% Think Congress Is Doing A Good or Excellent Job

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

Windows 8 Adoption at Standstill; Microsoft Slashes OEM Bundle Price to $30 from $120

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 03:54 PM PST

Four months after rollout, Microsoft has achieved an anemic 2.67% market share for Windows 8. Growth does not even keep up with natural attrition.
In the month of February, according to Net Applications, Windows 8 gained 0.4% of the desktop market, moving from 2.26 to 2.67%. In comparison, Windows 7 had a market share of over 9% after four months of public availability. A growth rate of 0.4% is absolutely horrendous, and — if we assume that PCs are replaced every five years — actually below the natural attrition/replacement rate. If growth of 0.4% wasn't bad enough, it's also worth pointing out that it's down from 0.5% in January — yes, Windows 8 adoption is slowing down. Windows 7, after a small dip last month, actually gained market share in February.



It's a bitter pill to swallow, but Windows Vista actually enjoyed faster growth than Windows 8 — and we know all too well how the Vista story played out. Despite selling Windows 8 at a massively discounted price of $40 for three months (it's now $200), and sales boosts from Black Friday and Christmas, it's clear that Windows 8 has failed to take off. Short of giving away Windows 8 for free, there isn't a whole lot that Microsoft can do — and even then, there are still millions of consumers and business customers that are perfectly happy with Windows 7 and leery of Windows 8′s Metro Start screen.

Windows and Office are cash cows for now, but the desktop market has started to contract — slowly at first, but it will accelerate. With the mobile market exploding, Windows Phone failing to grab significant market share on the smartphone, and minuscule tablet market share for Windows 8, it doesn't look good for Microsoft.
Microsoft Slashes OEM Bundle Price to $30 from $120

ExtremeTech reports Microsoft cuts the price of Windows 8 and Office 2013.
In a double whammy of bad news, it seems that Microsoft has been forced to cut the price of Windows 8 and Office 2013 licenses to spur the adoption of Windows 8 — and Samsung, citing lack of consumer interest, has pulled its Windows RT tablet from Germany and "additional European countries."

According to the Wall Street Journal's anonymous sources, Microsoft has been offering a dual pack of Windows 8 and Office to OEMs for $30 since late February, for touchscreen devices under 10.8 inches. The previous price was $120.

We still don't know exactly how many touch-enabled Windows 8 devices are actually being used by consumers, but the mere fact that Microsoft hasn't shared any figures — either in general, or specifically for its Surface tablets — is a strong indicator that things aren't going to plan. The only real indication we've had is from retailers such as Newegg, which said that sales of Windows 8 tablets had been very slow, and that most Windows 8 devices sold had been laptops or tablets.

Which leads us neatly onto the second tidbit: Samsung is pulling the Windows RT Ativ Tab out of Germany and "additional European countries" (Samsung hasn't yet specified which ones). This follows on from Samsung's decision to not release the Ativ Tab in the US, citing a lack of consumer interest and confusion over what Windows RT actually is.

Moving forward, we should also remember that Microsoft is working on Windows Blue, which will reportedly be very cheap — or possibly free. It isn't yet clear whether Blue will be a standalone version of Windows that you can buy off the shelf, or the code name for Microsoft's internal shift towards annual releases, instead of every two or three years. It is possible that Microsoft's slashing of Windows 8 and Office license costs is simply a precursor to Windows Blue. Considering how Windows and Office bring in the lion's share of Microsoft's profits, though, this certainly seems like a dangerous game for Microsoft to be playing.
Should some form of OpenOffice ever gain a big corporate following in the US, it will be the end of Microsoft as we know it. With the new emphasis on tablets and phones, perhaps the end is here regardless.

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

Clowns Never Learn

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 12:57 PM PST

President Obama said the sequester cuts would be "catastrophic".

Reader Tim Wallace pinged me with a few comments to help put those catastrophic cuts in perspective.

Tim asks: If you were making $50,000 per year in 2007 and you income went up to $70,000 (a 40% increase in six years), would a $1,750 pay cut to $68,250 be catastrophic?

Apparently it would be for the Obama administration. The federal budget is up 40% from 2007 and the Democrats and President are telling us they cannot afford to cut spending 2.5%.

Not that the "cuts" are real in the first place. All that is really being cut is a decrease in the projected increase. A chart of Federal Spending from PJMedia will add another perspective.

Federal Spending in Inflation-Adjusted Terms



Backing Away From Catastrophic Talk

For obvious reasons (shown above) Larry Kudlow notes The 'Catastrophic' Sequester Narrative Dies a Quick Death
However you calculate the sequester spending cuts, and however uneven they may be, the reality is that the sequester at least moves the ball in the right direction. I maintain that by reducing the government spending share of GDP, the sequester is pro-growth.

The White House and the CBO are predicting a 0.5 percent to 0.7 percent decline in GDP, post-sequester, and a loss of 750,000 jobs. All this from a spending reduction of roughly 2.4 percent over the next ten years, in which Uncle Sam's spending growth will be $44.8 trillion rather than $46 trillion.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and other demand-siders have called for a slow, gradual federal-spending reduction. Well, that's exactly what they're going to get. The first fiscal year of sequester will see $44 billion in spending cuts, which is about one quarter of 1 percent of GDP. That's pretty gradual.

And compare that $44 billion 2013 spending cut (most of which is slower baseline growth, not a cut in spending levels) to a roughly $150 billion 2013 tax hike. Hmm, let me get this right: It's okay to raise taxes, because that won't hurt the economy, but it's not okay to cut spending, because that will lower output?

And while the business sector has survived to become highly profitable, the federal sector has become bloated, edging ever closer to debt bankruptcy.

Oh, regarding Team Obama's doom-and-gloom economic forecast, hearken back to 2009 when the White House economic gurus predicted 3 to 4 percent real economic growth in recovery, with unemployment dropping below 6 percent. That, presumably, would have been driven by a roughly $1 trillion spending increase. But instead we got the weakest recovery in modern times going back to 1947 -- an anemic 2 percent economy and unemployment just a shade below 8 percent. The trillion-dollar stimulus never panned out.

If Keynesian spending was going to work, it would have already worked.

So maybe we should try something new. Let's lower spending and free up resources for the innovative private sector, and then let's see if the results are better. I'm betting, as did deceased Nobel-prize winners Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and James Buchanan, that as the government sector shrinks, private economic growth expands.

The Republicans are right to stick to their guns on budget cuts. And if President Obama expects to point his finger at the GOP for an economic-sequester catastrophe, he's going to be mistaken.
Keynesian and Monetarist Clowns Never Learn

Kudlow says "If Keynesian spending was going to work, it would have already worked."

Indeed. Yet clowns want more and more, even though Japan proved in spades how foolish Keynesian and Monetarist policies are. See In Praise of Theft and Fraud (But Not Deceit).

Bernanke (a known QE Monetarist clown) now proudly wears two clown hats with his intrusion into the fiscal policy debate. Clowns never learn, they just keep trying bigger and bigger doses of what clearly doesn't work.

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

What's Next for Italy? No Working Government for 7 Months, Then Elections in September

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 09:16 AM PST

Pier Luigi Bersani has twice ruled out the possibility of a grand coalition with Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right coalition, and Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement wants no part of overtures from Bersani.

There is insufficient support for another technocrat. So, the logical conclusion is new elections are forthcoming. But when?

Reader "AC" who is from Italy but now lives in France explains ...
Hi Mish,

Now that elections are over and declarations have been made by the three major party leaders, we can look at what's ahead for Italy. In a nutshell: It's highly likely that no empowered government will be in charge for six months or longer, and in September Italy will be voting again.

The first session of the Parliament will take place on 3-15. By 3-20, the presidents of the Chamber and Senate will be elected. The President will then meet with parliament groups to see if a government can be formed. Based on statements made by the key political parties, no grand coalition is possible.

By 4-15 the Parliament will seek to elect a new President because the mandate of Napolitano expires on 5-15 and Napolitano has already said he will not accept another term. Outgoing presidents at the end of their term are forbidden by the constitution to call new elections. Therefore, Italy has to wait for the new president to be elected. This process may take until the end of May.

It is unlikely that the first act of a newly elected president would be to dissolve the Parliament without any attempt to merge some sort of temporary solution. Look for the new President to seek another technocrat PM who can garner enough support in parliament. Garnering sufficient support in parliament for another technocrat PM also seems impossible. The only choice left would be to call new elections.

The problem is that at this point we will likely be at the middle of June. A new election could take place at the end of July or mid-August, but that is the middle of the summer holiday season. I think very unlikely that a President will call elections during that period. So, the earliest month that elections would likely take place is September (with an electoral campaign in August, not exactly the right month for that either).

The end result is likely to be a delay of at least 6 months, without a real government able to make significant decisions in the interim.

Matteo Renzi, the Mayor of Florence, may be a game-changer in the next elections. I believe he will be the next PM candidate for the Center-Left. A lot of people thinks that if Renzi had been the Center-Left candidate things would have been much different.

Let's see.

Regards

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

In Praise of Theft and Fraud (But Not Deceit)

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 12:25 AM PST

Some people are in favor of theft and fraud as long as it's not deceitful. Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf is one of those people.

Let's take a look some of Wolf's ideas to "save" Japan with a campaign of forced inflation as presented in "Risky Task of Relaunching Japan". 

Here are some snips by Wolf followed by my immediate rebuttal.

Wolf: The question is whether inflation can be achieved and managed.

Mish: There is no question a policy of inflation for Japan is seriously misguided. If maintained, the policy will blow up in a spectacular currency crisis.

Wolf: According to economic advisers Smithers & Co net debt of non-financial companies has fallen from 150 per cent of equity in 1995 to 30 per cent. But government net debt has jumped from 29 per cent of gross domestic product at the end of 1996 to 135 per cent at the end of 2012. These facts have deep implications. First, ending deflation is going to be far harder than it would have been in the late 1990s.

Mish: The moral of the story is how futile (and how ridiculous) it was for Japan to try to "beat deflation". Japan was once the world's largest creditor. Japan now has debt approaching 250% of GDP, accumulated in a ridiculous attempt to defeat deflation.

Wolf: Second, it would be helpful if higher inflation also made real interest rates negative, which would encourage people to spend.

Mish: Wolf implies "saving is bad" and spending is good. The idea is nonsensical. Savings allow banks to lend to credit-worthy customers without the need to inflate money supply. There can never be too much saving.

Wolf: Third, negative real rates would also redistribute wealth from the state's creditors towards future taxpayers.

Mish: Exactly why should governments or central banks be in charge of redistributing anything? It is certainly not taxpayers who benefit from currency wrecking schemes, but rather those with first access to money, the banks and the already wealthy.

I offer conclusive evidence in Top 1% Received 121% of Income Gains During the Recovery, Bottom 99% Lose .4%; How, Why, Solutions.

Also see my follow-up article Reader Asks Me to Prove "Inflation Benefits the Wealthy" (At the Expense of Everyone Else).

Wolf: Such negative real rates can be achieved either by making inflation higher than expected or by capping interest rates. It is not, in fact, clear whether the Japanese authorities want to create strongly negative real rates of interest. But they should, even though this would also create the risk of a political backlash.

Mish: Once again, policies of deliberate inflation destroy those on fixed income (and much of Japan's elderly are on fixed income), for the benefit of banks and those with first access to money. Quite frankly this is theft. There is no better word than "theft" to describe the deliberate destruction of taxpayer savings. For further discussion, please see Hello Ben Bernanke, Meet "Stephanie".

Wolf: How should this be done and how transparently? The BoJ could insist that it is aiming at 2 per cent inflation, but follow policies likely to bring higher inflation than this. That would be risky deceit.

Mish: Wolf obviously believes that greater than 2% theft is OK as long as it is not accompanied with deceit.

Wolf: The current price level is 30 per cent below where it would have been if annual inflation had been 2 per cent since 1997.

Mish: That sounds like tremendous news to me. Who in the US would not like to see gasoline prices 30% lower? Food prices 30% lower? Education prices 30% lower?

For a look at "hockey stick inflation" please consider Is Inflation the Legacy of the Federal Reserve?

Wolf: If the BoJ sought to return to the level of nominal GDP implied by 3 per cent annual growth from 1997, it would be committing itself to annual increase of close to 9 per cent a year over the next decade. That could surely reduce the real burden of debt!

Mish: Wolf is disingenuous. The real burden of debt is a function of real interest rates and real growth not nominal GDP growth. Should Japan succeed in causing a currency crisis (and it may do just that if it follows Wolf's nonsensical prescription, who knows where interest rates will be? Even if Japan did successfully reduce its debt burden, it would be at taxpayer expense. And why is there a debt burden in the first place? The answer is economic imbeciles fought deflation with a combination of Keynesian and Monetarist ideas over the course of decades, and none of it worked.

Wolf: At the limit, Japan might use "helicopter money", as discussed in my column of 12 February. If the BoJ uses fiat money it does not wish to withdraw, it will also have to impose explicit reserve requirements on commercial banks.

Mish: Wolf's article The case for helicopter money starts off with a preposterous straw man idea "I fail to see any moral force to the idea that fiat money should only promote private spending". In reality, there is nothing moral about using fiat money to promote any spending, ever. By its very nature, fiat money, created out of thin air, is immoral.

Wolf: The traditional view at the BoJ has been that monetary policy cannot raise inflation. This shows a surprising lack of imagination. In principle, the BoJ can use its fiat money to buy everything in the world, at any price it wanted. This would certainly lower the purchasing power of the yen.

Mish: Buying anything at any price is purposeful fraud to the benefit of those who were overpaid. And because it's blatant and purposeful fraud, Wolf displays a surprising abundance of over-imagination. There are indeed limits on what central banks can do. They may step over the line by a bit, but not to the absurd heights Wolf suggests they easily can.

Wolf: The policy shift must be both credible and credibly contained.

Mish: Wolf obviously has learned nothing from central planning efforts in Russia, the housing bubble in the US, or Japan's multi-decade attempt to destroy savers in Japan. What Wolf seeks is a set of central planners who will be wise enough at implementing what is tantamount to a stupid policy. If the central planners were that wise, they would not attempt something so ludicrous in the first place.

Wolf: One can envisage two big and clearly interrelated dangers. First, the new approach might be seen as a deliberate attempt at beggar-my-neighbour policies and would, as a result, cause dangerous retaliation. Second, it might stimulate flight from the holders of yen and so a currency collapse and soaring inflation.

Mish: Those are the first and only ideas Wolf presented in his article that make complete sense. Of course he goes on to ignore the ideas.

Wolf: Maybe, working to a 2 per cent inflation target will deliver what is needed. But I suspect that a more radical target, for levels of prices or nominal GDP, may be needed, at least for a while. The new team at the BoJ will have to avoid doing too little, even though it risks ending up doing too much. It will need much judgment and some luck. The world should wish it well.

Mish: Heaven forbid Japan does too little. My gosh, just look at the results. Why Japan actually has some semblance of price stability! Who wants that? Obviously not Wolf who suspects that "a more radical target may be needed".

Final Thoughts

Wolf concludes with "Japan will need much judgment and some luck".

If Japan had any judgment it certainly would not be doing what Wolf suggests. So yes, Japan will need "some luck" (but a miracle is more like it).

Wolf is willing to let Japan risk "doing too much" even though it might cause serious inflation, destroy the Yen, risk a political backlash, or cause "dangerous retaliation to beggar-my-neighbour policies".

And he admits he does not know if a more radical target is needed! (which of course it isn't).

I will be polite. Wolf is nuts.

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

"Wine Country" Economic Conference Hosted By Mish
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Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


How Guys Will Use Google Glass [Video]

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 02:57 PM PST



Check out a real world scenario, and get a feeling of how guys will actually use Google Glass…


Animals Can Be Jerks Too!

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 02:12 PM PST

The not so cute and fluffy side of the animal kingdom..







































































Charlize Theron Aging Timeline

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 12:01 PM PST

Charlize Theron was always a very pretty woman and has aged gracefully.

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Cats As Rage Faces

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 10:05 AM PST

The Real Cats Behind the Cartoon Rage Faces..





































SXSW Interactive [Infographic]

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 09:39 AM PST

SXSW (South by South West) is one of the largest conference/festivals in the entire world. The industries of film, music and technology all come together for a week of trade shows, panels, screenings, concerts parties and more.

SXSW Interactive is the technology portion of the conference and has been a launching pad for several well-known companies over the past several years, including Twitter. Everyone from industry leaders to small startups attend the conference to network, share knowledge, forge partnerships, and/or seek funding.

The following infographic from BestCoFounder illustrates the ever-growing size of this conference, in addition to what a massive networking opportunity it presents.

Click on Image to Enlarge.
2013 SXSW Interactive [Infographic]
Via BestCoFounder