marți, 26 martie 2013

SEO Blog

SEO Blog


Online PR For SEO – How It Works And How To Do It

Posted: 26 Mar 2013 11:00 AM PDT

A great method to promote your business, products and services whilst gaining successful SEO is online PR. Online PR is sometimes seen as a difficult channel to use as part of SEO and digital marketing. But if you stick to these golden rules, not only is online PR a great...
Read more »

Voice Communication On Social Sites

Posted: 26 Mar 2013 03:08 AM PDT

Facebook is now working on voice messages and voice calls. This is the newest effort in the mobile first effort by Facebook. This is one of the recent moves in the mobile communication arena. The social network is looking at helping people communicate in a number of ways. Facebook's messenger...
Read more »

How To Build A Social Network In WordPress

Posted: 26 Mar 2013 12:38 AM PDT

With literally thousands of social networks available on the Internet today, ranging in niche from dating to automotive consultations, many webmasters are starting to see the potential of creating a social network. Unfortunately, building a social network has always involved hundreds of hours of programming and planning, making it very...
Read more »

Online Backup: A Small Discussion

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 10:46 PM PDT

When it comes to better administration and management, there are a number of things most firms would consider doing. Data capturing and document storage are undoubtedly the most important among them. Without proper data capture and entry facilities, maintaining important documents pertaining to the company's daily operations may become difficult....
Read more »

You VS Internet?

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 10:28 PM PDT

You VS Internet? Online sales and marketing is fast becoming the enemy of the travelling sales rep. With so much at the click of a button nowadays, it's difficult to make your product stand out enough to warrant the face to face sell. The reality is that businesses, however small,...
Read more »

SEO Finds In Your Server Log

SEO Finds In Your Server Log


SEO Finds In Your Server Log

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 07:14 PM PDT

Posted by timresnik

I am a huge Portland Trail Blazers fan, and in the early 2000s, my favorite player was Rasheed Wallace. He was a lightning-rod of a player, and fans either loved or hated him. He led the league in technical fouls nearly every year he was a Blazer; mostly because he never thought he committed any sort of foul. Many of those said technicals came when the opposing player missed a free-throw attempt and ‘Sheed’ passionately screamed his mantra: “BALL DON’T LIE.”

‘Sheed’ asserts that a basketball has metaphysical powers that acts as a system of checks and balances for the integrity of the game. While this is debatable (ok, probably not true), there is a parallel to technical SEO: marketers and developers often commit SEO fouls when architecting a site or creating content, but implicitly deny that anything is wrong. 
 
As SEOs, we use all sorts of tools to glean insight into technical issues that may be hurting us: web analytics, crawl diagnostics, and Google and Bing Webmaster tools. All of these tools are useful, but there are undoubtedly holes in the data. There is only one true record of how search engines, such as Googlebot, process your website. These are web server logs. As I am sure Rasheed Wallace would agree, logs are a powerful source of oft-underutilized data that helps keep the integrity of your site’s crawl by search engines in check. 
 
 
A server log is a detailed record of every action performed by a particular server. In the case of a web server, you can get a lot of useful information. In fact, back in the day before free analytics (like Google Analytics) existed, it was common to just parse and review your web logs with software like AWStats
 
I initially planned on writing a single post on this subject, but as I got going I realized that there was a lot of ground to cover. Instead, I will break it into 2 parts, each highlighting different problems that can be found in your web server logs:
 
  1. This post: how to retrieve and parse a log file, and identifying problems based on your server’s response code (404, 302, 500, etc.).
  2. The next post: identifying duplicate content, encouraging efficient crawling, reviewing trends, and looking for patterns and a few bonus non-SEO related tips. 

Step #1: Fetching a log file

Web server logs come in many different formats, and the retrieval method depends on the type of server your site runs on. Apache and Microsoft IIS are two of the most common. The examples in this post will based on an Apache log file from SEOmoz. 
 
If you work in a company with a Sys Admin, be really nice and ask him/her for a log file with a day’s worth of data and the fields that are listed below. I’d recommend keeping the size of the file below 1 gig as the log file parser you’re using might choke up. If you have to generate the file on your own, the method for doing so depends on how your site is hosted. Some hosting services store them in your home directory in a folder called /logs and will drop a compressed log file in that folder on a daily basis. You’ll want to make sure to it includes the following columns:
 
  • Host: you will use this to filter out internal traffic. In SEOmoz’s case, RogerBot spends a lot of time crawling the site and needed to be removed for our analysis. 
  • Date: if you are analyzing multiple days this will allow you to analyze search engine crawl rate trends by day. 
  • Page/File: this will tell you which directory and file is being crawled and can help pinpoint endemic issues in certain sections or with types of content.
  • Response code: knowing the response of the server -- the page loaded fine (200), was not found (404), the server was down (503) -- provides invaluable insight into inefficiencies that the crawlers may be running into.
  • Referrers: while this isn’t necessarily useful for analyzing search bots, it is very valuable for other traffic analysis.
  • User Agent: this field will tell you which search engine made the request and without this field, a crawl analysis cannot be performed.
Apache log files by default are returned without User Agent or Referrer -- this is known as a “common log file.” You will need to request a “combine log file.” Make your Sys Admin’s job a little easier (and maybe even impress) and request the following format:
 
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\""
 
For Apache 1.3 you just need “combined CustomLog log/acces_log combined”
 
For those who need to manually pull the logs, you will need to create a directive in the httpd.conf file with one of the above. A lot more detail here on this subject.  
 

Step #2: Parsing a log file

You probably now have a compressed log file like ‘mylogfile.gz’ and it’s time to start digging in. There are myriad software products, free and paid, to analyze and/or parse log files. My main criteria for picking one includes: the ability to view the raw data, the ability to filter prior to parsing, and the ability to export to CSV. I landed on Web Log Explorer (http://www.exacttrend.com/WebLogExplorer/) and it has worked for me for several years. I will use it along with Excel for this demonstration. I’ve used AWstats for basic analysis, but found that it does not offer the level of control and flexibility that I need. I’m sure there are several more out there that will get the job done. 
 
The first step is to import your file into your parsing software. Most web log parsers will accept various formats and have a simple wizard to guide you through the import. With the first pass of the analysis, I like to see all the data and do not apply any filters. At this point, you can do one of two things: prep the data in the parse and export for analysis in Excel, or do the majority of the analysis in the parser itself. I like doing the analysis in Excel in order to create a model for trending (I’ll get into this in the follow-up post). If you want to do a quick analysis of your logs, using the parser software is a good option. 
 
Import Wizard: make sure to include the parameters in the URL string. As I will demonstrate in later posts this will help us find problematic crawl paths and potential sources for duplicate content.
 
 
You can choose to filter the data using some basic regex before it is parsed. For example, if you only wanted to analyze traffic to a particular section of your site you could do something like: 
 
 
Once you have your data loaded into the log parser, export all spider requests and include all response codes:
 
 
Once you have exported the file to CSV and opened in Excel, here are some steps and examples to get the data ready for pivoting into analysis and action: 
 
1. Page/File: in our analysis we will try to expose directories that could be problematic so we want to isolate the directory from the file. The formula I use to do this in Excel looks something like this. 
 
Formula: <would like to put this is a textbox of some sort>
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("/",C29,2)),MID(C29,(SEARCH("/",C29)),(SEARCH("/",C29,(SEARCH("/",C29)+1)))-(SEARCH("/",C29))),"no directory")
 
2. User Agent: in order to limit our analysis to the search engines we care about, we need to search this field for specific bots. In this example, I’m including Googlebot, Googlebot-Images, BingBot, Yahoo, Yandex and Baidu. 
 
Formula (yeah, it’s U-G-L-Y)
 
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("googlebot-image",H29)),"GoogleBot-Image", IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("googlebot",H29)),"GoogleBot",IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("bing",H29)),"BingBot",IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Yahoo",H29)),"Yahoo", IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("yandex",H29)),"yandex",IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("baidu",H29)),"Baidu", "other"))))))
 
Your log file is now ready for some analysis and should look something like this:
 
 
Let’s take a breather, shall we?
 

Step # 3: Uncover server and response code errors

The quickest way to suss out issues that search engines are having with the crawl of your site is to look at the server response codes that are being served. Too many 404s (page not found) can mean that precious crawl resources are being wasted. Massive 302 redirects can point to link equity dead-ends in your site architecture. While Google Webmaster Tools provides some information on such errors, they do not provide a complete picture: LOGS DON’T LIE.
 
The first step to the analysis is to generate a pivot table from your log data. Our goal here is to isolate the spiders along with the response codes that are being served. Select all of your data and go to ‘Data>Pivot Table.’
 
On the most basic level, let’s see who is crawling SEOmoz on this particular day:
 
 
There are no definitive conclusions that we can make from this data, but there are a few things that should be noted for further analysis. First, BingBot is crawling the site at about an 80% more clip. Why? Second, ‘other’ bots account for nearly half of the crawls. Did we miss something in our search of the User Agent field? As for the latter, we can see from a quick glance that most of which is accounting for ‘other’ is RogerBot -- we’ll exclude this. 
 
Next, let’s have a look at server codes for the engines that we care most about.
 
 
I’ve highlighted the areas that we will want to take a closer look. Overall, the ratio of good to bad looks healthy, but since we live by the mantra that “every little bit helps” let’s try to figure out what’s going on. 
 
1. Why is Bing crawling the site at 2x that of Google? We should investigate to see if Bing is crawling inefficiently and if there is anything we can do to help them along or if Google is not crawling as deep as Bing and if there is anything we can do to encourage a deeper crawl. 
 
By isolating the pages that were successfully served (200s) to BingBot the potential culprit is immediately apparent. Nearly 60,000 of 100,000 pages that BingBot crawled successfully were user login redirects from a comment link. 
 
 
The problem: SEOmoz is architected in such a way that if a comment link is requested and JavaScript is not enabled it will serve a redirect (being served as a 200 by the server) to an error page. With nearly 60% of Bing’s crawl being wasted on such dead-ends, it is important that SEOmoz block the engines from crawling. 
 
The solution: add rel=’nofollow’ to all comment and reply to comment links. Typically, the ideal method for telling and engine not to crawl something is a directive in the robots.txt file. Unfortunately, that won’t work in this scenario because the URL is being served via the JavaScript after the click. 
GoogleBot is dealing with the comment links better than Bing and avoiding them altogether. However, Google is crawling a handful of links sucessfully that are login redirects. Take a quick look at the robots.txt and you will see that this directory should probably be blocked. 
 
2. The number of 302s being served to Google and Bing is acceptable, but it doesn’t hurt to review in case there are better ways for dealing with some of edge cases. For the most part SEOmoz is using 302s for defunct blog category architecture that redirects the user to the main blog page. They are also being used for private message pages /message, and a robots.txt directive should exclude these pages from being crawled at all. 
 
3. Some of the most valuable data that you can get from your server logs are links that are being crawled that resolve in a 404. SEOmoz has done a good job managing these errors and does not have an alarming level of 404s. A quick way to identify potential problems is to isolate 404s by directory. This can be done by running a pivot table with “Directory” as your row label and count of “Directory” in your value field. You’ll get something like:
 
 
The problem: the main issue that’s popping here is 90% of the 404s are in one directory, /comments. Given the issues with BingBot and the JavaScript driven redirect mentioned above this doesn’t really come as a surprise. 
 
The solution: the good news is that since we are already using rel=’nofollow’ on the comment links these 404s should also be taken care of. 
 

Conclusion

Google and Bing Webmaster tools provide you information on crawl errors, but in many cases they limit the data. As SEOs we should use every source of data that is available and after all, there is only one source of data that you can truly rely on: your own. 
 
LOGS DON’T LIE!
 
And for your viewing pleasure, here's a bonus clip for reading the whole post.
 

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

28 New Citizens

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
 

28 New Citizens

Yesterday, President Obama spoke at a naturalization ceremony for active duty service members and civilians at the White House. He welcomed 28 new citizens to our nation of immigrants, and called for reforms to our immigration system that will help harness the talent and ingenuity of all those like them who want to work hard and find a place here in America.

Find out why it's so important to reform our immigration system.

President Barack Obama watches as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano delivers the oath of allegiance during a naturalization ceremony for active duty service members and civilians in the East Room of the White House, March 25, 2013. Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director, left, participates in the ceremony. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama watches as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano delivers the oath of allegiance during a naturalization ceremony for active duty service members and civilians in the East Room of the White House, March 25, 2013. Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director, left, participates in the ceremony. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

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

President Obama Establishes Five New National Monuments
President Obama signs proclamations establishing five new national monuments that celebrate our nation’s rich history and natural heritage.

President Obama's Passover Message
Yesterday, President Obama celebrated Passover and touched upon the powerful symbols that it represents, and the inspiration it provides to him and to all people seeking a more just and peaceful future.

Weekly Address: Helping Protect Our Kids by Reducing Gun Violence
The American people made their voices heard, and the Senate acted to make it harder for criminals and people with serious mental illnesses to get guns, to crack down on anyone trying to funnel guns to criminals, and to reinstate and strengthen a ban on the sale of military-style assault weapons. Each of these ideas deserves a vote.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

10:30 AM: The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing

11:15 AM: The President meets with senior advisors

12:15 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

12:30 PM: The President and the Vice President meet for lunch

1:45 PM: The President delivers remarks honoring the Stanley Cup Champion Los Angeles Kings and MLS Cup Champion LA Galaxy WhiteHouse.gov/live

3:00 PM: The Vice President, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, and Senator Tom Carper deliver remarks at the newly designated First State National Monument

3:35 PM: The President meets with Secretary of Defense Hagel

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

Get Updates

Sign up for the Daily Snapshot

Stay Connected

 

This email was sent to e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com
Sign Up for Updates from the White House
Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy
Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House

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

 

Seth's Blog : Studying entrepreneurship without doing it

 

Studying entrepreneurship without doing it

...is like studying the appreciation of music without listening to it.

The cost of setting up a lemonade stand (or whatever metaphorical equivalent you dream up) is almost 100% internal. Until you confront the fear and discomfort of being in the world and saying, "here, I made this," it's impossible to understand anything at all about what it means to be a entrepreneur. Or an artist. 


More Recent Articles

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

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




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

 

luni, 25 martie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Men in Black Seek Answers; Troika to Return to Spain in May Asking "What Happened to €42 Billion in ESM Bank Recapitalization Tranches?"

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 11:08 PM PDT

SAREB, Spain's bad bank, has received assets (primarily bad loans) from Bankia, NCG Banco, Catalunya, Caixam, Banco de Valencia and others.

Bankia, a component of Spain's nationalized bank system has been one disaster after another. Guru's Blog reports that has you invested €37,500 in the IPO of Bankia at €3.75 per share, it would be worth 70€ today, a loss of 99.81%. Had you waited to buy at the bargain basement price of €0.26, your investment would be worth €1,009, a loss of 97.3%.

That's quite the loss. Bankia shareholders have been wiped out. Recovery is impossible.

Men in Black Seek Answers

The question at hand now is "What Happened to the €41 billion Spain received in two tranches of ESM money for bank recapitalization?"

That's a good question and one the "men in black" want to know as well.

El Confidencial reports Troika Will Return to Spain in May to Investigate Bankia
The troika, made up of the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF threaten an upcoming visit to Spain, during the last week of the month of May. The 'men in black' come this time seeking to clear up some of the derivatives in the famous bank bailout.

Specifically, the Troika will put a magnifying glass on Spain to check in detail the fate of the more than 41 billion euros delivered to the Government of Mariano Rajoy. The effective distribution of the two tranches of the ESM bailout is troubling supervisors. They also do not understand the development of other obligations as set out in a memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed last July.

One of the aspects of most concern in community media is the convoluted relationships between entities that have received public aid and the bad bank (SAREB) reluctantly created by the Spanish Government.

The 'men in black' do not understand why the SAREB has called for a draconian discount on the  transfer of the assets of the bubble, then claim an extra 25% margin on retail prices. The spread in absolute terms is about €13 billion over the €51 billion in assets acquired by the bad Bank. It's an amount equivalent to 30% of the resources used in the capitalization of problem institutions.

International supervisors also question with some suspicion the mode and manner by which the banks have not been able to find market for their properties.

Finance minister Luis de Guindos said on Friday the solution will be to force all banks to loosen their pockets and spend another €2 billion, an extraordinary spill. The troika believes that this formula is not the most equitable since precisely the entities that have been nationalized will need new cash contributions.
This was an exceptionally difficult piece to translate. I believe I have the gist correct but if you read Spanish you may wish to refer to the original El Economista Article.

The key point is the "men in black" will be in Spain trying to figure out what happened to €41 billion in ESM tranches that Spain received to recapitalize its banks. They also want to understand why SAREB cannot sell its properties.

The answer to the latter question is easy enough to figure out. Banks valued the assets too high, there is no market for them, and writeoffs will be even bigger than previously estimated.

In short, SAREB will need still more money. The "men in black" will not be pleased.

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

Wine Country Conference

I am hosting an economic conference on April 5 in Sonoma, California. Proceeds go to the Les Turner ALS Foundation (Lou Gehrig's Disease).

Please see My Wife Joanne Has Passed Away; Stop and Smell the Lilacs for my association with the disease.

To learn about the economic conference with world-class speakers including John Hussman, Michael Pettis, Jim Chanos, John Mauldin, Mike "Mish" Shedlock, Chris Martenson with guest moderator Lauren Lyster and other Special Guests, please visit Wine Country Conference April 5, 2013

Federal Spending Per Non-Government Worker

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 06:16 PM PDT

Here is a pair of interesting charts from reader Tim Wallace.

Ratio of Workers



click on chart for sharper image

Tim used non-seasonally adjusted numbers from the BLS, subtracting the number of government employees from total employed to produce the above chart.

Spending Per Non-Government Worker



click on chart for sharper image

Tim used government spending records as posted on the White House website and data from the first chart to compute the amount of spending per non-government worker.

Obama claims the cutbacks will hurt the economy.

Federal government spending now amounts to $31,679 per non-government employee, annually. This is a spending problem,  not a revenue problem.

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

Slovenia Under Pressure; Risk of Next Cyprus Already at Hand

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 04:39 PM PDT

If you thought you could take a breather following the crash of Cyprus, you were wrong. Bloomberg reports Slovenia's Nascent Cabinet Under Pressure to Avoid Cyprus Fate.
Slovenia's six-day-old government is being urged to prevent the nation becoming the euro region's next bailout battleground.

Prime Minister Alenka Bratusek's Cabinet must quickly carry out a plan to revamp the country's ailing lenders, the central bank said yesterday. The former Yugoslav nation needs about 3 billion euros ($3.9 billion) of funding this year, while banks need 1 billion euros of fresh capital, the International Monetary Fund said last week.

European Union officials are striving to contain a debt crisis that prompted Cyprus to join Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain in agreeing on a bailout. Slovenian banks such as Nova Ljubljanska Banka d.d. are struggling with surging bad loans that equal a fifth of economic output, fueling investor concern that it may be next to seek aid.

Most Vulnerable

Slovenian and Hungarian banks are the most vulnerable in the region with non-performing loans at about 20 percent and growing, analysts at Standard & Poor's Ratings Services, led by Paris-based Pierre Gautier, wrote yesterday in a research note.

Nova Ljubljanska, the nation's biggest lender, reported a loss of 275 million euros in 2012, its fourth consecutive negative result. Nova Kreditna Banka Maribor d.d., which had a 205 million-euro loss last year, fell to the lowest level since its 2007 listing after a debt-equity swap increased the government's stake to 79 percent. The shares plunged more than 40 percent last week and were unchanged at yesterday's close at 79 euro cents in Ljubljana.

The government vowed to stick with a bank-recapitalization plan of as much as 4 billion euros, though with unspecified modifications, as surging bad loans fuel investor concern that the country may require a rescue.
Story Ends in Disastrous Bailout

Anyone who has followed Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, or Portugal knows how this story will end: In yet another disastrous bailout followed by the destruction of the Slovenia economy.

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

Regulators Prepare for Run on Cypriot Banks; Two Largest Banks Remain Shut, Others Open Tomorrow

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 01:17 PM PDT

Most Cypriot banks will open tomorrow but capital controls remain and the two largest banks will remain shut while the ECB "monitors the situation" and regulators determine precise haircuts.

CNN Money reports Big Cyprus banks to stay shut after bailout
Most banks in Cyprus will open again Tuesday for the first time over a week. But the two biggest lenders at the heart of a €10 billion European Union rescue will stay shut for two more days to give regulators time to prepare for a run on deposits.

Deposits of over €100,000 at Bank of Cyprus and Popular Bank will be frozen until they have been restructured. Popular Bank will be split up, its viable assets and insured deposits transferred to Bank of Cyprus, and its non-performing loans moved into a bad bank that will be wound down.

Big depositors at Popular Bank face complete wipe out, along with shareholders and bondholders.

The losses facing big depositors as part of a deposit-equity conversion at Bank of Cyprus have yet to be determined but could be around 30%, a Cypriot government minister said Monday. Again, shareholders and bondholders will be tapped first.

The big unknown is how small depositors will react, or what restrictions they'll face when they try to access their money from Tuesday. The Cypriot parliament last week gave the government powers to implement temporary capital controls.
Cyprus will be ruined for a decade. Expect GDP to plunge by as much as 30%.

Since Big depositors at Popular Bank face complete wipe out, Cyprus may as well have done this on its own and left the Euro.

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

Another "Euro Is Saved" Moment in Pictures

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 09:25 AM PDT

Euro 20 Minute Chart



click on any chart for sharper image

US Dollar 20 Minute Chart



Gold 20 Minute Chart



Rescue Me



I was looking for a video by Aretha Franklin but the above by Fontilla Bass will have to suffice.

The idea that Cyprus was in any way shape or form "rescued" by the Troika is preposterous. The good news appears to have worn off already.

Next up Spain.

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

Note: Some ATT users (not a fault of ATT) received timeouts on my "Wine Country Conference" link (see below). If you were one of them, please try again. The problem has been fixed.

Wine Country Conference

I am hosting an economic conference on April 5 in Sonoma, California. Proceeds go to the Les Turner ALS Foundation (Lou Gehrig's Disease).

Please see My Wife Joanne Has Passed Away; Stop and Smell the Lilacs for my association with the disease.

To learn about the economic conference with world-class speakers including John Hussman, Michael Pettis, Jim Chanos, John Mauldin, Mike "Mish" Shedlock, Chris Martenson with guest moderator Lauren Lyster and other Special Guests, please visit Wine Country Conference April 5, 2013

Merkel's Vision: "United States of Germany"

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 12:13 AM PDT

Following brutal negotiations with EU finance ministers, the IMF and various European government officials, Cyprus finally agreed to measures that her highness, Angela Merkel would accept.

This time she held her ground. Previously, Merkel compromised every key position she has ever held in the sake of political expediency.

For example, Merkel went to the well twice on Greece to appease her opponents. She repeatedly caved in to demands from French president Nicolas Sarkozy. She reversed her stand on nuclear energy following German polls.

So why did Merkel draw the line at Cyprus?

To Merkel everything is a play to win the next election and ultimately to preserve her legacy. She is willing to play hardball now for one reason only. Public opinion is decisively against further bailouts, and anything but exceptionally harsh terms on Cyprus would hurt her election chances in September.

She fears the rise of the eurosceptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party and the best way to take some wind out of the AfD sails is to show she cares about austerity.

Merkel's Vision

Merkel's vision is not a United States of Europe. Rather, Merkel's vision is for a "United States of Germany". 

In this light, every move she has made makes perfect "political" sense, solidarity be damned.

That Cyprus and Greece were ruined in the process is acceptable "collateral damage". If Spain is not careful, it will become the next "collateral damage".

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