The folks at Spirit Halloween decided to offer us a look back at how the hottest pop culture trends became the most iconic costumes of the past three decades.
As a Department of Health and Human Services report shows, half of single young adults eligible for the Health Insurance Marketplace could get coverage for $50 a month or less -- or less than your cable bill.
Yesterday, President Obama welcomed James Comey to his new post as the seventh Director of the FBI. Comey previously worked as an attorney and later served as Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice. At the FBI Headquarters, the President praised Comey’s dedication, judgment, and commitment to the ideals of the FBI.
Nearly one year ago, communities across a dozen states in the Northeast experienced the devastating and tragic effects of Hurricane Sandy. But brick by brick, block by block, they are rebuilding.
For more than 40 years, the White House has opened its doors and welcomed visitors from across the country to tour the grounds and gardens. This past Sunday, we invited photo enthusiasts who follow the White House on Instagram to join us for the first-ever White House InstaMeet.
Nearly all of us have used Screaming Frog to crawl websites. Many of you have probably also used Google's Structured Data Testing Tool (formerly known as the Rich Snippet Testing Tool) to test your authorship setup and other structured data.
This is a quick tutorial on how to combine these two tools to check your entire website for structured data such as Google Authorship and Rel="Publisher", along with various types of Schema.org markup.
The concept:
Google's structured data tester uses the URL you're testing right in their own URL. Here's an example:
We can take advantage of that URL structure to create a list of URLs we want to test for structured data markup, and process that list through Screaming Frog.
Why this is better than simply crawling your site to detect markup:
You could certainly crawl your site and use Screaming Frog's custom filters to detect things like rel="author" and ?rel=author within your own code. And you should.
This approach will tell you what Google is actually recognizing, which can help you detect errors in implementation of authorship and other markup.
Disclaimer: I've encountered a number of times when the Structured Data Testing Tool reported a positive result for authorship implementation, but authorship snippets in search results were not functioning. Upon further review, changing the implementation method resolved the issue. Also, authorship may not be granted or present for a particular Google+ user. As a result, it's important to note that the Structured Data Tester isn't perfect and will produce false positives, but it will suit our need in this case, quickly testing a large number of URLs all at once.
Getting started
You're going to need a couple things to get started:
Screaming Frog with a paid license (we'll be using custom filters which are only available in the paid version)
This short video tutorial walks through all eight steps outlined below. If you choose to watch the video, you can skip straight to the section titled "Four ways to expand this concept."
Steps 1, 2, and 3: Gather your list of URLs into the Excel template
You can find the full instructions inside the Excel template, but here's the simple 1-2-3 version of how to use the Excel template (make sure URL Tools or SEO Tools is installed before you open this file or you'll have to fix the formula):
Step 4: Copy all of the URLs in Column B into a .txt file
Now that Column B of your spreadsheet is filled with URLs that we'll be crawling, copy and paste that column into a text file so that there is one URL per line. This is the .txt file that we'll use in Screaming Frog's list mode.
Step 5: Open up Screaming Frog, switch it to list mode, and upload your file
Step 6: Set up Screaming Frog custom filters
Before we go crawling all of these URLs, it's important that we set up custom filters to detect specific responses from the Structured Data Testing Tool.
Since we're testing authorship for this example, here are the exact pieces of text that I'm going to tell Screaming Frog to track:
Authorship is working for this webpage.
rel=author markup has successfully established authorship for this webpage.
Page does not contain authorship markup.
Authorship is not working for this webpage.
The service you requested is currently unavailable.
Here's what the filters look like when entered into Screaming Frog:
Just to be clear, here's the explanation for each piece of text we're tracking:
The first filter checks for text on the page confirming that authorship is set up correctly.
The second filter reports the same information as filter 1. I'm adding both of them for redundancy; we should see the exact same list of pages for custom filters 1 and 2.
The third filter is to detect when the Structured Data Testing Tool reports no authorship found on the page.
The fourth filter is to detect when broken authorship is detected. (Typically because either the link is faulty or the Google+ user has not acknowledged the domain in the "Contributor To" section of their profile).
The fifth filter contains the standard error text for the structured data tester. If we see this, we'll know we should re-spider those URLs.
Here's the type of text we're detecting on the Structured Data Tester. The two arrows point to filters 3 and 4:
Step 7: Let 'er rip
At this point we're ready to start crawling the URLs. Out of respect for Google's servers and to avoid them disabling our ability to crawl URLs in this manner, you might consider adjusting your crawl rate to a slower pace, especially on large sites. You can adjust this setting in Screaming Frog by going to Configuration > Speed, and decreasing your current settings.
Step 8: Export your results in the Custom tab
Once the crawl is finished, go to the Custom tab, select each filter that you tested, and export the results.
Wrapping it up
That's the quick and dirty guide. Once you export each CSV, you'll want to save them according to the filters you put in place. For example, my filter 3 was testing for pages that contained the phrase "Page does not contain authorship markup." So, I know that anything that is exported under Filter 3 did not return an authorship result in the Structured Data Testing Tool.
Four ways to expand this concept:
1: Use a proper scraper to pull data on multiple authors
Screaming Frog is an easy tool to do quick checks like the one described in this tutorial, but unfortunately it can't handle true scraping tasks for us.
If you want to use this method to also pull data such as which author is being verified for a given page, I'd recommend redesigning this concept to work in Outwit Hub. John-Henry Scherck from SEOGadget has a great tutorial on how to use Outwit for basic scraping tasks that you should read if you haven't used the software before.
For the more technical among us, there are plenty of other scrapers that can handle a task like this - the important part is understanding the process so you can use it in your tool of choice.
2: Compare authorship tests against ranking results and estimated search volume to find opportunities
Imagine you're ranking 3rd for a high-volume search term, and you don't have authorship on the page. I'm willing to bet it would be worth your time to add authorship to that page.
Use hlookups or vlookups in Excel to compare data from three tabs: rankings, estimated search volume, and whether or not authorship is present on the page. It will take some data manipulation, but in the end you should be able to create a Pivot Table that filters out pages with authorship already, and sorts the pages by estimated search volume and current ranking.
Note: I'm not suggesting you add Authorship to everythingâ€"not every page should be attributed to an authorâ€"e-commerce product pages, for example.
3: Use this method to test for other structured markup besides authorship
The Structured Data Testing Tool goes far beyond just authorship. Here's a short list of other structured markup you can test:
4: Blend this idea with Screaming Frog's other capabilities
There's a ton of ways to use Screaming Frog. Aichlee Bushnell at SEER did a great job of cataloging 55+ Ways To Use Screaming Frog. Go check out that post and I'm sure you can come up with additional ways to spin this concept into something useful.
Not to end on a dull note, but a couple comments on troubleshooting:
If you're having issues, the first thing to do is manually test the URLs you're submitting and make sure there weren't any issues caused during the Excel steps. You can also add "Invalid URL or page not found." as one of your custom filters to make sure that the page is loading correctly.
If you're working with a large number of URLs, try turning down Screaming Frog's crawl rate to something more polite, just in case you're querying Google too much in too short a period of time.
When you first open the Excel template, the formula may accidentally change depending on whether or not you have URL Tools or SEO Tools installed already. Read the instructions on the first page to find the correct formula to replace it with.
Let me know any other issues in the comments and I'll do my best to help!
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Not the most expensive, but the one that most ideally suits the needs of those that care.
It's easy to get lost in the chaos of mediocre, of discount, of close and cheap. But if you're the best, among the people who care to find and talk about the best, no market is too crowded.
India's central bank is expected to raise policy interest rates for the second time in as many months on Tuesday to fight stubbornly high inflation, while rolling back further emergency measures put in place recently to support the slumping rupee.
Despite the risks to an already sluggish economy, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is forecast to lift its policy repo rate by 25 basis points (bps) to 7.75 percent, according to 29 of 41 economists polled by Reuters.
"Given that food price inflation is at a 38-month high, there is a risk that it could spread to generalized inflation expectations," said Samiran Chakraborty, head of research at Standard Chartered in Mumbai.
Annual food inflation accelerated to 18.4 percent in September, its highest since mid-2010, pushed up by prices of vegetables including onions and stirring public discontent ahead of national elections which must be held by next May.
While the central bank looks set to raise its repo rate, it is likely to cushion the blow to credit markets by further unwinding liquidity tightening measures implemented this summer as it struggled to shore up the tumbling rupee.
The rupee slumped to record lows in August, at one point sliding some 20 percent for the year, on concerns about the country's gaping current account and fiscal deficits, and as global investors dumped emerging market assets for fear the U.S. Federal Reserve was set to start tapering its massive stimulus program.
The RBI had jacked up the MSF by 200 bps in July as the rupee sagged. It rolled back 75 bps of that at its September 20 review and another 50 bps earlier this month. The combination of a repo increase and further MSF cuts would restore the gap between the two rates to its usual 100 bps.
The rupee closed on Monday at 61.52 to the dollar, down 10.6 percent on the year, after stabilizing in recent months on the back of India's support measures as well as the delay in the Fed's expected winding-down of its stimulus.
"The strategy will be to continue on the path of dismantling the extraordinary measures taken during the rupee crisis. I don't think he (Rajan) will be ultra-hawkish and will emphasize that growth is a concern and that also needs to be tackled," said Abheek Barua, chief economist at HDFC Bank.
The headline wholesale price index (WPI) unexpectedly hit a seven-month high in September of 6.46 percent as food prices surged, while the consumer price index jumped an annual 9.84 percent, spurring expectations for another rate hike.
Rupee vs. U.S. Dollar
Pause Before Rupee Collapse?
With consumer prices rising at nearly 10% annualized, and food inflation over 18%, a hike to 7.75% is hardly tight economic policy. Moreover, India's property and stock market bubbles are both still going strong.
Supposedly the RBI wants to maintain "growth". But what growth is that? Supposedly real growth takes into account inflation, but I am hard pressed to believe it.
Regardless, this dam may be about ready to collapse, even if India's stock market hits new highs in nominal terms.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
The Delegate Commission for Economic Affairs gave the green light to the last phase of the plan to settle the commercial debt.
€6.5 billion has been allocated to settle unpaid debts to suppliers for outstanding bills prior to December 31, 2011.
The last phase corresponds to unpaid accrued invoices between January 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013. Early estimates suggest that the total could exceed €14.0 billion.
The problem is that the government only has additional €1.7 billion in the current year to meet those debts. The remaining money will be paid starting January 1, 2014 and shall come primarily from Treasury reserves and surpluses that have accumulated in the various issues of bonds and notes recent months.
The government has chosen to prioritize payments to those companies that have major problems or liquidity needs. The Ministry of Finance and Public Administration has reached an agreement with the five big banks (Santander, BBVA, CaixaBank, Popular and Sabadell) to companies that want to get their invoices paid at a discount in December.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
The US National Security Agency secretly monitored as many as 60m phone calls in Spain in just one month, Spanish media reported on Monday.
The reports, in the El Mundo daily newspaper, are based on information supplied by Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower. They refer to the period between December 2012 and January 2013, and again highlight the sheer volume of phone traffic monitored and recorded by the NSA. Spain has about 47m inhabitants.
The documents also revealed that the surveillance was carried out by one of a network of secret US mobile phone listening stations that extends around the world, with manned posts – often in diplomatic missions – in European cities including Berlin, Frankfurt, Rome, Milan, Paris, Geneva and Madrid.
Ms Merkel is sending intelligence chiefs to Washington to seek answers this week. The White House's own internal review of the National Security Agency is due to provide Mr Obama with an interim report in the week starting November 11.
Drowning in Useless Data
A friend of mine writes
The NSA is currently drowning in data. The approach of grabbing all transmissions is futile. Computer programs to sort through it are futile as well.
For example, this email will probably be caught in the NSA web, simply because of references to the NSA. Because of my frequent international travel which is undoubtedly logged, this email will make it past another filter. Because of my circle of friends in DC, this email may pass another filter.
Because Mish is likely monitored and because I copied someone who frequently visits China, all three of us are likely monitored.
Finally, given this email passed a number of programmatic filters, a human being might actually be reading the entirety of this conversation.
Hello NSA!
Hello NSA agent ... How you doing? Having a good time sorting through useless data, day after day, after day, and wasting taxpayer money in the process?
Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Michael Pettis, at China Financial Markets, discusses Abenomics, Japan's shrinking (for now) current account surplus, debt, and interest rates in an interesting email. From Pettis ...
Abenomics in Japan is likely to put upward pressure on the national savings rate in Japan (but not necessarily on the household savings rate). This implicitly requires that over the next two or three years Japan run a higher current account surplus. In a world struggling with excess capacity and insufficient demand, pressure to increase the Japanese current account surplus is likely to result in higher unemployment – either abroad, if Japan's trade partners do not take steps to protect themselves from the counterbalancing deficits, or at home if they do.
It may seem a little quixotic to worry about a surging Japanese current account surplus just now when in fact Japan's external balance has declined substantially and is surprising analysts on the downside.
As I discuss in the first two chapters of my January book, "The Great Rebalancing", currency depreciation does not affect the trade balance directly by changing relative prices. It does so indirectly by changing the relationship between savings and investment.
As production rises relative to consumption, the difference between the two – the national savings rate – must also rise. This means that as the yen depreciates, the consequence is likely to be an increase in the Japanese savings rate.
But it doesn't end there. Japan seems to be taking other steps to force up its domestic savings rate. Here is last Tuesday's Financial Times:
Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, pledged to press ahead with the first increase in sales tax for over 15 years despite objections from some of his closest advisers, gambling that measures to address the country's massive debts would not hinder his attempts to jump-start the economy.
The increase in the consumption tax, part of the proceeds of which will be used to increase infrastructure investment, will accomplish many of the same results as the deprecation of the yen. A consumption tax, like a tariff, is effectively a kind of back-door currency devaluation, with a slightly different mix of losers among the household sector and winners among the producing sector.
By boosting production and reducing consumption, however, it automatically forces up the national savings rate in the same way as does currency depreciation.
So far, this all looks like an attempt by Abe to increase Japanese competitiveness and so increase its total share of global demand, but not by increasing Japanese productivity, which is the high road to growth, but rather by reducing the real Japanese household income share of what is produced. This effectively means Japan will be growing at the expense of its trading partners. As the Japanese become less able to consume all they produce, the excess must be exported abroad.
If the world were in ruddy good health, we might not worry too much about policies aimed at Japan's pulling itself out of the mess created in the 1980s, but with the whole world struggling with weak demand and with country after country trying to reduce domestic unemployment by selling more abroad – effectively exporting unemployment (with Germany in particular hoping to resolve the European crisis not by increasing its net domestic demand, as it should, but rather by forcing German surpluses outside Europe) – there is a real question in my mind as to how successful the Japanese program of Abenomics is likely to be if it implicitly requires a burgeoning trade surplus.
Expect Higher Unemployment
If Japan forces up its savings rate, and assuming that we are unlikely to return in the next few years to a credit-fueled consumption binge, the only way the world can respond to a structural forcing up of the Japanese savings rate is either by higher unemployment outside Japan or, if Japan's trade partners take steps to protect themselves from higher Japanese trade surpluses, higher unemployment inside Japan.
Enormous Debt-Servicing Cost
Japan is struggling with an enormous debt burden, and perhaps this explains why Tokyo is so eager to engage in policies that force up the Japanese savings rate. As long as more than 100% of Japanese borrowing is funded by domestic savings (if Japan runs a current account surplus it must be a net exporter, not importer, of capital), it doesn't have to rely on fickle foreigners, who might not be satisfied with coupons close to zero, to fund its enormous debt burden.
But the debt burden creates its own very dangerous source of trade instability. To understand why, we need to consider what happens to interest rates in Japan if nominal growth rates rise.
In Japan, interest rates are currently very low, close to zero. With total government debt amounting to more than twice the country's GDP – which puts it among the most heavily indebted governments in the world – it is not hard to see how low nominal interest rates benefit Japan. With interest rates close to zero, there is very little cashflow pressure on the government from servicing its debt.
Real vs. Nominal Interest Rates
Some people might argue that nominal interest rates do not matter. We should be looking at real interest rates, they would argue, and with Japan's having experienced deflation for much of the past two decades, real interest rates in Japan are high and the nominal rate is largely irrelevant.
This is true, real interest rates do matter, but it doesn't mean that nominal interest rates do not. In fact both real and nominal interest rates matter, albeit for different reasons. Real rates matter for all the obvious reasons – they represent the real cost to the borrower in terms of a transfer of resources from the borrower to the lender. But nominal rates also matter because they effectively determine the implicit amortization schedule of principal payments.
When the nominal rate is zero or close to zero in a deflationary environment, in other words, interest is effectively capitalized in real terms. In fact, whenever the real rate exceeds the nominal rate, as it has in Japan for much of the past two decades, the cashflow cost of servicing the debt is lower than the real cost, and the difference is effectively converted into real principal and deferred. In real terms, in other words, Japanese debt is growing by the difference between the real rate and the nominal rate, and this effectively represents a reduction in the cashflow cost of servicing its debt.
When nominal interest rates are positive and higher than the real rate, however, there is effectively an acceleration of real principal payments. This means that as long as nominal rates are very low, the real cost of servicing the debt is low and the principal payments are postponed, with some of the interest even being capitalized. As nominal rates rise, however, the real cost of servicing the debt during each payment period consists of interest plus some real principal.
This is just a long, perhaps pedantic, way of pointing out that even if the real interest rate in Japan declines, debt servicing is likely to be much more difficult as the nominal rate rises. Japan might be paying a lower real rate, but it is also implicitly paying down principle, instead of capitalizing it. Tokyo would need a significant increase in revenues, or a significant decrease in expenditures, to cover the cost.
So what would force Japan to raise its nominal interest rate? In principle the nominal interest rate should be more or less in line with the nominal GDP growth rate. If it is higher, growth generated by investing capital is disproportionately retained by net savers (including mainly the household sector). There is, in other words, a hidden transfer of resources from net borrowers to net savers.
If the nominal lending rate is lower than the nominal GDP growth rate, as is the case in China today and Japan during the 1980s, the opposite occurs. There is a hidden transfer from net savers to net borrowers, and because net savers are mainly the household sector, this will put downward pressure on the household share of income even as it gooses investment growth. This hidden transfer has been at the heart of the rapid economic growth that typically occurs in financially repressed economies during the earlier stages, and is also at the heart of the investment misallocation process that typically occurs during the later stages. We have seen this very clearly in China.
Will Tokyo Raise Interest Rates?
Japan is trying to generate both positive inflation and real GDP growth, so that it is trying urgently to raise the growth rate of nominal GDP. What happens if and when it is successful? For example let us assume that Japan's GDP is able to grow nominally by 4-5% a year – what will happen to the nominal Japanese interest rate?
Tokyo can either raise interest rates in line with nominal GDP growth rates or it can keep them repressed. In the former case, debt-servicing costs would soar, ultimately to 8% of GDP or more. This would create a problem for Tokyo in its ability to service its tremendous debt burden. It would need a primary surplus of around 8% of GDP just to keep debt levels constant, and it is hard to imagine how such a huge surplus would be consistent with nominal GDP growth rates of 4-5%.
If it were to raise income taxes it would create a huge burden for the household sector and almost certainly force up the national savings rate by forcing down the household share of GDP.
On the other hand if, in order to make its debt burden manageable Tokyo represses interest rates to well below the nominal GDP growth rate, it is effectively transferring a significant share of GDP from the household sector to the government in the form of the hidden financial repression tax. This is what Japan was doing in the 1980s, with all of the now-obvious consequences.
Japan's enormous debt burden was manageable as long as GDP growth rates were close to zero because this allowed both for the country to rebalance its economy and for Tokyo to make the negligible debt servicing payments even as it was effectively capitalizing part of its debt servicing cost. If Japan starts to grow, however, it can no longer do so. Unless it is willing to privatize assets and pay down the debt, or to impose very heavy taxes of the business sector, one way or the other it will either face serious debt constraints or it will begin to rebalance the economy once again away from consumption.
As this happens Japan's saving rate will inexorably creep up, and unless investment can grow just as consistently, Japan will require ever larger current account surpluses in order to resolve the excess of its production over its domestic demand. If it has trouble running large current account surpluses, as I expect in a world struggling with too much capacity and too little demand, Abenomics is likely to fail in the medium term.
Perhaps all I am saying with this analysis is that debt matters, even if it is possible to pretend for many years that it doesn't (and this pretense was made possible by the implicit capitalization of debt-servicing costs). Japan never really wrote down all or even most of its investment misallocation of the 1980s and simply rolled it forward in the form of rising government debt. For a long time it was able to service this growing debt burden by keeping interest rates very low as a response to very slow growth and by effectively capitalizing interest payments, but if Abenomics is "successful", ironically, it will no longer be able to play this game. Unless Japan moves quickly to pay down debt, perhaps by privatizing government assets, Abenomics, in that case, will be derailed by its own success.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
When it's time to name your project, you probably want to find a domain for it. And, alas, all the obvious and most of the silly dot com choices were taken a very long time ago.
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