Central Perk

luni, 28 octombrie 2013

Search News from the Future

Posted: 27 Oct 2013 04:21 PM PDT

Citizens of Moz, I come to you at a most desperate hour. I've just returned from London, Distilled's international headquarters, and I've been patiently awaiting this moment to share some potentially niche-shattering news with you all.

I don't quite know where to begin, so I'll just say it: You see, the stories are all true. Will Critchlow is a wizard. I know, it's common knowledge that nearly all Englishmen are wizards, I've seen Harry Potter too. But Mr. Critchlow is a wizard with a most peculiar and exciting gift: that of clairvoyance. He can see the future!

And no, I don't mean in a Steve Jobs/Carl Sagan/George Orwell futurist kind of way either. I mean he quite literally has a translucent, viridian ball of crystal sitting on his desk that divines that which has yet to transpire! I wouldn't have thought anything of the object upon first glance, but one night I came back to the office to grab my misplaced jacket to low mutterings, frantic typing, and wisps of smoke coming from the other side of the room. I dove into the bean bag room so as not to draw his attention and waited patiently, shaking with dread but with a fully piqued curiosity.

I couldn't make out what he was chanting and I don't think I would have been able to translate the Latin anyway. After about 30 minutes of this I heard him pack up his things and leave. I'm normally more of the craven type when it comes to adventure, but something that night pressed me to snoop around my boss's desk for the truth.

The smoke and emerald glow dissipated as I shuffled some papers around. The smell of ozone lingered in the air. Nothing looked too out of the ordinary: the latest issue of Inc. Magazine, a Post-it note with a hastily scrawled and circled "Fire Phil Nottingham: Oct 31"... wait... this news clip read... 2016? Maybe he was just tired and mistakâ€" 2020?! What was I looking at here?!

What I'm about to reveal may shock or even scare some readers, but I believe it is essential that the Moz community hear it nevertheless. I may lose my jobâ€"nay, I may be turned into a toad with a dreadful cockney accentâ€"but it will have all been worth it to bring this knowledge to you all. My interpretations may be shaky at best, but the headlines were as clear as day: These are digital marketing news items from the future!

You may never get a better chance to peek behind the tapestries of time as you do now. So read on, friends, and be brave.

Term "mobile" removed from Analytics, Google's vocabulary

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA â€" April 14, 2015 â€" A term commonly used by webmasters, digital marketers and industry analysts may not be so common after today. Over the weekend, Google removed the term "mobile" from all of its web products, including Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and the company's AdWords tool set.

"Mobile has been a deprecated term for some time now," the search giant explained in a corresponding blog post. "The lines between where and when we view our various screens have been blurred beyond parsability. All web-based content can be viewed on any device these days and thus it makes little sense to refer to all non-traditional desktop visitors as 'mobile.' "

The web is very close to becoming truly device-neutral largely thanks to thoughtful webmasters, CMS development teams and device manufacturers who have all come together to deal with the issue of rendering content from multiple angles. Data on device type, screen size, and other metrics is still readily available throughout Google's suite of webmaster tools. [...]

Voice searches now constitute 28% of all queries

AUSTIN, TX â€" June 29, 2020 â€" Search engine corporations such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have traditionally held on tight to their data, offering limited info on global search trends, but a recent study conducted by the University of Texas has unearthed compelling evidence that shows almost a third of all search queries are now conducted via voice search.

The nation's only "Professor of Search," Dr. Pete Meyers of the University of Texas explains the results of his institution's study:

"They called me mad back in 2013, but voice searches now constitute a huge chunk of the search pie. Several years ago we would have found it laughable to be walking down the street talking to our devices, let alone talking to our devices within our home. But with the advancement of voice recognition software and the nearly ubiquitous nature of the hardware to back it up, today we're estimating that voice search makes up almost a third of all search queries, and that number seems to be on the rise."

A few of the major contributing factors to the ascendancy of voice search include web-enabled automobiles, home appliances, [...]

Traditional television advertising revenues wane as new year begins; YouTube, Twitter and Facebook post record annual reports

NEW YORK, NY â€" January 1, 2019 â€" Google's video platform, YouTube (GOOG) along with social networks Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB), posted record gains in 2018 as social and video advertising revenues shattered forecasts and industry expectations. Analysts speculate that this was due in no small part to the transference of advertising spends on traditional television media. When FB and TWTR first hit the stock market, many buyers felt the social networks needed to prove themselves in the competitive world of media advertising, but as the multi-billion dollar industry of traditional television advertising continues to crumble amid stiff competition from a la carte alternatives like Netflix and Amazon, more marketing budgets are now trickling down to companies such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google's AdWords platform.

"Television is evolving and has been for some time," says Will Critchlow, founder and president of the world's foremost digital marketing agency, Distilled International. "Companies want to get their products in front of consumers, and those consumers are now watching television online. They're doing everything online." [...]

Netflix introduces video, text advertisements for streaming content

LOS GATOS, CA â€" January 16, 2019 â€" Earlier this month we saw reports that television advertising revenues were waning in the new year. Today we can report that some of those dollars will most certainly be spent on Netflix's streaming video platform. The company issued a press release this morning indicating that the company, for the first time in its history, will now display advertisements before many of their most popular original programs such as Arrested Development, Orange is the New Black, and the much-anticipated final season of House of Cards. Advertisements will be similar to those seen on YouTube, Hulu, and other video sites.

"With the amount of quality content and general media access we're collecting, we have no choice but to find revenue from other sources if we want to remain at the $9.99 price point we set in 2015," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said on an investor conference call yesterday. [...]

Google cracks down on fake, purchased +1s

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA â€" February 1, 2017 â€" For the first several years of the social platform's life, Google Plus seemed a joke to many. Comparisons were made to MySpace and other defunct social platforms, and G+ was often called "a graveyard" as it faced competition from the already-established Facebook. But since that time, the network has shown some real staying power with the full faith and credit of Google Inc. behind it. To that end, in late 2016 we reported on Google's announcement that plus ones, Google's own brand of "Likes," would help determine the order in which documents appeared in its search engine results pages. This move forced webmasters everywhere, for big and small companies alike, to reconsider the social platform for conducting regular business. Since then, various scams have been created to generate fake or paid "+1s" for sites who want quick and easy exposure in Google's search engine. While this practice has been effective for some, it is not sitting at all well with the search giant.

Today, Google announced a crack-down on those sites which it has determined to have been generating fake +1s. The process should be easy enough for Google as it has access to all of its users' account data and history. One well known Google representative, speaking on condition of anonymity, cut straight to the point, asking "What were they thinking?" in reference to marketers who've been attempting to game Google's algorithm. "As if we haven't been aware of fake Google plus accounts since Plus's inception?... [...]

Panda and Penguin now refresh daily

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA â€" July 22, 2016 â€" Five years ago, Google launched a pair of systems designed to keep poor content out of its search engine's results and combat questionable citation building tactics. The former is known as the "Panda" update and the latter, "Penguin." Until this week, the two algorithms have been updated on unpredictable schedules based on when the massive amounts of data required to make proper determinations about the quality of a website and its internet-wide citations were parsed. This would result in periodic "refresh" days, where webmasters who engaged in deceptive marketing practices would brace themselves for potential losses of traffic to their webpages. These updates would traditionally occur four or five times per year. Last Monday, Google announced that they've dedicated additional resources to these systems and are now able to parse the same data sets many times faster than before, meaning that these updates will now essentially occur in real time.

"Our users don't want clean and relevant answers three months from now, they need them immediately," declared a Google representative at an industry conference in San Diego... [...]

Google removes "organic keywords" tab from analytics

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA â€" October 31, 2020 â€" [...] and for those who don't remember, Google used to give webmasters access to what was known as "keyword data," allowing them to make better decisions about their sites' development and what their users' intent might be when visiting. In the fall of 2013, Google denied access to almost all of this organic data by encrypting all searches generated through Google.com. Today, Google took it a step further and completely removed the "Organic Keywords" tab from its popular web analytics program.

"We've been meaning to do this for some time now," said a senior Google representative, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We're very concerned about our users' privacy, and that's why we started to deny access to sensitive data such as search queries. We know our users don't want webmasters knowing what they're searching for, and we want to respect that."

Later in the same conversation, the same Googler said with a grin and a chortle, "There'll always be keyword data in AdWords." Adopting a sing-song tone, one might have quoted Arrested Development's timeless one-liner, "There's always money in the banana stand."

In other news, Google added a new tab to analytics titled "ASL," which includes less-sensitive data about users such as age, sex, location, weight, and sexual preference [...]

Cutts: Given today's technology, page speed a "deprecated metric" for determining site quality

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA â€" October 31, 2022 â€" For as long as there have been websites, there have been slow websites. In past generations, particularly in the 2000s and 2010s, internet users have been frustrated with delay times and unresponsive pages. Because of this, Google has made several attempts to help webmasters create more efficient sites, and has also taken measures to ensure that particularly slow sites do not register as frequently in their search results. But technology has come a long way since the days of 4G and 5G wireless networks.

Matt Cutts, the long-time head of Google's anti-spam team, addressed a group of fledgling digital marketers this weekend at SMX 2022 saying, "Given the bandwidth speeds of today's internet service providers, we're no longer using page speed as an indicator of 'site quality,' as this metric is now almost completely deprecated. In the past it made sense to devalue a site that took 10 to 15 seconds to load, and thus provided a negative experience for Googlers. But with today's 7G Quantum LTE-X technology, the difference between page load times are negligible, almost instant and ultimately irrelevant.

"Does anyone else remember 4G LTE? How about 2G? [Expletive], I'm old."

So, there you have it. That's all I found in Will's office that fateful night. Leave a comment and wish me good tidings if you be so bold. Though as a soon-to-be-toad, I may have a difficult time responding to your queries.

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!

Photo: POTUS, Cheesecake, and Cute Kids

Photo of the Day

Photo: POTUS, Cheesecake, and Cute Kids

President Barack Obama greets customers during a stop at Junior's Cheesecake and Desserts in Brooklyn, N.Y., Oct. 25, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Seth's Blog : 1,000 bands

1,000 bands

Brian Eno possibly said that, "the first Velvet Underground record may have only sold 1,000 copies, but every person who bought it started a band." [*]

It certainly wasn't a bestselling album, but without a doubt, it changed things.

The scarcity mindset pushes us to corner the market, to be the only one selling what we sell.

The abundance alternative, though, is to understand that many of us sell ideas, not widgets, and that ideas are best when used, and the more they get used, the more ideas they spawn.

Kevin Kelly has inspired 10,000 companies, and Shepard Fairey, a generation of artists.

How many bands will you inspire today?

* Two footnotes here. The first is that like most revolutionary ideas that start a ruckus, the first album was poorly reviewed. It wasn't the obvious next thing, the idea that's easy to celebrate. And second, Eno's quote has been amended over time: "I was talking to Lou Reed the other day and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years. The sales have picked up in the past few years, but I mean, that record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!"

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duminică, 27 octombrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

4th and 1st Amendments Under Fire; "Everyone Spies" a Favorite Cry of US Apologists; War Against Journalists; "We Hit the Jackpot"

Posted: 27 Oct 2013 11:42 AM PDT

The way to stop media reporting of NSA is simple: Shut down the agency entirely. It is too big, too bloated, and too useless. It spies on friends and foes alike. And when you tap the phones of 35 heads of state, including Angela Merkel, it's pretty damn hard to make the case that US spying is about terrorism.

Please consider the Guardian article NSA Chief Says Government Must Stop Media Reporting by Glenn Greenwald.

The most under-discussed aspect of the NSA story has long been its international scope. That all changed this week as both Germany and France exploded with anger over new revelations about pervasive NSA surveillance on their population and democratically elected leaders.

As was true for Brazil previously, reports about surveillance aimed at leaders are receiving most of the media attention, but what really originally drove the story there were revelations that the NSA is bulk-spying on millions and millions of innocent citizens in all of those nations. The favorite cry of US government apologists -–everyone spies! – falls impotent in the face of this sort of ubiquitous, suspicionless spying that is the sole province of the US and its four English-speaking surveillance allies (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).

There are three points worth making about these latest developments.

First, note how leaders such as Chancellor Angela Merkel reacted with basic indifference when it was revealed months ago that the NSA was bulk-spying on all German citizens, but suddenly found her indignation only when it turned out that she personally was also targeted. That reaction gives potent insight into the true mindset of many western leaders.

Second, all of these governments keep saying how newsworthy these revelations are, how profound are the violations they expose, how happy they are to learn of all this, how devoted they are to reform. If that's true, why are they allowing the person who enabled all these disclosures – Edward Snowden – to be targeted for persecution by the US government for the "crime" of blowing the whistle on all of this?

Third, is there any doubt at all that the US government repeatedly tried to mislead the world when insisting that this system of suspicionless surveillance was motivated by an attempt to protect Americans from The Terrorists™?

Speaking of an inability to maintain claims with a straight face, how are American and British officials, in light of their conduct in all of this, going to maintain the pretense that they are defenders of press freedoms and are in a position to lecture and condemn others for violations? In what might be the most explicit hostility to such freedoms yet – as well as the most unmistakable evidence of rampant panic – the NSA's director, General Keith Alexander, actually demanded Thursday that the reporting being done by newspapers around the world on this secret surveillance system be halted.

Recall that it was Glenn Greenwald who broke the NSA spy story episode with leaks from Edward Snowden.

As one might expect from criminal agencies, the NSA is fighting back, with an attack on constitutional rights.

4th and 1st Amendments Under Fire

TechDirt reports Keith Alexander Says The US Gov't Needs To Figure Out A Way To Stop Journalists From Reporting On Snowden Leaks

Apparently not satisfied with just setting fire to the 4th Amendment, NSA boss Keith Alexander's next target is the 1st Amendment. In an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog, it appears that Alexander felt he'd have a friendly audience, so he let loose with some insane claims, including suggesting that the government needs to find a way to "stop" journalists from reporting on the Snowden leaks.

Please click on the above link to see TechDirt's rebuttal to blatant lies by the NSA chief.

Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill to Setup Independent News Agency

Jeremy Scahill, National Security Correspondent for The Nation magazine, author of the international bestseller Blackwater, and also the author of Dirty Wars, is starting his own independent news agency along with Glenn Greenwald.

CNN reports Glenn Greenwald to join media venture backed by eBay founder Omidyar

Pierre Omidyar, founder of online auction site eBay, said Wednesday he is teaming up with journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has led reporting on secret U.S. surveillance programs, to create a new online mass media venture.

Greenwald announced late Tuesday that he was quitting The Guardian for "a once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity" but said he was not ready to give more details.

Now Omidyar has confirmed to CNN's Christiane Amanpour that he is behind the new media venture, which includes Greenwald and others -- and that he will personally fund it.

Greenwald has been at the forefront of a series of high-profile reports based on leaks from former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Journalist Jeremy Scahill and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras will also be joining the venture, Omidyar said.

Greenwald has been working with Poitras, based in Berlin, on NSA-related stories. Scahill is the author of the New York Times best-seller "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."

U.K. government and press collide in bullying of reporter's partner

The Guardian has come under fire in recent days from figures in the UK intelligence community who suggest its reporting has undermined efforts to keep the country safe in the face of terror threats.

Both Greenwald and The Guardian have accused UK authorities of using heavy-handed tactics to try to silence legitimate reporting.

Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, was detained for hours by UK authorities at London's Heathrow Airport in mid-August, as he was changing planes en route to the couple's Rio de Janeiro home. Items including a laptop, a hard drive and USB memory sticks were confiscated from him and are the subject of a legal challenge.

Greenwald said the episode was designed to deter him and other investigative journalists from using classified information and digging into stories critical of the British and allied governments -- but vowed to continue regardless.

"We Hit the Jackpot"

Finally, please consider the following video on the formation of the new independent news agency. In the video, Jeremy Scahill discusses his partnership with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras:

"We Hit the Jackpot" says Scahill.

Link if video does not play: "We Hit the Jackpot"

War Against Journalists

Says Scahill: "The Role of journalists is to hold those in power accountable... We are incredibly excited by this project because all three of us are journalists to the core ... There is a war against journalism around the world. Journalists are missing, beaten and imprisoned around the world ... And in the United States we have a president who won the Noble Peace Prize, who is a constitutional lawyer by training, and he is prosecuting whistleblowers in record numbers. They are monitoring the metadata of journalists, trying to figure out who they are talking to ... and we have a media culture that is totally morally bankrupt."

Indeed. And I wish Greenwald, Scahill, and Poitras huge success in their new venture.

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

Seth's Blog : Entrepreneurship => impact

Entrepreneurship => impact

Innovation is something else entirely. Many entrepreneurs use an innovation to make an impact, but the hard part, the part that we're rewarded for, is engaging with the user, the audience, the market. Bringing something to people who didn't think they wanted it, know about it or initially welcome it, and make a difference.

One reason it's so difficult to teach entrepreneurship is that we're not teaching tactics or skills. We're not teaching spreadsheets or finance or even marketing. No, when we encourage entrepreneurship, we're actually trying to get people to the place where they care enough and where they are confident enough to stand up and try to make things change.

Don't tell me what you invented. Tell me about who you changed.

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sâmbătă, 26 octombrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

More Obamashock! Glitches Hit Paper, Phone Applications; Obamacare Glitch Great Quotes

Posted: 26 Oct 2013 06:44 PM PDT

Millions of Existing Plans Dropped

I posted my personal experiences on Obamacare, as well as those of a reader, in Tips on Navigating Obamacare Costs on HealthCare.Gov - My Personal Experience - Obamashock!

Just in case anyone thought "ObamaShock!" was an isolated incident, the Weekly Standard reports Millions of Americans Are Losing Their Health Plans Because of Obamacare.

While the Affordable Care Act was making its way through Congress in 2009 and 2010, President Obama famously promised the American people over and over again that if you like your health plan, you can keep it.

"Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you," Obama said at one rally in July 2009. "First of all, if you've got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you."

But the president's promise is turning out to be false for millions of Americans who have had their health insurance policies canceled because they don't meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.

According to health policy expert Bob Laszewski, roughly 16 million Americans will lose their current plans.

Because the Obama administration's regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent as many as 16 million are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal.

Millions of people are now receiving letters from their carriers saying they are losing their current coverage and must re-enroll in order to avoid a break in coverage and comply with the new health law's benefit mandates––the vast majority by January 1. Most of these will be seeing some pretty big rate increases.

Obamacare in Rural Areas

The New York Times reports Health Care Law Fails to Lower Prices for Rural Areas

As technical failures bedevil the rollout of President Obama's health care law, evidence is emerging that one of the program's loftiest goals — to encourage competition among insurers in an effort to keep costs low — is falling short for many rural Americans.

While competition is intense in many populous regions, rural areas and small towns have far fewer carriers offering plans in the law's online exchanges. Those places, many of them poor, are being asked to choose from some of the highest-priced plans in the 34 states where the federal government is running the health insurance marketplaces, a review by The New York Times has found.

Of the roughly 2,500 counties served by the federal exchanges, more than half, or 58 percent, have plans offered by just one or two insurance carriers, according to an analysis by The Times of county-level data provided by the Department of Health and Human Services. In about 530 counties, only a single insurer is participating.

"There's nothing in the structure of the Affordable Care Act which really deals with that problem," said John Holahan, a fellow at the Urban Institute, who noted that many factors determine costs in a given market. "I think that all else being equal, premiums will clearly be higher when there's not that competition."

The Obama administration has said 95 percent of Americans live in areas where there are at least two insurers in the exchanges. But many experts say two might not be enough to create competition that would help lower prices.

Glitches Hit Paper, Phone Applications

Politico reports "The online website signup procedure is such a disaster that President Barack Obama is urging Americans to go ahead and try to get health coverage by mailing in a paper application, calling the helpline or seeking help from one of the trained "assisters.""

Please consider 'Glitches' hit Obamacare paper, phone applications too

But the truth is those applications — on paper or by phone — have to get entered into the same lousy website that is causing the problems in the first place. And the people processing the paper and calls don't have any cyber secret passage to duck around that. They too have to deal with all the frustrations of HealthCare.gov — full-time.

"We're confident by the end of November, HealthCare.gov will be smooth for a vast majority of users," said Jeff Zients, the former White House aide and management expert brought into oversee the repair drive.

But for now, with HealthCare.gov crippled by design flaws and a morass of messy code, the president and health officials have been using a variety of posts and announcements to urge people to try low-tech ways of enrolling. Basically they are saying while the front door is stuck, try the side.

Of course, reading an 800 number on national TV — as the president did in the Rose Garden the other day — created a flood of callers who couldn't get through. That led to another wave of frustration and Obamacare punch lines. But Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius tweeted on Thursday that HHS bulked up the call center to include more than 10,000 trained representatives.

Even before the tech problems, the government had a private contractor, Serco, to handle paper applications, which were expected to come primarily from less Web-savvy people. On Thursday, the company's program director John Lau told the House Energy and Commerce Committee that it had completed between 3,000 and 4,000 applications.

But Serco will be flooded with paper applications if the website glitches persist, predicted John Gorman, founder of the Gorman Health Group, which has advised some of the insurance exchanges. "Serco is going to be swimming in paper within the next two to three weeks," he said.

Obamacare Glitch Great Quotes

Inquiring minds looking for the most telling and colorful comments made about Obamacare "glitches" can find them on Politico. Here's a particularly funny one.

"We're going to do a challenge. I'm going to try and download every movie ever made and you are going to try to sign up for Obamacare — and we'll see which happens first." — Jon Stewart to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on "The Daily Show," Oct. 7

Nonetheless Obama insists the Obamacare show must go on. And what a horror story it is.

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

New Tools! More Pure Bank Profit!

Posted: 26 Oct 2013 10:52 AM PDT

Inquiring minds are monitoring the Fed's Balance Sheet.

click on chart for sharper image

One more week like this and the FED balance sheet will be $1 trillion more than last year at this time. Currently now at $980 billion with this past week adding $20 billion.

Breakdown From Year Ago

Total Credit: +980.711 Billion to $3.796 Trillion
US Treasuries: +448.877 Billion to $2.106 Trillion
Mortgage Backed Securities: +525.072 Billion to $1.401 Trillion

Of US treasuries, the Fed added (and holds) precisely $0 in short-term bills.
Of US Treasuries, the Fed added 16 Billion in Inflation Indexed notes

Obviously inflation is not a concern to the Fed. Bank profits are.

Excess Reserves

The Fed is pumping money into the economy at at rate of $85 billion a month. Banks cannot use the money and are not lending it. The money piles up as excess reserves and the Fed (taxpayers) pays interest on excess reserves.

Nonetheless, the Fed has a clever idea! It proposes a new tool to pay banks even more interest on money banks don't lend and cannot use (as an alternative to shrinking money supply).

New Tools!

With little fanfare or analysis by mainstream media as to what is really happening, Bloomberg reports Fed Gets Bigger in Markets as QE Prompts New Tools.

The Federal Reserve is getting more involved in debt markets as it tries to compensate for the impact of its almost $4 trillion balance sheet on short-term interest rates.

Policy makers are testing a new tool intended to improve their control of near-term borrowing costs. The facility would allow banks, broker-dealers, money-market funds and some government-sponsored enterprises to lend the Fed unlimited amounts of cash overnight at a fixed rate in exchange for borrowing Treasuries in so-called reverse repo transactions.

The facility is the latest innovation from a central bank that has participated on an unprecedented scale in U.S. debt markets since the credit crisis began in 2007. It's designed to help policy makers -- buying $85 billion of bonds a month -- siphon off excess cash in the banking system when they begin to tighten policy. Three rounds of so-called quantitative easing have enlarged the Fed's balance sheet to almost $3.8 trillion.

The new tool -- called the fixed-rate, full-allotment overnight reverse repo facility -- also is aimed at helping Fed officials address distortions in the market caused by their securities purchases.

"It will serve to put whatever floor they want under rates," said Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP LLC in Jersey City, New Jersey. "You're providing pretty broad-based access to Fed balances as an investment option."

While the Fed gained the ability in 2008 to pay interest on cash it holds in the form of excess bank reserves, that tool has limited effect in anchoring borrowing costs because only banks could park their funds at the central bank, Crandall said. By now offering to pay a fixed rate to a wider range of counterparties for their cash overnight, policy makers should be able to improve their control of near-term rates, he said.

"By offering a new, essentially risk-free investment, one would expect that anyone with access to such a facility would generally be unwilling to lend instead to someone else" at a lower rate, New York Fed President William C. Dudley said in a speech in New York Sept. 23.

Where Does It End?

From the Bloomberg article, one person sees things correctly. ...

With "the amount of bonds that have been piling up on the Fed's System Open Market Account" there "has been a collateral shortage," said Jim Bianco, president of Bianco Research LLC in Chicago. "What worries me about the Fed is that in reacting to the fact that their actions have created an unintended consequence in a free market, instead of saying 'Oh, maybe we ought to re-think these actions,' their answer is 'No, we'll go manipulate that problem now.' Where does this end?"

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

Enrolling in the Affordable Care Act Marketplace

Featured

Weekly Address: Enrolling in the Affordable Care Act Marketplace

In this week's address, President Obama discusses the launch of the Health Insurance Marketplace for the Affordable Care Act, which gives millions of Americans the opportunity to have access to affordable and reliable healthcare -- many for the first time.

Click here to watch this week's Weekly Address.

luni, 28 octombrie 2013

Search News from the Future

Search News from the Future

Term "mobile" removed from Analytics, Google's vocabulary

Voice searches now constitute 28% of all queries

Traditional television advertising revenues wane as new year begins; YouTube, Twitter and Facebook post record annual reports

Netflix introduces video, text advertisements for streaming content

Google cracks down on fake, purchased +1s

Panda and Penguin now refresh daily

Google removes "organic keywords" tab from analytics

Cutts: Given today's technology, page speed a "deprecated metric" for determining site quality

Photo: POTUS, Cheesecake, and Cute Kids

Seth's Blog : 1,000 bands

1,000 bands

More Recent Articles

duminică, 27 octombrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Seth's Blog : Entrepreneurship => impact

Entrepreneurship => impact

More Recent Articles

sâmbătă, 26 octombrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Enrolling in the Affordable Care Act Marketplace

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luni, 28 octombrie 2013

Term "mobile" removed from Analytics, Google's vocabulary

Voice searches now constitute 28% of all queries

Traditional television advertising revenues wane as new year begins; YouTube, Twitter and Facebook post record annual reports

Netflix introduces video, text advertisements for streaming content

Google cracks down on fake, purchased +1s

Panda and Penguin now refresh daily

Google removes "organic keywords" tab from analytics

Cutts: Given today's technology, page speed a "deprecated metric" for determining site quality

More Recent Articles

duminică, 27 octombrie 2013

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sâmbătă, 26 octombrie 2013

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