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sâmbătă, 18 ianuarie 2014

Making 2014 a Year of Action to Expand Opportunities for the Middle Class

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Weekly Address: Making 2014 a Year of Action to Expand Opportunities for the Middle Class

In this week’s address, President Obama said 2014 will be a year of action, and called on both parties to help make this a breakthrough year for the United States by bringing back more good jobs and expanding opportunities for the middle class.

Click here to watch this week's Weekly Address.

Seth's Blog : "Bring us your problems"

"Bring us your problems"

We're far more aware of our problems than our opportunities. Our problems nag at us, annoy us and paralyze us.

Every organization wrestles with its problems, and is eager to solve them.

When you generously invite people to bring you their problems, they might just do that.

Solving problems—actually solving them, not just claiming you do—solving perceived, urgent problems, is a surefire way to get the world to beat a path to your door. [HT to Adrian for the photo.]

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vineri, 17 ianuarie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Delinquencies and Defaults in Spain Hit 13%, a 50-Year Record
Obama's Message On NSA Translated
Greece Will Default in May Without Another Bailout or Change in Terms
Canada Housing Bubble: Far Too Late for Warnings; Rule of Predictions

Delinquencies and Defaults in Spain Hit 13%, a 50-Year Record

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 06:23 PM PST

Looking for evidence of a recovery in Spain? So am I, but I sure don't see any.

Via translation from La Vanguardia, please consider Bank Defaults Hit Record 13% in November.

Delinquency ratio of banks, savings banks, cooperatives and credit institutions operating in Spain rose again in November to 13.08%, a level not seen since the data began to be collected, over 50 years.

According to provisional data for November released today by the Bank of Spain, the Spanish financial system stand together a volume of overdue loans of 192.504 billion euros, compared to 190.971 billion in October, largely due to the economic crisis and high unemployment.

Compared to November 2012 the total volume of loans in November declined by nearly 212 billion, due in large part to deleveraging holding families and Spanish companies.

Although the Bank of Spain does not break default rates by type of institutions with the exception of the EFC, the rest (banks, savings banks and cooperatives) recorded a volume of bad loans of 187.039 billion euros, compared to 185.439 billion of previous month.

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

Obama's Message On NSA Translated

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 12:12 PM PST

Earlier today, President Obama gave a long-awaited and long-winded speech on the NSA. The Washington Post has the transcript.

Here are my thoughts:

Obama says we need more "balance" between security and liberty. The president would "not dwell on Mr. Snowden's actions or his motivations".

I will. Edward Snowden is a national hero who should be given immunity from prosecution and welcomed back to the US.

Instead of praising Snowden, the president says "the sensational way in which these disclosures have come out has often shed more heat than light, while revealing methods to our adversaries that could impact our operations in ways that we might not fully understand for years to come."

I suggest the revelations by Snowden shed an immense amount of light into the downright scary surveillance tactics of the NSA.

Obama says "I consulted with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created by Congress. I've listened to foreign partners, privacy advocates and industry leaders. My administration has spent countless hours considering how to approach intelligence in this era of diffuse threats and technological revolution."

That's completely believable. However, Obama failed to say "But heck, the discussion was meaningless, because I did what I wanted in the first place."

Obama promised "reformed procedures" and "greater transparency to protect privacy".

And here's a humorous statement: "I've made clear to the intelligence community that unless there is a compelling national security purpose, we will not monitor the communications of heads of state and government of our close friends and allies."

In short, we will not monitor communications of foreign leaders unless we will. How comforting.

I can sum up President Obama's entire speech up in a simple easy to understand graphic courtesy of reader "California Banker".

"Trust Me!" (Just as you did with Obamacare).

I promise "Change You Can Believe In!" (You can believe all you want, but there won't be any changes).

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

Greece Will Default in May Without Another Bailout or Change in Terms

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 10:49 AM PST

Cash flow analysis shows Greece is in serious trouble again in spite of having a current account surplus.

Specifically, Greece needs a change in payback terms or another bailout or it will default in August, if not May. I use the words "will default" imprecisely.

The only way Greece is making loan payments now is with money from the Troika.

The scam works like this: bailout money is allegedly given to Greece, but Greece cannot really touch it. Instead the money goes right back to the Troika for interest and capital payments, with perhaps a miniscule portion finally getting to Greece.

Realistically, Greece defaults on every payment already.

Greece Bailout Cash Flow

Even this game is in trouble now as Greek Cash Flow Charts show.

Just two days before New year 2014, Antonis Samaras told his People that Greece would leave its bailout programme next year without needing a third aid package. "In 2014 we will make the big step of exiting the loan agreement," said the Greek PM in a nationally televised address. "In 2014, Greece will venture out to the markets again [and] start becoming a normal country… There will be no need for new loans and new bailout agreements".

But figures obtained by The Slog show he lied.

Mr Samaras told the Greeks during October that debt relief would come by Christmas. It didn't. He is now suggesting there is no budget shortfall. There is.

He says the much-trumpeted €800m surplus obtained last year will help solve the problem. It won't.

The total payments due in 2014 are €31.6bn. The total loan funds available to meet that sum are €17.5bn. €0.8bn of Greek surplus doesn't even make a dent in it.

This second chart highlights when the inevitable shortage will become a default issue:

On 20th and 21st of the month, three whopping capital and interest payments become due. The largest of these – a €5.2bn sum – is also at a floating rate, and so could be bigger if confidence fails in the meantime. The funding gap to avoid default here is almost as big as that one sum due – at €4.7bn.

With that help available (and no yield rises) Athens could limp through to Q3. But then on 20th August things go badly pear-shaped again, when two further biggies hit the due date. The funding gap here is €5.6bn. Even if the Troika allowed Greece to bring the Q4 support forward, the gap would still be €3.8bn.

So in the very best, most optimistic scenario, Antonis Samaras needs €8.5bn in fiscal surpluses, and he needs them over the next 16 weeks.

The major point of the primary current account surplus is that Greece now obtains as much in tax revenues as it needs to finance current debt (not counting interest and debt repayments to the Troika).

If Greece can remain in a state of surplus, it can tell the Troika to go to hell, declare the bailout debt null and void, and shed its onerous debt burden. I suggest Greece should do just that.

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

Canada Housing Bubble: Far Too Late for Warnings; Rule of Predictions

Posted: 17 Jan 2014 12:35 AM PST

A recent parade of articles discusses the prospects of a pending Canadian housing bust. For example, The Globe and Mail reports Bank CEOs 'should be worried' about real estate.

Ed Clark, Toronto-Dominion Bank's outspoken chief executive officer, is playing the contrarian card one more time, publicly arguing that he and his fellow bank CEOs should be cautious about the country's heated real estate market.

While he isn't worried about a full-blown bust, Mr. Clark believes chief executives simply can't ignore warning signs in the market – particularly the sudden run up in prices for real estate of all stripes. "If you run a bank, you should be worried about it," he told the audience at a bank conference in Toronto.

The only thing I am confused about is why Ed Clark isn't concerned about a "full-blown bust".

Pater Tenebrarum at the Acting Man blog notes Carney's Legacy: Canada's Credit and Housing Bubble.

Tenebrarum quickly asks "How Long Before it Bursts?"

Energizer Bunny

Over the course of the past five years, every time I thought a major Canadian housing correction was coming, none did.

Canadian housing has been like the "Energizer Bunny", going and going and going. Nonetheless the housing bust calls keep on coming.

Short Notice

The Financial Times reports Canada housing: On short notice.

In the past five years, while other big developed economies have been suffering through the financial crisis, the average Canadian home price has risen 38 per cent to C$389,119 (US$355,000), according to data from the Canadian Real Estate Association. This has been driven in part by Toronto, where a condominium boom has driven prices to record highs.

At the same time, Canadian households have been on a debt binge fuelled by easy bank lending, low interest rates and government-insured mortgages. The household debt-to-income ratio rose to a record 163.7 per cent in the third quarter, close to the US peak of about 165 per cent on an adjusted basis.

Many of the investors and economists sounding the alarm about Canada's housing market are veterans of the US subprime crisis. They include Mr Hanson, the analyst, Steve Eisman, an investor, and Nouriel Roubini and Robert Shiller, the economists. Whether they will be right a second time is the source of a heated debate on both sides of the border.

While some of the bigger hedge funds are choosing to stay on the sidelines, Canada, and to a greater extent Australia, are top of the watch list.

"Once you start to see [Canadian] banks showing credit deterioration they'll all pile in," says Mr Eisman, founder of Emrys Partners and noted for his role in forecasting the US subprime crisis in Michael Lewis's book The Big Short.

The Canadian government is playing an important role in the mortgage boom. The government encourages banks to insure mortgages with more than an 80 per cent loan-to-value ratio with the national housing agency, meaning that mortgages with 20 per cent deposits and under are counted as close to sovereign risk.

"The vast majority of the mortgage book is insured by the government. This naturally protects the banking system but it does create a big taxpayer liability," says Craig Alexander, chief economist at TD Bank, the country's second-biggest bank.

"If you had large-scale losses and that insurance came into effect it would end up with the Canadian taxpayer."

Banks have piled into housing, racking up hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage loans, a large portion of which are backed by the government through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Consumer lending helped the banks to report record earnings in 2013.

The federal government is also guaranteeing up to 90 per cent on claims in the case of insolvency of private insurers in an effort to level the playing field between the private sector and the national housing agency.

This year, Canada imposed a "risk fee" on mortgage insurance provided by the country's housing agency, to compensate taxpayers for potential losses.

Despite the government's measures, Toronto's cranes and surging skyline tell a different story. But even those in the hedge fund industry know that betting on a Canadian housing collapse is not a sure thing.

"For every Eisman or [John] Paulson, there's someone that went out of business for shorting subprime too early," says Mr Daniels.

Rule of Predictions

No one knows for sure precisely when any bubble will burst. I got the US housing bubble correct but missed Canada by a mile.

I got the 2007 stock market bubble on the nose, but on this go around called a top on February 3, 2013: Extreme Sentiment: Barron's Cover "Get Ready for Record Dow - We Told You So"; Top Call.

Here is the cardinal rule of predictions: Make enough calls and sooner or later you are going to look ridiculous. Even those who get things correct often look ridiculous at intermediate stages.

I discussed a prime example of getting the call perfect but looking ridiculous along the way in Bubble Valuation Blues; GMO 7-Year Outlook for U.S. Stocks is Negative.

Leverage Works Both Ways

Make a play on major macro calls too early with leverage and you are wiped out. Had Paulson been a year early, he would have been fried to a crisp and we probably would never have heard about him.

In general, you only hear about the successes, never the failures.

The safest thing to do with bubbles is avoid investing in them at all, either way. There is no rule that says "one has to play the game".

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

Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 16 Jan 2014 03:18 PM PST

Posted by randfish

While guest posting can be a wonderful way to build your authority and earn links, it takes a huge amount of effort, and it's easy for marketers to start slipping down the "Guest Posting Slope of Madness." One of Rand's predictions for marketing in 2014 is that Google will begin to crack down on low-quality guest posts, and in today's Whiteboard Friday, he clears up some of the misconceptions that can lead to a downhill slide.

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

Video Transcription

Sarah: Howdy Moz fans. This is Sarah Bird, and I am the new CEO and that's why I am doing Whiteboard Friday. Today, we're going to talk about guest blog posting because that's SEO. Okay, so the first thing you have to do is think of something [Rand guides Sarah aside] ...

Sarah to Rand: But I'm the new CEO, and that means I do the ...

Rand: Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday, which I will still be doing for, well for a very, very, very long time to come I hope. Today I wanted to tackle a tricky topic. I know it's going to be a controversial one because a lot of folks in the SEO space do a lot of guest posting and guest blogging, but there's a challenge here. So I made some predictions last week, a couple weeks ago now, in the new year about what 2014 will bring.

One of those is that I predicted that Google will be taking some webspam action, essentially the Webspam Team will be building an algorithm to target guest posters, people who do a lot of guest posting and a lot of guest blogging at scale to get links back to their site in order to rank. This is a very common strategy that many, many folks use, and here's why it's a slippery slope.

So oftentimes we start up, up here. You're sort of super white hat, and "Oh, yeah you know I've got some great stuff to share, but my site doesn't get all that much traffic so maybe I should go and see if Huffington Post or Mashable or maybe the Moz Blog or any of these sources will take it because I have a great post."

Hey, what do you know? A lot of the time if you have something relevant and useful and great to say and you have some great ideas to share, some great visuals, some data, fantastic. You can get those guest posts on those big sites. Then you start to slide down the slope a little. You think, "Oh, yeah, that Huff Post piece went really well, and hey, I got a link. I got a live link out of it. Maybe that link will help me rank a little better, boost my authority, and I don't know, that's kind of nice. I should do some more guest posts and get more links. Maybe I'll find some sites that can send me some traffic and boost my profile and authority out in the sphere and get a few more links."

This is still totally, pretty much fine, pretty much okay. But then you slide down this little slope. There's this devious little part right here, between the I'm doing this for kind of authority boosting and traffic sending reasons and I'm just doing this for the link.

So you slide down the slope, and then you get, "Oh, man, finding decent sites that will take my guests posts is really hard, and I keep having to write really good stuff and come up with new ideas because they all want unique content. You know what? Maybe I'll just start going to any places that I can go where I'll get a link. Then eventually you slide down into this sort of total black hat territory where you are, "You know, I bet I could scale this and even automate it. I'm going to use a team of outsourced writers, and I'm going to use a team of outsourced placement specialists. I'm going to write some little thing to scrape through the links I download from OSC from my competitors and scrape through the Google results and find any place that'll take a guest post, who've taken five or more with spammy anchor text before, because that's what I want."

Oh, brother. That's why I call this the guest posting slope of madness. Madness! It is madness, because think about what happens here. Essentially you're going down this slope, and maybe you're seeing results, more and more results, but you don't know whether these links and these links that you've slid down into are actually really helping you or whether the authority and the profile that you've built from these good ones and all the other good marketing activities and the things your product is doing and your brand is doing are helping you, and you might think these are. So you keep doing them and then bam! You get smacked by a Penguin or the guest posting algo or whatever it is that comes next, and you have to go and try and get these folks to remove all these links, you have to disavow them, you've got to send your reconsideration requests, you're out of the search results for weeks or months at a time, usually months, sometimes years.

What have you done to your site? What have you done to your SEO? What if you had taken all this effort and energy and put it into just doing this stuff and then once you built up this authority doing most of the posting on your own site where people would be linking to you?

One of the frustrating things about guest posting that people forget all the time is that when you are putting content somewhere else, especially if that's good content, especially if it's stuff that's really earning traffic and visibility, that means all the links are going to somebody else's site. Somebody else is earning most of the attention awareness, and granted some of that is transferring on to you and that's why we do guest posting. But you have to be aware of that, and that leads me into some flawed assumptions.

Flawed assumption number one: More links are always better. This is not the case. This is not the case. I have seen many, many sites with just a few, a handful, a few dozen to a few hundred great links far outranking their brethren with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of links. All links are not created equal.

Less editorial restriction is better. When you're guest posting you're like, "Oh, they're so picky, these editors. Man, they want me to jump through all these hoops. Let me find some place that'll just take whatever I'll throw them." Guess what? If they take whatever you're throwing them, they're taking whatever the rest of the Internet is throwing them, and we all know what the rest of the Internet looks like.

Number three: The link matters more than other factors, other factors like traffic and influence and credibility. Also not the case. I'll be totally honest. I will take a great guest post that refuses to link to me or that only no follow links to me if I know that 5,000 or 10,000 people are going to read that piece and a few hundred people are going to re-tweet it and a few hundred people are going to like it on Facebook, because that is boosting my influence and my authority, and that is creating all kinds of things that will have second order effects that impact my SEO and my broad web marketing far better than just a link.

When should you guest post and blog? Well, like I said, if you're trying to reach that new audience, that new audience that another site or page or blog has captured, great. Guest posting is a wonderful choice. For example, let's say here at Moz we're trying to reach into the design community. We might go to some wonderful web design sites, Smashing Magazine, for example, and say, "Hey. Would you guys want maybe a good resource on SEO for designers?" They might say, "Yeah, great we'd love you." Perfect. That's a perfect marriage there.

In addition to creating a relationship with another organization through content, I also love this. This is a great way to build some early stages of relationship with another company before you do a formal partnership, and it helps to see whether there's kind of an overlap between your two organizations' audiences, such that you might want to do a deeper kind of relationship, maybe a sponsorship or an investment together, project or product together.

Quick note here. For your marquis content, your best stuff, I strongly -- see how I've underlined strongly -- strongly suggest using your own site. Reason being, if you're going to put wonderful stuff out there, even if you think it could do better on somebody else's site, in the long term you want that to live on your own site.

The last note I'll make is that Google's Webspam Team has been telegraphing for nearly a year that they are coming after sites that are using guest posting tactics at scale. You've heard comments from Google's Head of Webspam, that's Matt Cutts. You've seen comments on the Google Webmaster blog. You've heard them talk about it at conferences. If you're not getting the message, they are sending it directly to all of the folks in the SEO world that guest posting and guest blogging are targets for webspam in the future.

So just be very, very careful please and stay up and don't fall down this slippery slope. All right everyone, thanks so much. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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West Wing Week: Your Peek Inside the White House

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Today at 11 a.m. ET, President Obama will deliver remarks on U.S. intelligence programs. Click here to watch live on WhiteHouse.gov/Live.

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West Wing Week: Your Peek Inside the White House

This week, the President sat down for lunch with young organizers who are working to help implement the Affordable Care Act, hosted the President of Spain and the Miami Heat, traveled to the home of the Wolfpack to announce a new, public-private effort to support investment in our manufacturing sector, announced his nominee to run the Small Business Administration, and spoke on expanding college opportunity, alongside the First Lady.

Click here to watch this week's West Wing Week:

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sâmbătă, 18 ianuarie 2014

Making 2014 a Year of Action to Expand Opportunities for the Middle Class

Seth's Blog : "Bring us your problems"

"Bring us your problems"

More Recent Articles

vineri, 17 ianuarie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope - Whiteboard Friday

Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope - Whiteboard Friday

Video Transcription

West Wing Week: Your Peek Inside the White House

Add More Traffic to Your Website - Quick and Easy

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